with the telescopic zoom available in the eyepieces.
He throttled down only a fraction, steering to parallel Edwards, when he caught a flicker of darkness from the corner of his eye.
So much for being able to use sign language with Edwards before the UFO arrived.
Grant turned his head, swinging the Manta into an S-turn that would allow him to survey a maximum of sky around him. The cockpit glass of the high-velocity ship allowed him a fairly good panorama of the Mediterranean airspace. Edwards was visible, as well. He was keeping his distance and was focused on something Grant couldn’t see at this moment.
“Deaf and mute, and half blind,” the big, former Magistrate grumbled to himself. “I might as well be a sitting duck…”
With that thought, however, Grant noticed Edwards suddenly accelerate his Manta, as if to engage ramming speed against his fellow pilot. There was only a brief instant of confusion until he realized that whatever had drawn Grant’s attention as the UFO was now flying on his tail, sticking to his blind spot.
That turned out to be a much better form of nonverbal communication that instantly clicked in Grant’s mind. Within a moment he throttled up to near escape-velocity speed, tearing away from his pursuit utilizing the scram jet engines built into the moon-base-built wonder craft. He only maintained escape velocity for a few seconds, but that was more than sufficient to have created a few miles of space between the Manta and his pursuit.
With a deft spin, Grant was able to see the UFO as it raced to catch up. He could see a pair of powerful wings, but what hung beneath them was no mere bird, not even a pteranodon.
He employed his optic enhancements and zoomed in, focusing on a man.
No, to call it a man would have been a misnomer. With electronic readouts on the transparent shadow suit’s faceplate, Grant could see that the entity had a wingspan of thirty feet, its skin tone blued like that of a pallid corpse. Around its bare, brawny arms, he saw what at first appeared to be coiled serpents, but recognition immediately kicked in. He bore some version of the serpentine ASP blasters worn by the Nephilim drones who served beneath Enlil and the other Annunaki overlords. They glinted like metal in the sun, but those weapons seemed puny in comparison to the winged humanoid’s handheld device. It was a gigantic hammer, gripped in sinewy, powerful hands.
Grant looked at the face of his foe, one twisted in grim rage, tusks protruding and curving out over his mustached upper lip, a black beard of writhing worms crawling up the sides of his face before they lengthened into serpents like a male version of the Greek monster Medusa. His nose plunged down over his peeled-back lips like the hook of a vulture’s beak and its eyes were shadows beneath bulging, clifflike brow ridges.
Grant’s shock at the hurtling creature knocked him from taking a mental inventory of the beast’s appearance, and he flipped the circuits to activate the weapons recently added to the Manta. As he did, there was a whine of protest from the systems, informing him that whatever had negated radio communications had likewise disabled the weaponry controls.
“Isn’t that just great?” Grant growled, throttling up the engines and hurtling toward the flying humanoid. Though he was certain the hammer was far more than just a brutish weapon meant for crushing skulls, he was gambling on a Mach 2 impact stunning the flying opponent. The creature was not thematically different from the gigantic Kongamato from Africa, and he always wondered how one of those muscular horrors would have dealt with being run over by a supersonic Manta.
The tusked mouth turned into a semblance of a smile through the telescopic magnification on Grant’s faceplate and immediately he started to regret playing chicken with a flying demon.
He didn’t have long to doubt his course, though, as a moment later the Manta jolted violently. Even strapped into the pilot’s couch, Grant’s head and arms flailed wildly in the cockpit. Alarms and lights jerked to life around the cabin, the violence of impact making the horizon cartwheel in the cracked windshield of the supersonic craft.
Stunned, Grant tried to will his hands back to the joystick nestled between his knees. Unfortunately centrifugal force and a stabbing pain in his back and shoulder kept them dangling at the ends of his ropy arms. All the while, his optics displayed a countdown of the Manta’s altitude as it spiraled toward the Mediterranean Sea below. At this speed, striking incompressible water, it would be like hurling a melon against a stone wall, except the meaty fruit disgorged would be Grant’s internal organs.
Edwards was aghast at the sight of the winged monstrosity flying to meet Grant’s Manta at ramming speed. At the same time he grimaced at the inconvenience of having his weaponry disabled by whatever had knocked out the radios. As it was, the flying monster itself was spiraling out of control, seemingly as stunned as the Manta, its pilot locked in a fatal corkscrew heading toward the waiting sea beneath them. However, even as the hammer-wielding flier toppled head over heels through the empty air, Edwards’s Commtact came back online.
“Grant!” It was a chorus of alarmed cries in familiar voices.
Edwards looked between the stunned monstrosity and his fellow Cerberus warrior plummeting toward the ground. With a pit of disgust in his belly, he realized that the newly armed Mantas had very little that could be used to save another aircraft from crashing. The upgrades were meant to swat threats from the sky, to ensure that they crashed.
And if Edwards could not rescue Grant, he’d sure as hell avenge his friend. His thumb flicked up the safety switch on his joystick and he pressed down on the trigger. In a moment a pair of .50-caliber machine guns roared to life beneath the keel of his Manta, streams of lead locking on the falling humanoid. As tracers described the path of fire from Edwards’s guns, the winged creature jolted to alertness. One bullet smashed through the beast-man’s wing, but no pain registered on his target.
Instead the huge hammer was raised in both hands. It lowered its head and the hammer’s bonce began to glow brightly, turning into a blazing sun at the end of its two-meter-long shaft. Edwards watched as the air in front of the hammer and the falling devil sparked to life. Instinctively the former Magistrate realized what those individual flares were as he eased off the trigger. The hammer was incinerating the massive bullets in flight, shielding the stunned opponent.
“So, if you want to play it that way,” Edwards murmured, “let’s try something that won’t burn up.”
Edwards kicked in what passed for afterburners on the Manta, and the crush of acceleration pushed him deeper into the pilot’s couch, the transonic aircraft blistering along at escape velocity. This low, he wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace very long, but it was merely a short burst of speed that roared him past their winged opponent. Unlike Grant, he wasn’t going to ram his enemy, but rather, let the sonic boom in his wake beat at the odd, hammer-wielding being.
And since the interference had stopped and the Manta’s cockpit was now receiving camera images, he was able to spot the effects of the thunderclap of his passage on the creature. It had lost its hammer and, once more, it was working into a spiral. Unfortunately this spiral was slow and winding, lazy and controlled.
Even so, there was no way that Edwards was going to allow it anywhere near its fallen hammer, wherever it would have landed. He swung his Manta around, all the while hoping that somewhere Grant had regained control of his craft.
The winged creature spotted the incoming scram jet and righted itself, putting
