Shadow Born

Kane poked and prodded at that smear. Although no sign of animation was left within the ugly concoction, Kane felt no relief. He had encountered another goddess who had survived the destruction of her body, taking root to reincarnate in the bodies of three young women. Neekra’s thousands of years of existence had influenced stories of night terror around the globe, so the death of one body wouldn’t stop her. They’d put her down, but still someone else was looking for that body, that tomb she sought.

That someone else, the same man who wanted out of the alliance, was Prince Durga, exiled regent of the underground Nagah city-state of Garuda in India. Durga, like all Nagah, was a humanoid, an upgrade of humanity created by an ancient alien entity named Enki, a member of a race called the Annunaki, who had been involved with another superhuman species, the Tu’atha de Danaan, in manipulating humanity and its rise to power on Earth. The Nagah had been human, with additions of cobra DNA, skillfully crafted by the benevolent Annunaki, to create a benign, hidden race.

The Nagah survived skydark in their underground city of Garuda, but not without some losses. The small nation-state finally, after centuries, made its presence known to Kane and the other explorers of Cerberus. What could have become a wonderful alliance turned to tragic ashes as Durga chose that moment to make his bid for sole leadership of the pan-terrestrial society. Allying with gods and men, Durga launched a civil war, and had not Durga greedily varied from his plan and sought out superhuman power for its own sake, he might have succeeded. As it was, Kane and his allies ended that war, but not without loss of innocent life in addition to the destruction of human and Nagah co-conspirators.

Kane had thought that Durga was dead, killed in a fuel-air explosion, but the same technology that made the prince into a living force of nature spared him, just barely. As he plotted revenge against his former bride, now the matron queen of the Nagah, he traveled across the Indian Ocean to Africa, seeking a cure for his crippled condition, as well as means to renewed power. Part of that power was discovered in an army of cloned beasts, with physical might to rival a bull-gorilla, bat-like wings and a taste for human flesh. Those hybrid mutants were known as the Kongamato, but Durga’s control of the animals was usurped by a warlord of the dreaded Panthers of Mashona, an outlaw militia who ruled the lands to the west of Harare and Zambia, the same Gamal who “donated” his body to the she-devil Neekra.

Durga hadn’t only relied upon the Kongamato, apparently. When Kane assailed the necropolis, he encountered a cadre of cloned Nagah, their physiques further upgraded with Igigi/Nephilim DNA to turn them into his shock troopers. Durga possessed a dozen of those clones, at least when he was alongside Neekra.

A lone figure stepped onto the dirt next to Kane.

“Grant said it was time to go. The place is wired and ready to blow,” the young man said.

The six-foot, perfectly muscled Nagah clones that Durga utilized weren’t the only creations the prince made. Physically, the young man, Thurpa, looked to be eighteen or nineteen, at least as far as Kane could see through his cobra-like features. Chronologically, though, Thurpa must have been less than a year old.

The Cerberus adventurers and their companions had discovered Thurpa’s clone nature. He looked absolutely normal, but during Durga’s struggle against Neekra, Thurpa suffered the same pain from physical injuries and psychic trauma. When the young man gripped Nehushtan, the ancient walking staff of kings and prophets, its healing power transmitted through him to Durga.

Even now, Kane could see the numb shock on the young man’s features, realizing that any memories since before the day he met Kane and the others had been a lie, a fabrication implanted by a renegade prince whose rampage slew even his mother, the old matron of Garuda. Thurpa had thought that he could return home, but he’d never set his own eyes upon it. Rather, they had been echoes of another’s mind; most likely, it was Durga’s.

“How are you feeling?” Kane asked him.

“Like I should stay down here when you press the detonator,” Thurpa replied.

Kane shook his head. “No. We won’t do that.”

“I’d been worried that I was maybe hypnotized or brainwashed,” Thurpa said. “Now, I find that I’m his clone. Worse, I’m the son he always wanted.”

“We don’t judge our friends on the sins of their fathers,” Kane told him. He rested his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You’ve done so much good alongside us.”

Thurpa’s amber eyes glistened in the backwash of light from his torch. The boy was in tears. “I’ve killed pretty well.”

“Killed to protect, killed to liberate,” Kane corrected. “And you risked yourself jumping on the back of a superhumanly strong creature to stop her.”

Thurpa frowned. “I attacked her because I realized, I’m not real. I’d be no...”

Kane gave him a light tap on the shoulder. “You feel real enough to me. And you would be a loss. Nathan would feel alone, and Lyta looks interested in you.”

“A freak in a land he was not born to,” Thurpa replied.

“Her first look at her rescuers,” Kane said. “If anything can make you feel good and real...”

Thurpa shook himself free from Kane’s comforting grip.

“And spread his seed?” Thurpa asked, glaring at Kane in disbelief.

“It’s not genetic structure that makes you good or bad,” Kane returned.

Thurpa’s glare dimmed in fire, his anger draining. Kane had seen emotional defeat on faces before. This was a crushing blow to him, and such despondence could easily lead the young man to reckless risks or an act of desperation, if not direct suicide.

Thurpa had easily earned Kane’s respect for courage and tenacity. He’d also shown himself in other ways. As a Magistrate, Kane had developed a quick sense not only for danger, but also for the content of a person’s character. All this time he’d spent with the young Nagah had informed him that this cobra-hooded stranger was someone he could trust, someone with compassion, despite the origin of his chromosomes.

“Come on, there’s nothing down here except for corpses,” Kane told him. “We’ll go some place you’ll feel better.”

“I thought we had been chasing my father and Neekra to her tomb,” Thurpa asked.

“It’s got to be better than this. And spending time in the sun and the air will do wonders for your spirit,” Kane told him.

Thurpa nodded.

The two men walked up the corkscrew ramp, returning to the surface, where the others waited.

* * *

THE FIRST SIGN that their detonation worked was a slight rumble that actually tickled the soles of Lyta’s feet. The ground throbbed as a shock wave grew, and she found herself backing away from the epicenter. Ripples in the dirt rose, and then it seemed to telescope inward, rocks crashing downward. She knew that she was dozens of yards from ground zero of the blast and that the caverns below would absorb most of the concussive force of the detonation, but even so, the earth surged and heaved.

Jets of rancid air and dust blew out from cracks burst between solid rock by the shattering explosion. Clouds rose into the midmorning sky, thick and roiling, turning a sunny day to darkness. The roar of crushing rock from below fooled her, for an instant, into believing that the mother of all thunderstorms slashed down on the six people.

“Grant doesn’t fool around when it comes time to blow shit up,” Lyta said softly.

Nathan shook his head. “Considering what they did to the Kongamato, I’m not surprised.”

Lyta glanced to one side. Thurpa stood alone, looking down into the dirt. His interest had been momentarily snagged by the explosion, but now he withdrew back into himself and stared at the ground.

The cobra-like young man, who had shown her such care and concern a few days before, no longer let himself feel like one of the group. She walked over to him.

“Thurpa?”

Amber eyes opened, turned toward her.

“Come on, let’s get going before we’re wearing an inch of cemetery dust,” she said, leaning toward him, bumping her shoulder against his.

Thurpa turned up one corner of his mouth. “I’ll join you guys in the truck.”

Lyta reached up, lacing her fingers with his. She could feel the hardness of the scales on the inner pads of his fingers and across his palm. At first, he seemed reluctant to give her a squeeze, but she pressed harder. The scale pads had been stiffer than normal skin but not sharp edged; they obviously were worn down by day-to-day operation, or maybe it was just a case of natural evolution. Pointy, jagged edges on a palm got in the way of everyday life. With too tough a set of skin on the bits that needed tactile feedback, they’d be effectively crippled, not as if it had been the scales on the soles of his feet.

He was warm, and his scales were soft and smooth. When he squeezed her fingers, managing a little bit of a smile, he was gentle. “Kane mentioned that you might be interested in me...”

“That man may be jumping the gun. I just lost my fiancé,” she whispered.

Lyta quickly stood on her tiptoes, bringing her full lips close to his ear hole. “But he ain’t barking up the wrong tree.”

Thurpa leaned away, looking her over. “I wish that I could...”

Lyta cut him off and elbowed him in the ribs, pointing to the sky. “Looks like we’re gonna get...”

“Come on!” Brigid Baptiste shouted from their pickup truck, untouched for days since the Cerberus group hid it to the side in order to ambush the militia group who had her in a slave queue.

The two ran for the truck. Nathan was in the bed, holding up a tarp. Thurpa lifted Lyta up and under the canvas, then bowed his head as dust, sand and tiny pebbles came raining down. Lyta reached out and took his forearm, pulling with all the strength of her legs to bring him up and into the truck bed. Kane also was under the canvas, helping Nathan hold up the protective tarp, while Grant and Brigid settled into the cab.

The sound of tiny objects rattled off the roof of the cap, snapping and popping on the canvas that Nathan and Kane used as an improvised umbrella.

Grant fired up the engine once most of the debris settled around them, turning on headlights and windshield wipers to see through the remaining cloud of airborne particles and to scrape layers of dirt from the glass. He looked through the back sliding window into the cab as Kane pushed the tarp back, letting the gravel spill out through the netting and the lowered tailgate. As the pickup gained speed, the gravel and dust poured as a trail behind them, kicking up a swirling cloud.

The four people in the bed of the truck immediately got to work making certain the dust was swept out. The last thing they needed was an easy way for someone to track them. Without the dust fully expunged, there’d always be something kicking off the truck, leaving a smoky trail showing recent passage and making them much more visible from the air.

So far, except for the Kongamato, Durga and Neekra hadn’t shown means of aerial surveillance, but then, Durga himself had kept an Annunaki skimmer in his employ back in Garuda. If the Nagah prince had the wherewithal to find cloning facilities, a means of pumping out mutant soldiers like the not-so-bright “brothers” of Thurpa or the aforementioned Kongamato, aerial surveillance wasn’t out of the question at all.

Lyta had been lucky enough not to have seen the beasts and their wing-arms with musculature and power akin to a bull-gorilla’s. Blobs reanimating corpses, making them like legendary vampires in strength and agility, were bad enough. The Kongamato themselves, with their bat-wings, had been a pure nightmare.

A nightmare that she, and her three companions in the bed of the truck, kept an eye out for by scanning the skies. While Grant set up the explosives in the underground cavern, Lyta and Nathan went to work gathering ammunition and extra firearms and loading them into storage lockers on the truck. It was hard work, but preparation was necessary. They had been going up against the tomb that Neekra sought and didn’t have an idea of what they could expect there.

They had picked up rocket launchers among the arsenal, though Lyta had been present when the others opened fire on Neekra’s latest avatar and wasn’t convinced that rockets would be enough. That feminine body, composed of no more than human flesh, ignored entire magazines of automatic gunfire and close-range blasts of hand grenades. Maybe an antitank rocket could have done some damage to that incarnation of her.

What were they going to find at Neekra’s home?

What else could Durga call upon?

Thurpa looked worried, but his concern seemed to be much more than what they would run into; it was also what his role would be. The young man had learned that his presumptions of being a recent recruit had been simply an illusion, false memories entered into his mind. He had been able to transmit the healing energies of Nehushtan, Nathan Longa’s responsibility, to Durga. What other controls and connections did that fallen prince hold over Thurpa?

She reached out, resting her hand on his knee. It took a few moments before Thurpa’s vision focused, instead of gazing glassily at the recently swept bed of the pickup truck. He rewarded her with a slight smile, resting his hand atop hers.

“You have friends here,” Lyta said.

“I know that,” Thurpa replied. “Which makes me all the more worried of what I might do to you.”

“We’ll be expecting trouble,” Kane mentioned. “We don’t want to hurt you, and we know you don’t want to cause us any trouble. But we can protect Lyta and Nathan if necessary.”

Lyta glanced toward Kane. He was a large man, six feet in height, with powerful ropes of muscle in his upper body, akin to the musculature of a wolf. His eyes were a cool blue, and now, in the light of his words, those orbs seemed especially predatory. The warrior had done some amazing things, first rescuing her, then protecting her from the freakish amorphous blobs of Neekra, and then in subsequent battles.

She thought about how Thurpa measured up to him. The young man gave up four inches of height and thirty pounds to the explorer from America. While the Nagah had fangs and venom, and a layer of scales that might armor him somewhat, Lyta had little illusion that those would make up for Kane’s greater size, strength and experience.

The hardness in Kane’s gaze softened, and he added, “We won’t let you hurt them or yourself.”

“Thank you,” Thurpa said softly.

* * *

GRANT, BEHIND THE wheel of the pickup truck, kept his voice low, allowing the Commtact on his jaw to do most of the work of transmitting sound into Brigid’s and Kane’s Commtact receivers. Between the jostling of the truck on the roads and the relative solitude of the pickup’s cab, he knew that this conversation would be private.

“Thurpa turns out to be a creation of Durga. Maybe even a clone,” Grant said, putting their suspicions on the table. “What can we do about this? And will it have an effect on us?”

“Everything we’ve seen of Durga is part of a long-term plan,” Brigid offered. “He’s not one to go for a quick partial victory.”

“Except when he took a dip in the Cobra baths back in Garuda,” Kane subvocalized. Grant caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror. He was looking toward the forest to the right of the truck, so what noises he made would be lost in the wind and the other three wouldn’t see his throat and jaw move. “And he’s learned his lesson from that disaster.”

“Instant gratification and physical power weren’t enough to protect him, nor give him the victory he sought,” Brigid concurred.

“So, Thurpa, if he is a ticking time bomb, might not go off for years?” Grant asked.

“I don’t think that he’s a bomb,” Kane’s voice popped in, disembodied. “He’s too valuable to Durga.”

“Kane has a point,” Brigid returned. “From Thurpa’s account, we learned that when Neekra attacked Durga, sensory input seemed to be deferred between Durga’s body and Thurpa’s. When Thurpa sought the regenerative capabilities of Nehushtan, he could sense Durga also drawing strength and healing.”

“So, Thurpa is Durga’s means of immortality?” Grant mused. “Like an overflow valve. Things get too hot for Prince Asshole, it vents through our friend.”

“On a psychic scale, yes,” Brigid concurred. “The two of them have a psychic link through which they share the load.”

Grant frowned, his gunslinger’s mustache accentuating and exaggerating the downward bow of his lips. “So if we ever have to take down Durga, we could hurt Thurpa.”

“Why have a bomb when you have a perennial human shield?” Brigid inquired rhetorically.

Kane’s grumble, to Grant’s ears, was indicative of a stewing, deepening anger stemming from impotence. “Not that your riddle needs answering, but he gets psychic shielding from Neekra, and he gets something that will stop us from putting a bullet into his head.”

Brigid nodded. “Correct.”

Grant watched the mirror image of Kane glance toward Thurpa in the back of the truck. He saw profound pain in his friend’s features, that impotence toward helping the young Nagah, whose only sins had been those of his father.

“What’s to say that Hannah’s children aren’t going to end up the same way?” Kane asked finally, looking away from Thurpa. “Durga implanted his DNA into her, giving her twins, the first and last children she’ll ever have.”

“Durga’s a bastard, but those kids will be raised right,” Grant said. “Manticor will be a good father to them.”

“Will fatherhood be enough when they’re in psychic contact with a sociopath like Durga?” Kane asked. “They’ll grow up with what the rest of the world would think are schizophrenic delusions.”

“But we’ll get this information to Hannah,” Brigid said.

Kane’s grunt showed his frustration. “And what will that provide?”

“It will warn her of what’s coming,” Brigid told him.

Grant kept his eyes on the road. Even as he drove, he was trying to figure out what could mitigate any telepathic influence on Hannah’s twins or on Thurpa.

“What about the control interface that Gamal used?” Grant asked. “It was a thought transmitter.”

Brigid turned to him. “Use it as a signal blocker? But that was a lot of machinery. Unless it would be an area denial device. It sends out a scramble signal...but then, no one could use any natural psychic ability in Garuda.”

“It’d have to be a blanket, wouldn’t it?” Grant asked.

“We could try something akin to a torus defense, but...” Brigid mused. “Brain waves would have openings in areas away from the ring itself, either transmitting over the top or under the earth.”

“The only way we have to protect Hannah’s children is to end Durga,” Kane murmured. “And if we kill Durga, what kind of harm would we cause Thurpa?”

Brigid sighed. “He said he’d be willing to sacrifice himself.”

Grant’s mood darkened even further, but he refused to let go of any hope. “Let’s see that it doesn’t come to that.”

Frustrated and feeling helpless in the face of Thurpa’s personal danger, Grant’s stomach twisted. He needed to vent his impotence on something.

The hiss-boom of a darting rocket drew his attention from the side. Their pickup truck had passed into a sandy, barren clearing between trees, and a line of enemy trucks were parked up on a hill. It had to be the militia, the Panthers of Mashona—or what was left of them.

And there would be no mistaking Kane, a white man, or Thurpa, a human cobra, in the bed of their truck.

“Here comes shit!” Grant bellowed, tromping the gas to keep ahead of subsequent rounds of enemy fire.

Chapter 2

As soon as the wobbly spear, riding its tail of smoke and fire, hissed past the bed of the pickup truck and smashed into the ground, Thurpa grabbed his folded rifle and looked along the cottony trail back to its point of origin. He grimaced at the sight of three trucks, similar to the one that Grant and the others had procured back at Victoria Falls, except these had been mounted with machine guns and were filled with gunmen.

What do you think you are, idiot? A swordsman? Thurpa winced at his own self-reproach and snapped the stock open on the rifle.

Kane clapped him on the shoulder, shook his head.

“We’re moving too fast. You’ll waste ammunition!” he shouted over the roar of engines and crunching dirt kicked up by the pickup’s tires.

Thurpa glanced back and heard the crackle of enemy weapons, but there was no sign of near impact. He was trained well enough to keep his finger far from the trigger, making certain he didn’t inadvertently send a bullet out of his rifle. Considering the amount of jostling and physics at work in the bed of the pickup, he realized the wisdom of Kane’s admonition. One bad bounce or rut in the ground, and a shot intended for one of the enemy militia could go into an ally.

They needed to rely on Grant’s driving skills to make it out of this alive.

“When we slow down, then we shoot,” Kane added.

Thurpa looked to Nathan and Lyta. He tried not to spend too long looking at the young Zambian woman, though she was pretty. Again, he was thrown back to when he discovered that he was a clone of the Nagah prince Durga. He’d learned from Kane, Grant and Brigid that his “father” had played upon racial purity differences among the Nagah to assemble for himself a die-hard crew, an army who would give him the strength behind his uprising.

Of course, that race-baiting, those who had been “born cobra” or had been false Nagah having been converted by the Cobra baths, was simply a means of pecking and splintering the society of the underground city of Garuda. The underground city was home to humans, “natives” and pilgrims who undertook the change in a nanotech machine bath, and as in any society with a great deal of immigrant influx, there had been the disenfranchised who felt as if they were owed something, either by their “birthright” or simply because they had toiled hard to cross dangerous borders and frontiers. As such, Durga had a means of destabilizing an otherwise rock-solid representative republic monarchy.

Blaming “the other” was one of the oldest means of gaining personal power, even with a government in which the will of the people was able to overrule and defy royal decree. Hatred was at once a means of consolidating groups and eroding the fabric of a society. Thurpa heard about the rifts within Nagah society still existing as open wounds since Durga’s expulsion from the city.

The thought of Durga’s nurturance of bigotry reminded Thurpa of how much he wasn’t a product of his father’s mind. He was attracted to a young human, one who didn’t resemble an Indian. The African Lyta was as exotic as he could imagine. She had stated that her heart was off limits because of the loss of her fiancé, but he wanted nothing more than to protect her.

Thankfully, the pickup truck was staying far ahead of their enemies, bullets zipping far and wide, missing the Cerberus exiles and their allies. Thurpa’s patience started to grow short at being a “sitting target,” unable to do something to stop their pursuit. He could see that bit of warrior pride in his father, the willingness to dive head-to-head with an enemy, no matter the odds.

Kane’s hand clapped his shoulder again. “Get ready!”

A jolt of excitement rushed through Thurpa. That surge of excitement told him just how true his “superiority to mammals” was. Adrenaline was a human trait, and he recalled the origin mythology of the Nagah, how Enki crafted their race from humans, adding to them the traits of the cobra and some from the Annunaki themselves. Along the way, the alien might had faded into recessive genes, but not the cobra aspects, though according to Kane and the others, maybe it was well enough that he didn’t share the same genetics as the Igigi or, as they had been known to the Cerberus heroes, the mindless drones called Nephilim.