Cradle Of Destiny

“None necessary,” Falk replied. “I just wanted you to know who you were working with.”

“How deep is that pit supposed to be?” Edwards asked.

“From ceiling to floor, we’re looking at thirty feet,” Falk explained. “The overall floor space looks to be the size of four football fields blocked together, with pillars that could easily be five feet in diameter.”

“Football fields?” Edwards asked. “Say it in postapocalyptic terms for those of us without a frame of reference.”

“Two hundred yards long, and we’re looking at about fifty yards wide,” Falk translated. She snorted with amusement.

“What’s so funny?” Edwards asked.

“First time I knew more about football than someone who is so stereotypically a jock,” Falk said. “Football was a game full of men who wished they were as big as you or Grant.”

Edwards smirked at the obvious compliment. “You know, instead of fucking around with knives and shovels, why don’t we blow a hole in the side of this thing?”

“We want to see what’s inside, not collapse the whole damn place,” Brigid explained.

“The roof’s thick, easily two yards,” Falk said. “And the support pillars are thick and intact according to the sonar.”

Brigid frowned as she thought about it.

“I’m not talking about a nuclear blast,” Edwards said. “A controlled, focused explosion. Back when the Magistrates had to get into a place without bringing down the whole shantytown, we used loops of detonation cord that cut through walls without a blast wave that would level huts around our target.”

“Kane generally just throws grenades,” Brigid mused.

“He also was a pilot on a Deathbird gunship,” Edwards told her. “Firepower is its own solution for those guys.”

“I guess the old saying is correct,” Brigid said.

“There’s no problem that can’t be solved with the application of high explosives?” Edwards asked.

Brigid nodded. “And not to judge a book by its cover.”

Edwards shrugged his huge shoulders. “Don’t attribute it too much to brains. Just a good memory and some damned impatience.”

“Do you have that kind of explosive power?” Brigid asked.

Edwards scooped up his war bag. “I can roll my quarter kilogram blocks of plastique into det cord.”

“Why do you have them separated into quarter kilogram blocks?” Brigid asked.

Edwards smiled. “Sela told me about her time with Special Forces who made these things called ‘eight balls.’ A wad of C-4 with a detonator made a big stunning sound without throwing shrapnel all over the place. You could deafen a room full of bad guys with one of these, maybe even knock them cold, but they’re still useful enough for ripping shit apart when packed properly.”

“Then set it up and let’s see what this place really is,” Brigid said.

The explorers worked together to open the ancient underground temple, hoping to learn when and where their friend Grant lost his coat in this foreboding tomb.

BRONDA STRODE along the perimeter that the Millennial Consortium had placed around the Thunder Isle facility. The barrel of his 9 mm Calico submachine gun rested on his left forearm, and his finger lay on the frame above the weapon’s trigger in an effort to keep the weapon safe but ready to go. One twitch of his finger, and he could start spitting out bullets from the Calico’s 100-round helical magazine, sawing an opponent in half.

He reached the end of his patrol circuit and saw Lonmar. Where Bronda had been a grim, brutal raider who had attacked caravans that crossed the Outlands, Lonmar was a tall, powerful giant who was once been a Magistrate from Beausoleilville, a violent enforcer who obeyed the whims of the bitch-goddess who had evolved into the merciless Annunaki overlord Lilitu. These were the raw-muscled head breakers who the millennialists had known were the backbone of their effort to set up a technocracy over the shattered Earth. Both men were given power and the freedom to utilize it in service to that scientific cabal.

That Lonmar and Bronda got to engage in their heartless excess of cruelty was icing atop a cake whose ingredients were pay, logistical support and the backing of an army of like-minded brutes.

The guards and scientists who were manning the Operation Chronos time trawl facility had given a modicum of a fight—they had even brought down a couple of millennial mercenaries—but it hadn’t been enough to slake the two sentries’ blood thirst. There was a little hope, though. A radio message had gotten out to New Edo.

The Tigers of Heaven had received that call.

Bronda took a deep breath, and nodded to Lonmar. “Any sign of those primates?”

“The samurai are going to be sneaky,” Lonmar answered. “I heard from Snakefishville about a raid their Mags went on. They had their asses handed to them.”

Bronda’s crooked scar of a mouth turned up at one end. The other side had been immobilized by scar tissue and nerve paralysis when he’d been slashed across the face on one of his first caravan raids. “Scared?”

Lonmar’s bushy eyebrows wrinkled, inching together like hairy caterpillars over his black, soulless eyes. “Snakefishville is full of pussies. If I’d been there, I’d have broken off their own damn swords up their asses.”

Bronda chuckled. “Keep your eyes open.”

“You, too,” Lonmar replied.

Bronda turned and went back along his section of perimeter. With the consortium, the former raider had found the closest thing he could call kinship and family. Maybe it had been a design by one of the technocrats, some form of social engineering that turned the mercenary thugs under their sway into a more cohesive fighting unit. Bronda liked people like Lonmar and the rest of the hired guns working with him. It might have been a form of manipulation, but Bronda didn’t mind. The group he fought alongside worked. Let the Tigers of Heaven come get them. When the Calico drained empty, the Outlands pirate would draw the wicked foot-and-a-half-long sword and show the primitive Japanese how to really carve up flesh.

There was the smack of fist on flesh from behind, and Bronda whirled. Lonmar staggered backward, recoiling from a punch hurled by a tall monster of a man dressed in a long black coat. Lonmar had been a physical giant, but the titan in the leather duster threw a follow-up punch that felled the ex-Magistrate like a rotted tree. Bronda didn’t think that anyone could have laid out the man, but the stranger whirled to look at the raider.

Seeing the skin of dark mahogany, the drooping gunfighter’s mustache and the swelling musculature shifting under the coat, Bronda had a moment of recognition.

It was Grant, one of the three who had escaped from Cobaltville, turning their backs upon the barons of the monolithic city-states. A jolt of panic passed and Bronda swung up his Calico to rip the bald, black giant in half.

The machine pistol stuttered out a short burst, and Bronda knew that he’d hit Grant, but the outlander ignored the impacts of his bullets. If Bronda hadn’t been distracted by a goose-feather shaft jutting from his rib cage, he’d have had the time to realize that Grant’s coat had been armored. Bronda looked at the end of the arrow that had transected his torso, then into the woods. The arrow had flown scant moments before Bronda had opened fire, his ability to recover from surprise only a moment quicker than the archer’s estimate.

For a brief moment, he saw a beautiful woman in samurai armor nock another arrow onto her bowstring, her hands moving swiftly. It had felt like minutes to the dying, shocked Bronda, but Shizuka had gotten off her second deadly missile in under a second, this razor-sharp point slicing through Bronda’s left eye, pinioning his brain.

Shizuka heard the ugly crunch of neck bones disintegrating, and she turned to see Grant rise from Lonmar’s corpse. The samurai wondered why Grant would have killed an unconscious man, but her eyes fell to the bloody scalps hanging off the millennialist’s belt. The broken neck was swift, painless justice, sparing the murderer potential reprisals in the form of torture.

Grant’s eyes met hers, and he jerked his head toward the entrance that the two millennialists had been guarding. Other cold-blooded killers were crawling the halls of the Operation Chronos laboratory. If there had been hostages, their captors would have been alerted by the brief stutter of automatic fire. Grant was spurred on by the impetus of imperiled lives.

With the silence and grace of a jet-black tiger, the big Cerberus warrior slipped through the side access.

Chapter 3

With Cerberus Away Teams Alpha and Beta broken up, Kane pulled in the remaining third of Domi’s team, Sela Sinclair, to join him on an emergency jump to Thunder Isle. Right now, in the mat-trans chamber, Donald Bry and Daryl Morganstern were busy trying to override the lockout placed by the Millennial Consortium hijackers at the Operation Chronos facility. Kane didn’t doubt Sinclair’s ability. The woman had fought for Cerberus redoubt for a year, proving herself as brave and skillful a warrior as any he had met. Sinclair had been born in a different time, an air force security officer whose training had been geared toward protecting United States military bases from terrorism. She was a freezie, a cryogenically preserved relic from centuries in the past, and upon awakening, she had sided with Kane, Brigid and Grant in battling another temporally displaced set of opponents.

Kane was in his shadow suit, the high-tech polymers conforming to his lean, wolflike musculature like a second skin, except this skin would protect him from hard vacuum decompression and intense heat or cold, though it could not redistribute kinetic shock from small-arms fire. Due to its high-tech composition, the shadow suit did protect its wearer from hard impacts such as falls and even punches from foes of great size and strength.

Kane preferred the shadow suit over his old Magistrate armor. It provided him better mobility and superior comfort. It also hid easily under other clothing, being low profile and formfitting. He didn’t mind being able to ignore the biting, frostbite-inducing chill of arctic winds or the blazing, mercilessly hot suns of deserts in nothing more than the shadow suit and its hood. Other features, such as camouflage and protection from radiation, were simply icing on the cake.

Sinclair wore another shadow suit, identical to Kane’s, but her forearm was not adorned with the Magistrates’ weapon and badge of office, the folding Sin Eater machine pistol. Rather, Sinclair had her Beretta M-9 pistol hanging on a pistol belt, along with a collapsible combat baton, a fighting knife and various bits of security kit that gave her a continuity of force from mild restraint to lethal response that compensated for the relative lack of size compared to big, muscular men like Kane, Grant or Edwards. There was no doubt, thanks to the curve-hugging properties of the shadow suit, that Sinclair was athletic and strong, but without the feral ferocity of someone like Domi, she had to supplement her strength and skill with an assortment of equipment that would give her an edge against the rare opponent whose greater might was matched with fighting ability.

Kane, after years of adventuring with some of the most dynamic women on the planet, had no doubt that a woman with training and experience could handle herself quite well in almost as many situations as he could. But he also appreciated Sinclair knowing her limitations and adapting strategy and preparations for them. Kane himself knew that he was not the strongest or the most skilled warrior on the planet, nor was he the smartest. That was one of his strengths.

Grant had relayed some wisdom from the Tigers of Heaven from a swordsman named Musashi, one of the most celebrated samurai warriors in the history of Japan. Musashi had said that “to know one’s limitations is to be limitless.” Kane had innately understood that, and it was what had carried him and his allies to victory over gods, armies of cultists and other threats to humanity’s tenuous existence in the dangerous world that existed in this postapocalyptic time. That bit of philosophy passed on from a swordsman hundreds of years ago was simply a confirmation for what Kane didn’t have the words. Right now, however, he was more interested in the limitations of technology.

Because the mat-trans unit on Thunder Isle was part of the Totality Concept, a Continuity of Government program in the event of an apocalyptic event, it would have been easy to pop into the Operation Chronos facility if it weren’t for the fact that the mat-trans was on total lockdown because of the millennialist’s attack. Kane had suggested using the interphaser, a unit that acted in concert with natural vortices of magnetic energy.

The Thunder Isle facility was constructed around such an intersection of magnetic force lines, often called Ley Lines by western alchemists or Dragon Roads by Asian geomancers. The interphaser would drop them somewhere in the control room. While the sudden appearance of Kane and Sinclair would give them some advantage, there was no way to know if they would emerge in a murderous crossfire.

“You will end up in their mat-trans, which could easily be put under guard. You’d be gunned down—” Lakesh said.

A glare from Kane cut him off.

Right now, Donald Bry, Lakesh’s right-hand man for running the functions of the Cerberus redoubt, was working code and math together with Clem Bryant and Daryl Morganstern. Bryant wasn’t a computer expert or a mathematician like Bry or Morganstern, but he had rapidly become one of the premier scientific problem solvers. His field of expertise had been oceanography, something that was not immediately necessary in the struggle against the Annunaki and other forces threatening the freedom of humanity. He’d originally become the chef for the redoubt, but his ability to think outside of the box had granted Lakesh and the others the spark to reach conclusions.

The three men were an odd amalgamation, from the slender, rust-haired Bry to squat, pudgy-faced Morganstern to tall, goateed Bryant.

Kane looked to Sinclair. “We could just take a Manta…”

“No good,” Bry said. “Grant’s already in motion, from what I heard over his Commtact.”

“Lakesh, we don’t have time to dick around,” Kane said. “Just jump us in. No one has a gun that can punch through the armaglass chamber doors.”

Sinclair managed a smile. “I do have something that could help us with that.”

With that announcement, she drew a flashlight from her well-stocked utility belt.

“Flashlight,” Kane noted.

“I’d show you what it does, but it’d take you a few seconds to get over the strobe setting,” Sinclair answered.

“What kind of candlepower does it put out?” Kane asked.

“Ten thousand,” Sinclair said. “It’ll still be sharp enough to leave a millennialist seeing spots for about fifteen seconds.”

“That should buy us enough time to get out into the open,” Kane returned. “Lakesh?”

The chief scientist of Cerberus frowned, but his decision process was quickened simply because of the swiftness of Kane’s decision. The former Magistrate was a man of action, but also one with an uncanny danger sense that had kept him alive in conflicts against menaces powerful enough to erase the solar system. “Bry, can we send them?”

Bry nodded and he and Morganstern exited the mat-trans unit. Kane and Sinclair entered the armaglass chamber with swiftness and purpose.

Kane wasn’t going to let Grant, his partner and best friend in the world, disappear into history without a fight.

GRANT AND SHIZUKA STALKED through the entrance into a well-lit corridor. The millennialists were too savvy to allow stretches of shadows to obscure the approach of enemies. It didn’t matter, since the hallway was empty of sentries, which made this approach all the more suspicious. For a brief instant, Grant wished Kane, with his uncanny point man’s sense, was by his side instead of the beautiful samurai Shizuka. She was highly skilled, but Grant had yet to encounter another with Kane’s instincts and reflexes.

The former Magistrate pushed the thought from his mind. Instead of occupying his thoughts with what could have been, he needed to concentrate on the here and now. His eyes and ears couldn’t pick up on minuscule details with the same razor-sharp precision that Kane could, but he hadn’t survived years as a Mag without relying on his own well-honed awareness. That’s when he saw the smears of mud tracking along the otherwise mirror-polished floors.

Grant slowed and Shizuka, shadowing close to him, did likewise, her attention falling to the mess on the tiles. Neither of them spoke, but they both realized that something else was waiting down the hall, out of sight. The smell of the mud was the same primal stench of jungle that they had passed through. The Tigers of Heaven had done their best to clear the road between the beach and the installation of the dangerous feral predators trawled from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, then utilized speakers producing uncomfortable infrasonic pulses to keep them away.

The speakers had made manning Thunder Isle much safer, but nothing was perfect, necessitating sidearms and a contingent of sentries on the island at all times, just in case a predator’s taste for human flesh was stronger than the discomfort that pumped through his eardrums every time he neared their world.

Those speakers, unfortunately, had a limited range. Behind the walls of the facility, anything carted past them would be unhindered, save by locked bulkhead doors, just like the one that sat at the end of this corridor. As Grant and Shizuka kept to the cover of a wall outcropping, minimizing their exposure to security cameras, they realized that something else could have been curled up in nooks down the way.

“Judging by the size of the mud smears, trailing off into man-size footprints, we’re looking at deinonychus,” Shizuka said.

Grant, who had grown familiar with the time-displaced dragons of Thunder Isle, nodded in agreement. “More than one, too. And check it out, feathers. Definitely those little ‘terrible claws.’”

The predators that they’d referred to were the height and weight of German shepherds, but were infinitely more dangerous, possessing intelligence and teamwork in addition to flesh-rending killing claws on their hind legs and mouths filled with razor-sharp teeth. The deinonychus were masses of muscle that could sprint at upward of thirty miles per hour, as well. All of that combined into an opponent that was a lightning-quick slashing wind that could bring down elephantine sauropods outweighing an individual raptor tenfold. The Tigers of Heaven had suffered losses because of these cunning, dangerous creatures, and Grant and his other Cerberus companions had nearly succumbed to their threat, as well.

“Damn consortium must have drugged them and brought them here to be guard dogs,” Grant grumbled.

As if on cue, a feather-crowned head poked out, cat-slitted eyes staring manically over a grin full of daggers. Though the deinonychus had existed millions of years before humans had even developed consciousness, there was something primevally terrifying about that wild, unhindered smile that reached down into the mammalian DNA and still resonated in modern humans. This was the cackling wyvern, a fanged cockatrice that was the horror of mankind’s nightmares, the source of myths and horror tales.

Another head, then a third, all looked down the hall, nostrils flaring, heads tilting and twitching inhumanly to locate the source of any sound.

Grant grimaced, realizing that even hushed, his voice carried to the sharp ears of the deadly predators. Shizuka tensed, knowing that they didn’t see all of their dinosaur opponents. A sudden movement would be the trigger to the raptors’ charge. The three hunters, given the height of their heads around the outcroppings they’d nested at, were crouched on haunches of coil-wound muscle that could launch them as swiftly as even Shizuka’s arrows.

One of the raptors padded warily into the open, body and head held low and parallel to the floor tiles. Grant could see the predator’s killing claws, three-inch-long hooks of gleaming black talon, cocked perpendicular to the ground, its other nails providing it traction in the polished corridor. The raptor’s thigh muscles flexed and swelled, the promise of blinding speed stored in the tightly clenched limbs.

Grant sneered. The dinosaurs were simple animals, no matter how dangerous they could be. They were pawns of the millennialists, who simply saw every living thing as their subjects. That these creatures, magnificent examples of an evolutionary line ended sixty-five million years prior, would either kill or die was of no matter to the conspirators. At the same time, Grant was not a man who relished killing animals unnecessarily and hated it even more when those creatures were used as fodder for cowards too lazy to fight their own battles. As much as the initial sight of the deadly predators had awakened instinctual horror in the pit of his stomach, these dinosaurs were not malicious or gleefully violent. The only adversaries whom Grant had ever encountered who had taken joy or pride in their violence were humans. The deinonychus hadn’t made a choice to be here and be killers.

Still, Grant wasn’t going to stay his hand, not with Shizuka’s life at stake. The Tigers of Heaven commander had similar feelings. While one of them could have possibly retreated back out of this corridor, the two of them would not be able to dive through the door without entangling each other. They had to stand and fight, especially since there were citizens of New Edo and Cerberus on the other side of the door the raptors protected.

Grant would make note to provide a little extra pain to the sociopaths who threw away lives like table scraps as he extended his fingers for a countdown. Shizuka nodded, understanding his intent. From the behavior they observed, there was a path that didn’t involve violence and would result in their betrayed presence and injuries inflicted at the talons and fangs of the deinonychus. As Grant’s index finger folded down into his fist, the two warriors stepped into the open swiftly and suddenly, so much so that the lone predator crouched in the center of the hall stepped back, startled into recoil.

Grant’s step was punctuated by the sharp clack of his Sin Eater extending into his hand. The only sound that Shizuka had made was the creak of her bow flexing under the force of her strong arms. Both people were ready to let their weapons speak, and they stood with confidence and strength. Of course, this was surrendering any attempt at stealth on their parts, thanks to the noise the Sin Eater would make.

There was a method of dealing with animals, and predators were not too interested in engaging in combat with prey that could injure them. Successful hunters sought out targets that would provide them minimum risk, or stack the odds in their favor due to surprise and terrain. Here, in an open corridor, with foes who were armed and obviously capable of fighting back, the deinonychus would pause before a foolish head-on rush.

Those yellow-black slitted eyes locked on to Grant, which meant that Shizuka could slip back behind his bulk and head toward the bulkhead access to the outside. If they were to have a chance to advance farther without gunshots warning the millennialists on the other side of their blast shield, Grant and Shizuka would need a path for the deinonychus to run away.

It helped that the two adventurers could tell the difference between territorial challenge and hunting mode. From what they knew, no raptor would expose itself if there was no net of fellow predators to catch fleeing prey. This was the deinonychus pack standing their ground against a threat, the pack leader taking point and presenting the knowledge that the humans were approaching a very defensive, confused and frightened group.

Grant didn’t flinch, keeping eye contact with the pack leader, but other than showing off his size and weapon, he made no menacing actions toward the raptor. This was a fine line, a balance between a show of strength and passive standing. Too strong, and the deinonychus would take Grant as a threat. Too passive, and the prehistoric killing machine would advance, perhaps even attack.