James Axler - Cradle Of Destiny

The hostage takers might have cast the area into shadows, but there was no way that they could muffle the nervous shifting and breathing of captives. Grant tossed a pocketed pebble into the hallway to make certain, but no reaction left him with the impression that this place had been cordoned off and abandoned. He turned away to rendezvous with Shizuka and spotted a half-dozen consortium soldiers moving with purpose toward the Chronos trawl.

“Shizuka, you’ve got company on your six,” Grant warned over the radio.

“Busy,” came the hissed reply.

From the grunts transmitted over her hands-free microphone, Grant knew that he was going to have to hustle. From stealth to explosive acceleration, the big man charged down the hall, his long strides ending in loud thumps on the tile floor of the laboratory, each footfall loud enough to be a gunshot. If things were going to hell, Grant wanted to draw attention away from Shizuka.

“Hey!” shouted one of the group of soldiers who’d passed only moments before, hearing the ex-Magistrate run.

As Grant rounded the corner, he saw that three of the millennialists were in midturn, the front half of the group continuing on its path. Three Calico submachine guns would still have the potential of causing Grant injury through his armored coat, so there was no pause on the brawny titan’s part. Leg muscles surged, and he sprinted forward like a human bull, his arms swept out like the horns of a steer. Instead of making himself a smaller target, Grant gambled on causing as much disruption as possible. His wide, sweeping limbs struck each of the three gunmen, bowling them over.

Grant could feel the jaw of one mercenary dislocate as his melon-sized shoulder slammed up against it. His fingers disappeared into the wet mushy holes in an other’s face as he sunk them into eye sockets. The last of the trio’s throat thudded hard against his right forearm, wrapped in the hydraulic forearm holster, and there was a dull pop as the gunman’s larynx collapsed and his neck bones separated. It was a brutal assault, and there was at least one fatality in the attack. It was necessary; if any of the three had managed to get their fingers on the triggers of their machine pistols, the resultant gunfire would have alerted all of the hostaged Chronos facility.

Things were already going downhill, and there were three more hired soldiers to deal with. The crash of Grant against their compatriots was now enough to draw the lead group’s attention. Two stunned men and a corpse fell to the tile floor as they turned. Grant snapped off a hard punch with his left fist, the blow crushing the cheekbones of a millennialist, the impact enough to toss the man insensate to the ground. The second of the gunmen swung his Calico up, but Grant launched the Sin Eater into his grasp by flexing his wrist tendons. A heavyweight 9 mm slug exploded through the stealth module on the machine pistol’s muzzle, making a throaty pop that was matched by the bursting of ribs and lung tissue. The mercenary jerked violently backward as 240 grains of high-density bullet turned his internal organs to froth and shattered his spine.

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.