James Axler - Infinity Breach

One of the sailors who had been refueling Flag’s aircraft held up his hand, ordering Octavo to stop right where she was. In return, the cruel Italian doyenne brought up her right hand—the one that held the ancient stone knife—and swiped the blade across the unsuspecting sailor’s face.

With an agonized cry, the sailor fell to the smooth blacktop strip, a sudden crimson streak marring his youthful features.

Although they were rare, there were times when Abraham Flag regretted his policy of never carrying a gun. As he watched that brave sailor fall to his knees, the young man’s face a ruined mosaic of pouring blood, he felt that pang of regret once more. Despite Flag’s years training his body to an incredible level of physical fitness, Octavo had had too much of a head start and Flag’s own actions had not been fast enough. Now the young lad would wear that hideous scar for the rest of his life, evidence of the coldhearted cruelty of Mussolini’s fascist desires. Armed with the swift justice of a bullet, Flag might have halted Octavo in her tracks, wounded or killed her before she could cause any further damage.

As regrets darkened Abraham Flag’s mind, Demy Octavo drew her second Beretta handgun from its holster and began to wave it at the shocked sailors standing along the airstrip.

“Everybody keep back,” she warned, her voice as harsh as the ugly punishment she had just doled out to the sailor.

Showing their hands, the sailors backed away, their eyes fixed on the muzzle of that lethal handgun. But Abraham Flag’s eyes had been drawn elsewhere. Instead of stopping, he drove himself harder, running at full speed to catch up to the Italian infiltrator, outpacing his companions with his huge strides.

Still holding the sailors at bay with her silver-handled Beretta, Demy Octavo turned at the sound of Flag’s running feet. “Stop right where you are, Professor,” she ordered, “or their blood will be on your hands.”

As if to prove the seriousness of her threat, Octavo pulled the trigger, and a bullet spit from her gun, spearing through the air over the heads of the wary sailors.

Now twenty feet from Octavo, Flag stopped, his eyes fixed on the scene before him. “Demy, no!” Flag cried, and it seemed that there was the slightest trace of fear in the great man’s voice. “Stop!”

Octavo laughed, a vicious, ugly sound from such a beautiful face. “I’ll be leaving now, Professor, and no one will dare stop me,” she assured him, taking a step toward his waiting aircraft.

Abraham Flag fixed the woman with his stare, his incredible amethyst eyes exerting an almost hypnotic power. “Please, Demy,” he said, his voice calm once more. “Look at the knife.”

Suspicious of a trick, Demy Octavo glanced at the stone knife in her hand. Its strange, dark surface rippled with sunlight, and yet the glow seemed somehow unnatural, as though it didn’t really belong. Across from Octavo, still kneeling on the airstrip with his bloody face in his hands, the wounded sailor was clearly going into shock. But there was something else about him, something different. From beneath the sailor’s hands, Octavo saw that selfsame glow, tinged with red and pulsing like something organic. As the man lowered his hands, he revealed a rent in his face that was so unnatural as to defy description.

Flag had sensed as much as seen the nightmarish change to the young sailor’s face. It wasn’t simply a cut, the way a knife would cut. It seemed almost as though that ancient blade had burned him like acid, eating into the flesh and sinews that hid beneath his fragile skin. But there was more to it than that. The young man was wounded at a cellular level; the very fiber that made up his being had been damaged in a manner that utterly defied human comprehension.

For an awful moment, the name of the stone blade bubbled to the surface of Flag’s thoughts once more: Godkiller.

But it wasn’t just the young sailor’s face that had been altered. Demy Octavo was changing, too, as she clutched the knife in her elegant hand. She stood there looking at it, holding the blade in front of her as though transfixed.

“Demy,” Flag urged, his voice firm, “Miss Octavo? Please, put down the knife.”

For a moment, Octavo did nothing. She just stood, as still as a statue, as the Pacific sun beat down on the thin black line of the naval airstrip. And then, in a movement that seemed eerily inhuman, her head turned and she looked at Abraham Flag with a fierce anger in her eyes. Those deep brown eyes seemed darker now, but that was not the most remarkable thing that struck Flag as he stared into the orbs; it was their whites. For their whites were no longer white at all—they had taken on a crimson aspect as the blood bubbled within them.

“Put the knife down, Demy,” Flag urged once again. “It’s not safe.”

In response, Demy Octavo’s lips pulled back in an animal’s sneer.

Early twenty-third century

Laboratory of the Incredible, Antarctica

Seven armed troops came rushing from the corridor after Grant, and a moment later the clattering of feet from the far end of the vast laboratory area revealed more had been skulking in the distant shadows.

Kane and Brigid were already running, weaving between work surfaces covered with electrical coils, vacuum tubes, microscopes and a dense forest of other scientific equipment. As he ran, Kane tensed his wrist tendons and the Sin Eater shot into his grip. He could already feel the angry determination welling inside as a hail of bullets whipped past him and Brigid.

A little behind his colleagues, Grant leaped over a desk, sliding across it on his buttocks and back, blasting a burst of fire behind him from the muzzle of his own Sin Eater. His shots peppered the doorway around the corridor, felling two of the millennialists and driving the others to cover.

Smashing beakers and test tubes out of his way, Grant landed on the far side of the desk amid a rain of breaking glass. Righting himself, the huge ex-Mag turned this way and that, searching for Kane and Brigid as gunfire echoed all around him. He spotted his partners crouch-walking between two rows of worktables roughly twelve feet away.

“What happened?” Kane snapped as Grant caught his attention.

“What always happens,” Grant replied. “Somebody looked up at the wrong time.”

Kane stopped moving for a moment and peered over the desk he had crouched behind, looking across to the corridor. “We should have just ambushed them while we had the chance,” he chastised himself as he saw millennialist guards piling out of the exit there.

From the doorway to the corridor, someone shouted, “There’s three of them.”

A moment later, a cacophony of shots filled the air, shattering glass beakers and monitor screens on the work tops that he and his companions had taken refuge behind. The guards were followed a moment later by the dark-haired woman whom Kane had identified as Simona, striding through the open doorway, her high-heeled boots clattering against the hard floor with the pounding of a jackhammer. Kane saw her face properly for the first time, and not just the profile. It looked aristocratic, long with a pleasing curve to the chin. Kane noticed something else about it—something dark was marring the whole left-hand side of the woman’s face. Before he could ponder any further on this, the woman raised her voice, shouting instructions in an authoritative tone.

“Don’t damage anything,” she ordered. “The material in this laboratory could be invaluable to our cause.”

Invaluable was good, Kane thought. It gave them a chance to do more than dodge bullets. He switched on his Commtact and began to outline his plan, subvocalizing his instructions to Grant as he ushered Brigid toward the double-helix staircase at the far end of the vast laboratory room. “These ice rats have got us outgunned and outnumbered,” he said, “and it sounds like the only thing stopping them from shooting us where we stand is the equipment in this lab. Let’s use that to our advantage and get ourselves out of here while we still can.”