James Axler - Cradle Of Destiny

“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…”

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?”