Cradle Of Destiny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gonna break soon, bitch,” Allen growled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Grant!” Shizuka cried.

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

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

“No!” Shizuka yelled. Some instinct told her that if that last bit of Grant disappeared behind the wall, he would be gone, for no tether could resist the pull of currents across a dimension she couldn’t comprehend.

Suddenly, as if hurled by a tornado, Shizuka was free from the vortex. She collapsed to the floor of the chamber. She’d been birthed from seeming nothingness, her molecules yanked apart like taffy as she was drawn through a hole. If she hadn’t been one of the most physically fit people in New Edo, she’d be suffering a heart attack.

Instead, her heart broke as she knew that she was safe in the time she belonged, while Grant was gone, on the other side of the temporal event horizon. She looked and saw only an empty floor as the plates powered down, the shorn electrical cable that was Grant’s tether lying mockingly beside her.

“Damn it, Grant…”

Chapter 5

Never before had Shamhat been struck so soundly, even by Humbaba, his half-Annunaki master. The Igigi staggered back to his feet, wiping the ichor from the corner of his mouth, smearing it across his reptilian scales. Four mindless Nephilim drones struggled against the human who had appeared in their midst in the court of Urudug.

“He is human, is he not?” Humbaba asked. “He’s large, even for the Africans we know as the Watusi.”

“Nearly the size of an Annunaki,” Shamhat said. “Much larger than we, your servants.”

Humbaba’s leonine head rose and fell in a slow acknowledging nod. “Human, yet he wears garments not of the people we idle among.”

Shamhat’s yellow eyes narrowed to slits. “Chemically processed polymers blended beneath a biologically refined shell for his cloak. Interwoven plant-based fabrics with metal and synthetic additions for the vestments on his trunk and limbs. His footwear—”

“I noticed their uniqueness, Shamhat. Do not bore me with the fashion critique,” Humbaba’s lion voice grumbled. “If I’m not mistaken, the creature also possesses two chemical-powered, repeating projectile weapons. Such technology shouldn’t exist on this backwater world for millennia, should Father have his way.”

Shamhat nodded. “Perhaps a slave or a descendant of a slave sent off world?”

Humbaba’s eyes narrowed. “No. The language he spoke…it was gibberish. Even telepathic contact is elusive. A slave would be far more communicative.”

Shamhat watched the long-coated newcomer avoid a punch from one of the Nephilim drones with practiced speed, deftly catching the extended limb and bending it using a knowledge of body mechanics that was rare among the peoples of this world. Certainly, the humans calling themselves the Greeks had a similar hand-to-hand maneuver in their wrestling art of pankraton, and those in the Orient were only now developing a fighting craft they called hwarong do. Whoever this man was, he combined strength with skill in such a way that his enemies appeared to be moving at half of his speed.

Shamhat cast out his thoughts in an attempt to reach into the man’s mind, and was repulsed by a torrent of confusion and disjointedness. Tears welled in his yellow orbs in an attempt to salve the sudden, piercing ache behind his brow.

“Ah, you’ve tried your mind against his, as well?” Humbaba asked. “And what say you?”

“That is no man. His brain seems as if it’s at right angles to this universe. What surface memories I could grasp are incomplete and scrambled,” Shamhat replied. “Is he perhaps a shadow from another dimension?”

“A higher plane of existence, perhaps the echoes that a three-dimensional intellect could comprehend only in the shape of a human?” Humbaba asked.

“Theoretically such a creature would exist, but to carry such mundane equipment and garments when his very body would be superhumanly charged in our almost ethereal plane?” Shamhat asked. “He’d also be much faster in reaction to my Nephilim. I’ve honed their reflexes to an edge few have ever known before. This creature seems to be operating at a different time scale, but it’s nothing unique.”

A Nephilim grew tired of the conflict and employed his ASP blaster, twin strings of yellow lightning twisting from the snakelike projectors wound about his wrist. The powerful bolts struck Grant solidly, and he collapsed to his hands and knees.

The other Nephilim fell upon him as one, fists raining down on him.

“Enough!” Humbaba bellowed, his roar causing every creature in the court of Urudug to freeze, even the battered Grant. “He is to be taken alive!”

Strong arms wrapped around Grant’s limbs, the effects of the ASP energy discharge scrambling his thoughts even more. He didn’t know his own name, and he didn’t know why the world seemed to be moving in slow motion around him, but the reptilian creatures who restrained his powerful arms were eerily familiar, though other beings were strange. Some part of him wanted to work his lips, to communicate, but what would fall from them, even if he could form the odd barking sounds shared by these inhuman strangers around him?

He was tired, and he ached from injuries old and new. Phantasms of memories, things that felt familiar and friendly, hovered just out of reach of his consciousness. While he could put terms to things like floor, wall, arm, Nephilim, he had nothing for the faces, the entities attached to the ghostly images in his mind. They should have names, but like Grant’s own name, they eluded him like frightened cockroaches before a sudden light.

I know how insects react to a man’s approach, yet I don’t know the men and women who are a part of my life, Grant thought grimly. Not even my name.

“You may tame this one,” Humbaba said. “Teach him some language if his consciousness will abide it.”

Shamhat nodded, glaring at Grant. “Come, giant. We have much to discuss.”

The Nephilim pushed Grant toward the doorway that Shamhat had indicated. Grant stomped the ground with all his strength, anchoring himself against their efforts. There were four of the reptilian guards, applying their incredible physiques against his own, and yet he was stalling them. This wasn’t right to the lost and confused Grant. He had no right to be this strong, as if he had traded his mental clarity for muscle. Though he felt no heavier, he was indeed even swifter.

Shamhat nodded to the Nephilim who had shot Grant. “Give him another taste of discipline. It will do him good to realize who his masters are.”

The searing energy of the ASP charge struck Grant in the kidneys, his legs buckling. Pain blinded him, and he thrashed, hurling his captors away from him out of agonized reflex. Despite the display of strength, he sank to the floor, unable to breathe.

Shamhat, having recovered from Grant’s first blow against him, reached down and pulled on the human. Grant’s coat sloughed off his shoulders as the man struggled to escape his captivity. “Hit him again!”

More ASP lightning burned through Grant’s nerves, an onslaught of punishment that would have left him a smoldering briquette of charred flesh.

Who am I? Grant thought, staggering back to his feet.

Grant looked up in time to see nearly ten feet of leonine godling, all sculpted muscle and long limbs, standing over him.

“I said enough! I am tired of this foolish game!” Humbaba roared. Grant felt all the solid power of the giant’s crashing fist on his jaw, as if the half-Annunaki lord of this time-lost court were the only other real thing in this turgid dream.

Blessed unconsciousness descended upon Grant.

SILENCE REIGNED in the Operation Chronos laboratories. Kane had watched his best friend in this or any world disappear into the ether in an effort to save Shizuka. The warrior woman trembled, her body trying to reacclimate itself to the reality outside of the strange energies she had been bathed in.

When Kane and Sinclair had burst into the temporal-dilation chamber, they had seen Grant anchored by a heavy cable, tugging on an arm attached to something that Kane was still trying to describe mentally. The limb was pulled thin, like putty that was extruded through a pinhole. The person it had been attached to was a featureless blue ghost shimmering as if underwater. Though his eyes weren’t transmitting the ghost’s identity to Kane’s brain, some instinct told him that it was Shizuka, even before Grant had bellowed her name as he grasped her hand.

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