Outlanders 42 - Satan's Seed., page 22
"Until the Scarlet Queen is too angry to think straight," Kane retorted, firing another burst down the catwalk. "I don't want her getting wise and calling a retreat at the last second."
The rounds fired by the Black Sun troopers smashed into the computer stations, chips of plastic and shards of glass flying in all directions. Slugs bounced from the walls, beating a drum roll on the alloy sheathing. The countess began another shrieking tirade in German, followed by a grenade flying toward them. Spinning end over end, it landed just before the threshold. Everyone in the area wheeled away. A giant fist punched Kane in the small of the back and a storm of flame and smoke swirled around him, accompanied by a painfully loud blast of sound.
A battering ram of hot, almost solid air sent him cartwheeling over the top of a desk and he slammed down hard on the floor. Dizzy, rib cage throbbing, Kane fought his way to his feet. Brigid came to his side, helping to steady him.
"I think the countess is now officially too angry to think straight." Brigid announced, wiping at the blood trickling from a cut on her right cheek.
"Good," he croaked. "We have her just where she wants us."
Raising his voice. he shouted hoarsely, "Everybody fall back! Fall back!"
The defenders began a swift retreat to the far side of the control center, firing sporadically through the doorway toward the catwalk. A quartet of Black Sun troopers came through the door in a head-on rush, Schmeissers rattling in unison, the flaming bores sweeping in left-to-right arcs.
The personnel took refuge in adjacent offices, while Brigid, Kane and Shizuka backed away to the mat-trans unit, stepping into it but keeping the heavy door partially ajar. Bullets splatted harmlessly against the armaglass.
Turning to Nguyen, who had joined the wounded within the chamber, Kane extended a hand. Wordlessly, she placed a RG-34 grenade into it. He unpinned it and lobbed the little canister with an underhanded toss toward the Black Sun troopers, then ducked back behind the impenetrable cover of the armaglass.
The soldiers dived for cover, but only a few of them were quick enough to get out of range of the explosive charge and the effect radius of the shrapnel. The grenade detonated with a brutal thunderclap. A hell-flower bloomed, petals of flame curving and spreading outward. Spewing from the end of every petal was a rain of shrapnel, ripping into bodies, walls, equipment. Fragments rattled violently against the armaglass walls of the mat-trans, ricocheting way. The rolling echoes of the explosion faded, punctuated by the furious screaming of the countess.
Kane eased out of the chamber, squinting through the haze of eye-stinging, throat-closing smoke. He stroked a single shot from his Sin Eater, saw a wounded trooper jerk, lurch and fall.
Brigid joined him, subgun at her shoulder. "The countess is still hanging back."
"I'm not too worried about her," Kane replied. It's the troopers. We don't know how many she has. I hope your chronon-radiation-temporal-event theory is right."
"It's a theory," she said curtly. "And there's only one way to test it."
"Yeah," he drawled, stepping farther into the room. "So let's do that very thing."
He triggered his Sin Eater, bullets pounding through a black coverall he glimpsed through the smoke. The trooper vaulted backward, blood spurting from three holes neatly grouped over his heart.
The floor was awash with looping liquid ribbons of vermilion. Five Black Sun troopers sprawled across it, coveralls wet with fluids, the flesh beneath flayed to the bone by shrapnel.
Hefting her Copperhead. Brigid sidestepped toward the short flight of stairs leading to the stasis module. She exchanged a quick, grim nod with Shizuka, who double-fisted her katana. She intended to stand guard over the wounded people within the mat-trans unit.
A quintet of troopers raced through the doorway, firing in the direction of Brigid and Kane, their weapons chattering, muzzles flashing with little twinkles of dancing flame. Behind them on the catwalk stood Countess Paula von Schiksel, shrieking and striking the soldiers with her quirt.
Racing to the foot of the stairs, Brigid framed a trooper in her sights and fired a two-second burst that I opened up his chest, propelling him backward in a crimson mist. Then she and Kane heeled around and bounded up the risers. Shouldering open the door, Kane cast a quick glance behind him to make sure the full complement of Black Sun troopers were in full pursuit. As he and Brigid jogged side-by-side down the corridor, he panted, "So far so good."
"You realize that if my theory is wrong," she said breathlessly, "then we'll be trapped in the module." He had no breath to reply. The two people sprinted down the passageway, not turning even when they heard the tramp of multiple boots on the floor. They ran past the niches containing the artifacts trawled from past ages, hoping the troopers were too single-mindedly intent on killing them to be distracted by the treasures. When they reached the stasis module gallery, Brigid and Kane darted to opposite sides of the broad doorway, trying to soften the harshness of their respiration. The first three Black Sun troopers rushed onto the railed gallery and stumbled to clumsy halts, staring around through their goggles in confusion.
For the briefest fragment of an instant, a blue dazzle flashed from the amber stasis field like a blade of light. It stabbed through the chamber. Brigid and Kane heard a faint crackle and the three soldiers vanished. A ripple of blue-white force spread out from the module in a flat circle of energy that bisected the room, flowing upward and outward as ripples in a body of water. The ripples blazed with intolerable glares, sparks spattering. Kane and Brigid shielded their eyes from the flares that carpeted the floor of the corridor with burst after burst of pale energy.
They heard no outcries, no thuds of falling bodies or clatter of dropped weapons, only faint, repeated crackles and sizzles, then even those sounds faded away. A sharp odor of ozone spread upon the air.
Cautiously, Kane removed his hands from his eyes and peered around the edge of the door frame. He saw only eddies of white smoke and scorch marks on the floor in the shape of boot soles. Man-sized and man-shaped outlines were etched into the walls, black silhouettes of men, as if the bodies of the troopers had been flattened and merged with the alloy.
It took Kane two attempts before he was able to say. "Temporal event A, annihilating temporal event B... pretty novel way of killing your enemies."
Brigid stepped out into the corridor, eyes flicking back and forth. "They may not be dead at all."
"After all that trouble," Kane snapped, "they had better be."
"The chronon radiation blowback might have just blasted them back to their own time period. The temporal events canceled each other out."
A line of confusion appeared between Kane's eyes. "So this never happened?"
Brigid shrugged, removing the magazine from her Copperhead and checking the remaining rounds. "Let's go find out."
THE SALIVA-WET FANGS crashed shut within inches of Grant's heels as he shoulder rolled through the door and over the slick floor of the lobby. Dragging himself by his elbows, he scrambled away from the snout of the Monstrodamii.
The Daspletosaurus had managed to wedge its entire head through the doorway. It squeezed the upper part of its body through, snapping viciously at the air, growling and snarling. Its small arms strained to reach him, talon-tipped fingers twitching.
Powered by its massively muscled hind legs, the Monstrodamii pushed more of its body through the frame. A network of cracks spread through the wall, pieces of plaster popping loose.
Grant climbed to his feet, raised his Sin Eater and took careful aim, bracing his feet wide apart. He squeezed the trigger and the bullet struck the carnosaur in the right eye. The glaring orb disappeared in a splash of gelid red. The Monstrodamii roared deafeningly, lunging forward, pushing most of its body into the lobby. The wide hips and pelvic girdle caught in the frame.
Taking aim again, Grant began to depress the firing stud of his pistol. Then a heavy weight collided with him from behind, knocking him off balance. He staggered forward, trying to recover his footing.
He caught only a glimpse of a blond woman in a form-fitting scarlet tunic, stumbling across the floor, arms windmilling, flailing at the air with a riding crop. When she caught sight of the Monstrodamii she had time to scream once, then the jaws of the creature closed over her head. Her legs kicked in a futile spasm and she slapped weakly at the carnosaur's snout with the quirt. Then the fangs sheared through flesh, crunched through bone and the woman's headless body flopped to the floor.
Grant backed away as the Monstrodamii opened its jaws and allowed the blond-haired head to thud to the floor, where it rolled like an awkward ball. He lifted his Sin Eater again, but knew he would not be able to inflict lethal wounds before the saurian crashed through the wall.
The familiar rattle of a Copperhead drowned out the sound of the Monstrodamii's snarls. The beast jerked as steel-jacketed slugs cut through its scales. Whirling, Grant saw Kane, Brigid and Shizuka march out of the passageway. The subgun at Brigid's shoulder hammered on full-auto.
Kane tossed a grenade at the Monstrodamii and the giant saurian snapped at it as if it were a morsel of food. The head and upper body of the carnosaur disintegrated in a blast of smoke and red, wet flesh. Swearing, Grant ducked as blood and viscera splattered all around him. As the echoes of the explosion faded, Grant walked over to his three friends. All of them looked weary, blood-streaked and disheveled. They stared fixedly at the corpses of the Monstrodamii and the woman. Taking a deep breath, Grant pushed his Sin Eater back into its holster. Kane arched an eyebrow at him and asked. "Well, what have you been up to today?"
Epilogue
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, there was very little to do. A way to dispose of the corpses of the Monstrodamii and Countess Paula von Schiksel would come later.
Brewster Philboyd, Edwards, Aleister Crowley and Tshaya emerged from the jungle when the immediate crisis appeared over. After everyone had told their stories, Brigid cautioned that bringing the child into close proximity with the chronon stream, even as it depleted as it seemed now, might be dangerous to her.
Aleister Crowley, of course, was another matter entirely. Grant, Kane and Brigid escorted him to the stasis module, where he stared in wide-eyed awe at the amber shimmer.
"Your turn, Crowley," Kane said.
The man coughed and asked, "Why are you so sure it will work on me?"
Brigid smiled coldly. "The historical record shows Aleister Crowley dying of a respiratory infection in 1947. Therefore, it must work on you."
Crowley shrank away from the gallery. "It could kill me!"
Grant stared at him stonily. "And that's a problem for us why?"
'No," Crowley bleated, shaking his head. "I won't. There's nothing for me to—"
A hand pushed him into the shimmer of light and he could no longer speak. His head became a roaring maelstrom of agony that sucked him in, although he fought to hold on to the world around him.
Lights of a thousand colors and a thousand combinations of shapes swirled before his eyes. Then he looked out at the snowcapped mountains and inhaled the icy air. His chest hurt as if white-hot bands of iron were tightening around his lungs and he coughed, feeling the phlegm work its way up his throat. He shuddered, turned his head and spit into the snow. Aleister Crowley waited for the end of his last day in the twentieth century. He hoped he would not live to see the sun set behind the Carpathians again.
***
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
James Axler, Outlanders 42 - Satan's Seed.
