Jack Du Brul - Deep Fire Rising

Mercer could barely back away fast enough. He didn’t dare try to parry Randall’s immense swings. The impact would have torn the hammer from his hands. The stairs were halfway around the scaffold. If he turned to make a run for them, Randall would be on him in a second. There was only one option and he took it without hesitation.

The railing was four feet tall, but right behind Mercer was a section of rotted wood that had been damaged earlier in the fight. The instant he’d backed next to the opening he tossed himself from the platform.

The drop was ten feet, a relatively easy leap had he not been so seriously injured. He landed hard, sprawled against the top of the mechanical globe, nearly losing his hammer in one of the open access panels. He managed to turn onto his back in time to see Donny jump after him.

Randall landed a few feet away and tried to steady his fall with his ruined right hand. He shrieked as the sharp end of the broken bones shot through his skin in a dozen spots, saturating his hand in blood. Mercer got to his feet, bracing himself on the slick surface by wedging his foot against the six-inch-high ridge that was Alaska’s northernmost mountain range. Randall had his hand up and Mercer took aim. His swing didn’t need power, only accuracy.

The hammer’s steel head caught Donny on the up-raised wrist. The remainder of the bones in his lower arm disintegrated. The force was enough to shred the tendons and skin that had been keeping the hand attached to his wrist. The member flew free. Blood fountained from the stump.

“That’s for…” Mercer paused, unable to remember the name of the miner Randall had killed when he flooded the DS-Two mine. “Damn it, that’s for being a fucking prick.”

Randall couldn’t defend himself so Mercer’s next swing carried every ounce of strength left in him. He hit Randall in the chest hard enough to detach his sternum. Donny staggered but didn’t fall.

He lurched around in a circle holding his arm aloft while turning blue because he couldn’t draw breath. He finally slipped on the blood drooling across the surface of the oracle. He landed on his side and began to slide down the sphere. That’s when he became aware of what was happening and tried to save himself from falling off the golden globe. He twisted and kicked out with one leg, arresting his plummet by catching the lip of an access panel.

When he tried to stand, his foot slid into the mechanism.

Mercer was five feet above Donny’s position so he couldn’t see what was happening inside the machine. But suddenly Randall’s blank stare turned into fear and then panic. Donny tried to jerk his leg free of the hole and fell backward, sliding farther down the globe until Mercer felt as much as heard his knee joint pop. Inside the clockwork oracle, Randall’s foot had caught between a large pinion gear and a saw-motion rack of metal teeth. Each quick ratchet of the gear drew his foot deeper into the machine.

Somehow Randall struggled upright again. His screams drowned out all other sounds, echoing off the cavern, rebounding again and again in a chorus of unbearable agony. Mercer didn’t enjoy watching what was unfolding, but he wouldn’t look away. He kept his eyes locked on Donny Randall’s as the oracle’s remorseless mechanisms chewed his leg and pulled him deeper inside.

When his leg was half gone, Randall could no longer remain upright. He toppled into the hole and became tangled in more of the machinery. His cries lasted a few seconds more as he was literally eaten alive, his limbs plucked from his body before his torso was consumed. Somewhere deep inside the bowels of the oracle, his severed head dropped free, only to get stuck between a pair of gears and crushed.

“Bet you didn’t predict that,” Mercer said as he clambered along the oracle to find a way off its crown.

The huge machine shuddered just as he found a ladder that could be pulled down from the overhead scaffold. A steady vibration built from inside the oracle, as though a flywheel had become unbalanced and was fighting against its bearings. Something tore loose with a metallic squeal. A jet of mercury shot from a nameless volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

“Mercer?” Tisa shouted from far below, her voice nearly lost in the din of the damaged machine. “What’s happening?”

Unbalanced by Randall’s body falling through its gears, the machine tore itself apart. A piston exploded from the side of the oracle, poking a huge hole in its skin and scattering hundreds of intricate parts. Mercer pulled the ladder down and stepped off the oracle just as a huge gear rammed through the top of the machine, spitting a shower of brass and gold shrapnel.

Forced onward by geothermal pressure, the mechanism continued to grind upon itself, the intricacy of its design causing its downfall. Each component of the oracle was directly connected to every other, so when one was wrecked the damage spread geometrically. The plate containing the entire continent of Africa sheered from its mounts and dropped to the cavern floor.

Swaying on the scaffold, Mercer realized that Tisa was directly below the oracle. The structure was threatening to collapse. He raced around the platform, dodging sparking power cables and charging through a fire that had caught along one section. He reached the spiral stairs and threw himself down, unconcerned how the tower wobbled. He was doused by liquid mercury gushing from the Hawaiian Islands. Doubtlessly some of the carcinogenic fluid seeped into his bloody wounds.

Fifteen feet from the ground he heard voices over the noise and vibration. He hadn’t considered that other members of the Order would be around. He had no weapon other than surprise, and once that wore off he was no more capable of defending himself than Harry’s toothless basset hound.

“Snow, you here?” The voice was in Mercer’s head, a fantasy that Sykes had found him. “Snow, come in.”

Not in his head. In his ear. The tactical radio. “Doc, is that you? It’s Snow. Where are you?”

“I’m in a cave with a big gold globe that looks like it’s about to fall apart.”

Mercer sagged. The people he’d heard below weren’t more fanatic monks. Sykes and his Delta commandos had found him. He reached the ground floor. Above him, the surfaces of the oracle were a blur as the mechanisms inside destroyed themselves. Sykes stood a short distance off, covering Grumpy and Happy as they untied Tisa.

Mercer rushed past the two men and was nearly bowled over when Tisa threw herself into him. Their tears mingled as their lips sought each other out. Tisa was drawn and exhausted, her eyes washed out by her captivity. She hadn’t been allowed to bathe in days and her hair felt as brittle as straw. Mercer simply didn’t care. She was alive, and that was all that mattered.

“I knew you’d come for me,” she said. “I don’t know how, but I knew you’d come.”

“You never gave me your phone number. How else was I going to get in touch with you to ask for a second date?”

“Mercer,” Sykes interrupted. “We’ve gotta go.”

He couldn’t let go of Tisa completely, so as he pulled away he held one of her hands. “What’s the situation?”

“Serious unless Miss Nguyen knows a way out of here. We chased the last of the defenders into a bunch of dead-end tunnels. We got them, but there ain’t no way out except the way we came in.”

“And that’s blocked by the burning monastery.”

“How about it, ma’am?”

“There is a way. I used it once when I snuck into the oracle chamber when Luc and I were children. But first I have to go back for the Lama.”

“Was that the old man in the room with the secret entrance here?” Mercer asked.

“Yes.” Her tears changed from joy to sorrow. “I must save him.”