taking a few deep breaths. “Staring down a killer dinosaur is hard damned work.”
Shizuka brushed her hand across his broad chest, sparing a slight, tight-lipped smile. “So taking on some hired guns should be a snap, right?”
Grant chuckled and kissed Shizuka’s forehead, or rather the helmet chevron over her eyes. “Yeah. Can’t go taking a nap now.”
The two warriors headed down the hallway.
BRIGID BAPTISTE WAS impressed with the precision of Edwards’s breaching charge. The reshaped plastic explosives had cut a perfect hole large enough for Brigid, Domi and Maria Falk to slither through. Edwards had no intention of climbing into an ancient underground temple, and a hole large enough to fit his muscular, massive form would risk a weakness in the wall that might cause the improvised entrance to collapse.
Domi took point, putting her head and shoulders through the opening. Though not much sunlight got past even her slender frame, the albino’s ruby-red eyes were attuned to even the deepest of shadows, and could pick up details as necessary. She came out of the hole and reached into a gear bag, pulling a length of rope adorned with knots every two feet.
“Anchor,” she ordered.
Edwards nodded and secured the end of the cord and the grapnel hook to which it was attached in some rocks. When the steel tines of the grapnel were anchored, Edwards gave the hook a tug with all of his strength. If the former Magistrate couldn’t unseat the grapnel, then the combined weight of Falk and Brigid wouldn’t be too much for it.
“Shall we?”
“Maria last. You second,” Domi said to Brigid, slithering through the hole. A slender arm snaked out, snatched up her gear bag and yanked it into the shadows. Brigid waited a moment, wondering what would be the feral girl’s signal to follow her. The hiss of a flare, followed by a reddish glow in the darkened hole was a good preamble.
“Come on,” Domi called.
Brigid slipped through the hole, holding on to the rope. The drop to the ground was only twenty-five feet, but it was certainly nothing that she’d have wanted to attempt in the dark. Chunks of broken stone on the floor provided an uneven surface to simply hop on to, promising a broken ankle if she’d made the attempt. The knotted rope also provided an easy, low-profile ladder with which they could leave the temple. Thanks to Falk’s ground sonar, the hole itself was braced by sufficient struts to be fairly stable, if too small for Edwards to want to go through.
Even if he wasn’t wary of crawling into a claustrophobic space, Brigid, Domi and Edwards all agreed that someone standing guard at their entrance would be vital. There was no telling who was here on the Euphrates. The explorers had arrived in via parallax point, so knowledge of local bandits, pirates or tyrants was slim. If it weren’t for a heretofore unknown threat from the time of the Annunakis’ rule, and now new hints of another monstrosity from past millennia, Brigid wouldn’t have come here, making a wild stab for historical data that could be an edge in their next conflict with the Annunaki overlords.
Blindsided by Marduk’s horde alongside New Olympus, then the blade of Ullikummis and later Ullikummis himself, Brigid was getting tired of being caught behind the curve.
The vaulted underground chamber was large enough to be an aircraft hangar. Knowing the ships of the Annunaki, Brigid wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that this been a parking garage for ancient astronauts. She didn’t see any form of doors through which skimmers could flit in and out, but she wasn’t able to perceive the wall opposite the one they’d entered through, thanks to the gloomy shadows and the interruption of support studs. She remembered Falk’s original measurements as the geologist finally made her way down the rope.
Two football fields in area.
“Anything, Domi?” Brigid asked.
“Stale air,” she answered. “Scurrying vermin. Not much.”
Outside of Kane, Domi had some of the sharpest senses of any human that Brigid had ever known. Part of it was due to the sensitivity inherent in an albino’s eyes, the rest coming from growing up in the wilderness. Though her skin was alabaster in color, and her closely shorn hair was the hue of aged bone, the feral woman was hardly the fragile creature that albinos of previous centuries had been. She was strong and tough, having survived trauma that would have killed a less resilient human.
Brigid couldn’t have asked for a better companion to slink through the darkness of a temple that might also be an Annunaki tomb. She glanced over to Falk, who checked the Glock in her belt holster. Brigid saw a mirror of herself in the older woman, a scientist who was willing to journey into the unknown but who hadn’t been tested or tried in conflict. There was a difference between the two scientists, though. Falk was beginning her adventuring in her later years, while Brigid was still young and fit. The former archivist was also tall and heavy enough to make her gender less important should she ever get into conflict with a man. Falk was more petite, larger than Domi was but with none of the animalistic fury and wilderness instincts of the albino warrior.
The Glock was the simplest and easiest firearm to operate in the Cerberus armory, so Falk wouldn’t be completely inept if it came to gunplay. Without spending time on learning the operation of the mechanism, Falk and the other Manitius Base scientists could be grilled on marksmanship. The archivist knew the scores from their training, and Falk was above the median in skill, able to tear the heart out of a paper target. Still, Brigid knew that she’d have to watch out for the geologist, because a printed silhouette was very different from a menacing opponent.
Domi had stopped, looking at the other part of Grant’s trench coat. It hung like a flag, and from this side, there was no doubt that it had been crafted for a giant of a man. Below the empty coat was a pile of rodent-chewed bones. Brigid swallowed hard, but the feral girl knelt and picked up one of the bones.
“Too big,” she announced.
“How do you know?” Brigid asked.
Domi stood up the bone she was examining. It was a femur that was nearly as long as Domi’s entire leg. “Grant’s tall, but his thigh don’t reach to my waist. Someone else was wearing his coat.”
Brigid looked at the sunken, buckled ceiling, wondering how the skeleton had gotten nearly through the roof of the temple. She could only hope that it was a victorious situation for Grant.
She didn’t want to think of how someone else had gained possession of her friend’s coat.
Chapter 4
Merkel’s head shot up as two simultaneous events were announced by the consortium mercenaries under his command. One of the mercenaries was not so much a hired gun but a computer technician named Milo Donaldson, the key tapper who was given charge of the mat-trans and the time trawl. He was, to Merkel’s mind, the perfect example of a computer nerd, slender and full of himself because he had abilities that were as vital to the scientists as those of a dozen gunslingers. He got on Merkel’s nerves simply because of his perceived sense of power, which was only as good as his fingertips dancing across a keyboard.
The other was Kovak, who was a former Magistrate like Merkel. However, Kovak was not a war leader like Merkel was. Kovak was just another minion, someone who cleaned up. Merkel would be the one through the door first, while Kovak would hang back, fire a few shots into a twitching corpse and scoop up any dropped magazines. He was simply a cleaner, someone who took care of any messes that Merkel made while he was actively doing.
