James Axler - Death Cry

K ANE HURRIED TO CATCH UP with Grant as he left the ops center. The redoubt’s main corridor was a twenty-foot-wide tunnel carved through the mountain rock, with curving ribs of metal and girders supporting its high roof.

“What’s the hurry, hero?” Kane asked, keeping his tone light despite the creeping exhaustion he felt washing over him now that he was out of the field. “You hardly said a word on the flight back here—something on your mind?”

Grant held up his left arm, fist clenched and his wrist chron close to Kane’s face. “I promised I’d cook for Shizuka tonight,” he grumbled, “and didn’t expect to be out in the field most of the afternoon.”

Tilting his head, Kane looked at the wrist chron and noted that it was almost six o’clock. “So?” he asked. “Cooking is just cooking, it won’t take that long.”

“Sure.” Grant nodded. “Cooking will take no time at all. It’s not the cooking that I’m worrying about.” He brushed a hand over his chops and beneath his chin, feeling the first, spiky itch of forming stubble as it met with his fingers. “Shower, shave, clean clothes—gotta look my best.”

Before he could stop himself, Kane blurted out a loud guffaw. “Man, when did you two become such an old married couple? Listen to you!”

“Old married nothing,” Grant replied. “What are we doing all this for, Kane—what are we fighting this crazy-ass war for—if not for people like Shizuka?” He held Kane’s gaze for a moment before turning and heading to his private quarters.

Kane remained standing in the corridor, stunned and feeling suddenly very alone. The war. Sometimes he forgot about the war. When he was in point-man mode, when it was all instinct, all action and do-or-die, he just went with the flow, didn’t think too much about where it was all leading. But Grant was right. They were in the middle of a war, a war that had raged on the planet Earth for more than five thousand years.

An alien race called the Annunaki had arrived on Earth in an effort to prevent their own stagnation. They had toyed with the primitive creatures that they had found there, shaping them to their own ends, for their own amusements. And when the toys had begun to lose their luster, the Annunaki had unleashed a great flood to wash away the remnants of this childlike race called humanity and begin anew. New forms of terrestrial subjugation emerged, and humankind was once again exploited by the alien master race.

Nobody really knew how long the Annunaki had shaped world events, and no one really understood why an all-powerful race would take so much time over what were, to them, little more than insects. And yet, the Annunaki had set events in motion to build up the Earth only to have the great civilizations destroy each other in another cataclysm, this time seemingly of their own making. Where water had failed the first time, fire took its place.

The planned nuclear holocaust had served a simple purpose, akin to leaving a field fallow so that the crops could be better harvested in the next cycle. The small percentage of the population that survived that fateful day in 2001 reverted to a state of savagery that ensured only the very strongest survived.

Two hundred years after that first nuclear strike, the Annunaki had reappeared as the overlords, reborn in new bodies formed from the chrysalis state of a mysterious ruling elite called the barons. As far as Kane could understand it, the whole trick had been pulled through a computer download; an organic computer on a starship called Tiamat found orbiting Earth, utilizing vastly superior technology to regenerate the godlike Annunaki pantheon. But for all intents and purposes, it was just another file download, a saved memory opened and accessed once more.

And working with Brigid and Lakesh had taught Kane that one file download meant that you could do another. And another and another and another. Tiamat had taken a crippling hit during a recent squabble between different factions of the alien Annunaki, and their tight grip on the affairs of Earth seemed to be relenting, but Kane suspected—as did all of the Cerberus exiles—that the chances were good that a backup file of Annunaki personalities was just waiting to be downloaded. The threat had abated temporarily, but the war was far from over.

Grant was right. He had Shizuka, the beautiful leader of a society of samurai warriors called the Tigers of Heaven who inhabited Thunder Isle in the Pacific. She was a noble warrior, every bit as brave and formidable as Grant.

And who did Kane have? Who was his fight for?

“The hell with it,” the ex-Mag muttered, turning toward his own quarters to take a hot shower to loosen the kinks in his muscles. He didn’t need to hang a face or a name on the person he was saving. He was there to save humanity, there to save himself and others like him. It wasn’t a war; it was basic survival.

A S L AKESH ATTACHED a new keyboard to the recovered computer in the ops center, communications expert Donald Bry, sitting several seats across from him, thought he saw a quick flash of code whip across the monitor at his workstation.

A round-shouldered man of small stature, Bry wore a constant expression of consternation, no matter his mood, beneath the curly mop of unruly, copper-colored hair. Bry was a long-serving and trusted member of the Cerberus crew, acting as Lakesh’s lieutenant and apprentice in all things technological.

Bry leaned forward in his seat, peering at his computer monitor, waiting for whatever it was to reappear. His monitor was linked to the Keyhole communications satellite, allowing Cerberus to remain in touch with field operatives and to pass information to them as required.

As he watched the surveillance image with thermal overlay taking up the main window on-screen, he urged whatever it was that had flashed up to reappear. When nothing happened, he began typing frantically at the keyboard, then slid his chair a few feet along the desk to review the past forty seconds at a separate monitor to his left.

Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. No code. No flash. Nothing.

Turning back to the live feed, Donald Bry leaned forward once again and ran his index finger across the lower right-hand side of the screen, where he had thought he had seen the code flash for a fraction of a second.

Farrell leaned over from a nearby desk, a quizzical look on his face. “Everything okay, Donald?” he asked.

Bry looked up, feeling awkward and suddenly stupid. “I thought I saw something for a moment,” he told the other operator, “but it was nothing. Just tired, I guess. Been looking at the old boob tube too long.”

Bry accepted when Farrell offered to cover communications monitoring for a while, and he got up to stretch his muscles and get out of the room for a few minutes, assuring his colleague he would be back shortly.

As Bry passed him, Lakesh was hooking a new monitor to the recovered computer. “Be sure you save some of the action for me,” Bry instructed Lakesh with forced geniality before exiting the ops center into the vanadium-steel corridor.

Outside the quiet hum of the operations center, Bry stood and rubbed a hand over his eyes. “What did I see?” he asked himself quietly, trying to remember. Whatever it was, if it had been anything at all, had flashed across the screen so quickly that it had to have been there for no more than a nanosecond, utterly subliminal. If it had been anything at all, he reminded himself.

On the plateau outside the heavy accordion-style doors to the Cerberus redoubt, two figures were sparring. A rough circle had been etched in the dirt around them, stretching to a diameter of roughly twenty feet. The early-morning sun was rising over the mountain, casting long shadows across the ground as the two combatants paced the edge of the marked area as they prepared to battle.