Infinity Breach
“I shall take the stone knife to my laboratory,” Flag stated, his words cutting into the friendly bickering that was continuing between his two loyal companions.
Even as the words left his mouth, Flag sensed something behind him. He spun on his heel, turning to face the window at the exact instant that its glass pane shattered and a 9 mm bullet raced over his shoulder. Missing Flag by a fraction of an inch, the bullet zipped across the tiny room before embedding itself in the far wall with a dull thud.
“We’re under attack!” Flag cried as his companions took cover behind the desk.
As he spoke, Flag saw a familiar figure dressed in a brown leather flight suit moving just beyond the shattered window. It was Demy Octavo, leaping down from the wire fence that marked the border of the naval base. Flag was momentarily distracted as he admired her for a fraction of a second, her lithe, trim body like that of a dancer, her long, dark hair swirling in the island breeze. And then she raised the pistol in her right hand, and another 9 mm slug ripped through the space where the windowpane had been just a moment ago, blasting over Flag’s head and rushing onward into the room.
Abraham Flag did not take cover, however. Rather, he was already in motion, a whirling dervish as the glass of the window crunched beneath his booted feet. In a second, Demy Octavo leaped through the window, snapping her heels high in the air and passing through the frame without so much as brushing it, in a feat of incredible muscle control.
While Abraham Flag had been known to kill, he preferred not to arm himself with a gun. He had no objection to the use of ultimate force if it was required; he simply felt that carrying a gun was largely unnecessary when other means existed to halt a foe’s progress. As such, the incredible man of science now found himself unarmed and staring down the loaded barrel of a Beretta Model 1915.
“Good afternoon, Professor Flag,” the beautiful gun mistress said in English, her throaty voice displaying just the faintest hint of her exotic accent.
Flag saw the slightest hesitation in the woman’s eyes, as Octavo went to pull the trigger. He used that momentary hesitation—which could have been no more than an eighth of a second—to shift his head out of the path of the 9 mm slug as it left the barrel and raced through the air toward him. Then, as the bullet clipped past Flag’s ear, his hand whipped out and snatched the pistol before Octavo could loose another shot.
Octavo cried out as the pistol left her hand, along with her glove, which was caught up by Flag’s swift action. As her glove fell to the floor with a slap, the beautiful Italian turned on Flag, hissing like an enraged cat.
Abraham Flag’s eyes never left Octavo’s, but his fingers worked in a blur of movement. In less than two seconds, he had deconstructed the Beretta with one hand, dropping the component parts to the hard floor of the tiny office. But that minuscule distraction had been enough. As the barrel, grip and trigger guard tinkered to the wooden floor, Demy Octavo’s fist snapped out, connecting with Flag’s square jaw.
Caught off guard, Flag took a step backward, reeling from the savage blow. That momentary stumble threatened to cost Flag—and by extension the U.S. government—plenty. Signorina Octavo swooped down at the object resting on the desk like a hawk swooping down on a field mouse, snatching the stone knife in her right hand. She was still moving as Flag recovered, her tall body twisting as she jumped back to the window.
“Look out, Professor!” Barnaby B. Barnaby called from his hiding place behind the desk. “That incorrigible Italian ingenue is escaping. And she’s got our knife!”
Octavo leaped once more through the shattered window, an angry snarl marring her flawless features. She had the ancient artifact, but she had lost one of her precious Beretta pistols during the scuffle. Landing on the tarmac beyond the broken window, Demy Octavo took off at a run, the heels of her Italian leather boots clip-clopping against the ground as she made her way past the administration block.
“Where’s she goin’, Chief?” Little Ant asked as he watched the woman hurry away.
Instantaneously, Flag recalled the layout of the naval base. “She’s heading toward the main dock of the base!” he exclaimed. “Signorina Octavo is either planning to steal a boat…or my plane. Come on, let’s go.” As he said those final words, Flag was at the door to the office, running out into the corridor at a fast clip.
Outside, Demy Octavo had already reached the long airstrip where Flag has landed his experimental aircraft less than an hour before. She was as graceful as a gazelle as her arms pumped, and her long legs strove forward, the ancient knife clutched firmly in her right hand.
Two sailors were refueling Flag’s curious air vehicle as Octavo appeared from around the side of the two-story administration building. Nearby, another group of sailors—eight in all—were busy at work refitting a one-man submarine. The sub was still in the testing stages, the parts laid out along the concrete skirt beside the airstrip. All of the naval personnel looked up at the sound of running feet, and were surprised and baffled when they saw the striking form of the Italian special agent sprinting toward them.
Behind Octavo, the door to the administration block crashed open and Professor Flag came running out with his two mismatched partners hot on his heels. “Stop that woman!” Flag bellowed, his powerful voice needing no augmentation to be heard clear across the other side of the sunbaked airstrip.
One of the sailors who had been refueling Flag’s aircraft held up his hand, ordering Octavo to stop right where she was. In return, the cruel Italian doyenne brought up her right hand—the one that held the ancient stone knife—and swiped the blade across the unsuspecting sailor’s face.
With an agonized cry, the sailor fell to the smooth blacktop strip, a sudden crimson streak marring his youthful features.
Although they were rare, there were times when Abraham Flag regretted his policy of never carrying a gun. As he watched that brave sailor fall to his knees, the young man’s face a ruined mosaic of pouring blood, he felt that pang of regret once more. Despite Flag’s years training his body to an incredible level of physical fitness, Octavo had had too much of a head start and Flag’s own actions had not been fast enough. Now the young lad would wear that hideous scar for the rest of his life, evidence of the coldhearted cruelty of Mussolini’s fascist desires. Armed with the swift justice of a bullet, Flag might have halted Octavo in her tracks, wounded or killed her before she could cause any further damage.
As regrets darkened Abraham Flag’s mind, Demy Octavo drew her second Beretta handgun from its holster and began to wave it at the shocked sailors standing along the airstrip.
“Everybody keep back,” she warned, her voice as harsh as the ugly punishment she had just doled out to the sailor.
Showing their hands, the sailors backed away, their eyes fixed on the muzzle of that lethal handgun. But Abraham Flag’s eyes had been drawn elsewhere. Instead of stopping, he drove himself harder, running at full speed to catch up to the Italian infiltrator, outpacing his companions with his huge strides.
Still holding the sailors at bay with her silver-handled Beretta, Demy Octavo turned at the sound of Flag’s running feet. “Stop right where you are, Professor,” she ordered, “or their blood will be on your hands.”
As if to prove the seriousness of her threat, Octavo pulled the trigger, and a bullet spit from her gun, spearing through the air over the heads of the wary sailors.
Now twenty feet from Octavo, Flag stopped, his eyes fixed on the scene before him. “Demy, no!” Flag cried, and it seemed that there was the slightest trace of fear in the great man’s voice. “Stop!”
Octavo laughed, a vicious, ugly sound from such a beautiful face. “I’ll be leaving now, Professor, and no one will dare stop me,” she assured him, taking a step toward his waiting aircraft.
Abraham Flag fixed the woman with his stare, his incredible amethyst eyes exerting an almost hypnotic power. “Please, Demy,” he said, his voice calm once more. “Look at the knife.”
Suspicious of a trick, Demy Octavo glanced at the stone knife in her hand. Its strange, dark surface rippled with sunlight, and yet the glow seemed somehow unnatural, as though it didn’t really belong. Across from Octavo, still kneeling on the airstrip with his bloody face in his hands, the wounded sailor was clearly going into shock. But there was something else about him, something different. From beneath the sailor’s hands, Octavo saw that selfsame glow, tinged with red and pulsing like something organic. As the man lowered his hands, he revealed a rent in his face that was so unnatural as to defy description.
Flag had sensed as much as seen the nightmarish change to the young sailor’s face. It wasn’t simply a cut, the way a knife would cut. It seemed almost as though that ancient blade had burned him like acid, eating into the flesh and sinews that hid beneath his fragile skin. But there was more to it than that. The young man was wounded at a cellular level; the very fiber that made up his being had been damaged in a manner that utterly defied human comprehension.
For an awful moment, the name of the stone blade bubbled to the surface of Flag’s thoughts once more: Godkiller.
But it wasn’t just the young sailor’s face that had been altered. Demy Octavo was changing, too, as she clutched the knife in her elegant hand. She stood there looking at it, holding the blade in front of her as though transfixed.
“Demy,” Flag urged, his voice firm, “Miss Octavo? Please, put down the knife.”
For a moment, Octavo did nothing. She just stood, as still as a statue, as the Pacific sun beat down on the thin black line of the naval airstrip. And then, in a movement that seemed eerily inhuman, her head turned and she looked at Abraham Flag with a fierce anger in her eyes. Those deep brown eyes seemed darker now, but that was not the most remarkable thing that struck Flag as he stared into the orbs; it was their whites. For their whites were no longer white at all—they had taken on a crimson aspect as the blood bubbled within them.
“Put the knife down, Demy,” Flag urged once again. “It’s not safe.”
In response, Demy Octavo’s lips pulled back in an animal’s sneer.
Chapter 6
Early twenty-third century
Laboratory of the Incredible, Antarctica
Seven armed troops came rushing from the corridor after Grant, and a moment later the clattering of feet from the far end of the vast laboratory area revealed more had been skulking in the distant shadows.
Kane and Brigid were already running, weaving between work surfaces covered with electrical coils, vacuum tubes, microscopes and a dense forest of other scientific equipment. As he ran, Kane tensed his wrist tendons and the Sin Eater shot into his grip. He could already feel the angry determination welling inside as a hail of bullets whipped past him and Brigid.
A little behind his colleagues, Grant leaped over a desk, sliding across it on his buttocks and back, blasting a burst of fire behind him from the muzzle of his own Sin Eater. His shots peppered the doorway around the corridor, felling two of the millennialists and driving the others to cover.
Smashing beakers and test tubes out of his way, Grant landed on the far side of the desk amid a rain of breaking glass. Righting himself, the huge ex-Mag turned this way and that, searching for Kane and Brigid as gunfire echoed all around him. He spotted his partners crouch-walking between two rows of worktables roughly twelve feet away.
“What happened?” Kane snapped as Grant caught his attention.
“What always happens,” Grant replied. “Somebody looked up at the wrong time.”
Kane stopped moving for a moment and peered over the desk he had crouched behind, looking across to the corridor. “We should have just ambushed them while we had the chance,” he chastised himself as he saw millennialist guards piling out of the exit there.
From the doorway to the corridor, someone shouted, “There’s three of them.”
A moment later, a cacophony of shots filled the air, shattering glass beakers and monitor screens on the work tops that he and his companions had taken refuge behind. The guards were followed a moment later by the dark-haired woman whom Kane had identified as Simona, striding through the open doorway, her high-heeled boots clattering against the hard floor with the pounding of a jackhammer. Kane saw her face properly for the first time, and not just the profile. It looked aristocratic, long with a pleasing curve to the chin. Kane noticed something else about it—something dark was marring the whole left-hand side of the woman’s face. Before he could ponder any further on this, the woman raised her voice, shouting instructions in an authoritative tone.
“Don’t damage anything,” she ordered. “The material in this laboratory could be invaluable to our cause.”
Invaluable was good, Kane thought. It gave them a chance to do more than dodge bullets. He switched on his Commtact and began to outline his plan, subvocalizing his instructions to Grant as he ushered Brigid toward the double-helix staircase at the far end of the vast laboratory room. “These ice rats have got us outgunned and outnumbered,” he said, “and it sounds like the only thing stopping them from shooting us where we stand is the equipment in this lab. Let’s use that to our advantage and get ourselves out of here while we still can.”
Brigid turned to Kane as they rushed through the lab. “You’re crazy,” she spit. “We can’t just leave—”
“Kane’s right,” Grant’s voice stated over their linked Commtacts. “I don’t much want to get shot in the head today, so let’s just get back to the Mantas and call this one a bust.”
“But the Annunaki blade—” Brigid began.
Kane silenced her with a look. “This isn’t the time,” he growled, and Brigid saw that steely determination in his gray-blue eyes.
As if in response, Brigid’s arm snapped up and she thrust the TP-9 handgun at Kane’s face. “Get down,” she yelled.
Kane didn’t stop to think. He was already dropping to the floor in a forward roll as Brigid’s semiautomatic weapon spit a burst of bullets where his head had been just a second before. Still rolling, Kane spun, tracking Brigid’s arc of fire with his own weapon. He saw three millennialist guards there, sprinting to keep pace with himself and his red-haired companion. One of the millennialists dropped as Brigid sprayed his head and torso with 9 mm bullets.
Fast runners, Kane thought with irritation as he righted himself and snapped off a quick burst from his crouching position on the shiny floor of the laboratory. The remaining Millennial Consortium men continued running, bearing down on Brigid as Kane’s bullets cut the air all about them. Several bullets clipped the guards, but only slowed them momentarily, their kinetic armor diffusing the impact of the blasts.
Then the two remaining guards were on Brigid, weaving past the worktables as they turned on her.
A little farther back, Grant was trading shots with another group of guards. The millennialists were wary, careful not to hit any of the potentially invaluable equipment in the lab. Grant used that to his advantage, peppering the lab with bullets and punishing any of his foes who broke cover.
The two millennialists who had chased down Brigid and Kane split up. Brigid fired another blast from her TP-9 at the nearer guard, but he rolled sideways just fractionally quicker than Brigid’s aim. A second later, the same guard sprung up from the work surface he had rolled behind, and his left leg whipped out in a snap kick. The guard’s foot slammed into Brigid’s stomach, and she flailed backward, a burst of fire from the TP-9 going wild, the bullets zipping into the air before disappearing with a staccato echo into the rafters of the vast room.
As Brigid recovered from that first, savage blow, the millennialist swung his right fist at her face, a small pistol clutched in his fingers blasting bullets through the air. Brigid stepped backward just quickly enough to avoid the shots, and, gun in hand, her foe’s fist whipped through the air just beside her.
Brigid’s reply was swift and deadly. Her right arm zipped up and her index finger locked on the trigger of the semiautomatic pistol she held, lacing her foe’s body with a stream of bullets that drew a continuous line from groin to face. The millennialist rocked backward with the bullets’ impacts as they smashed into his kinetic armor, and then he was toppling into the array of distillation equipment on a desk behind him. As blood spurted from his lips, the Millennial Consortium footman fell into the distillation tubes, smashing the fragile glass equipment to little more than a mosaic of shattered glass.
Just two desks over, Kane was having his own problems with another of the guardsmen. Kane’s initial observation had been spot-on—his opponent was a fast runner. So fast that Kane suspected he had some kind of augmentation under his baggy winter clothing—perhaps a cybernetic upgrade, something like one of the mechanical suits his field team had encountered in Greece just months before.
Through luck or skill, the millennialist remained on his feet as Kane’s Sin Eater spit bullets at him. Then, in a blur, the man lunged at Kane, leaving the ground in a jump that took him several feet into the air. There was no time for Kane to react as his opponent’s pointed right foot snapped out and drilled him in the side of the head.
For several seconds Kane’s head reeled, and he felt as though he was falling. Even as he recovered his wits, Kane received the guard’s follow-up blow—a brutal kick that caught him in the ribs, rolling him across the floor.
As Kane reeled from the blow, he squeezed his eyes shut and sought his focus, stilling his mind and ignoring the stab of pain in his side.
A flurry of movement, and the millennialist was lining up a spinning kick with Kane’s head as its ultimate destination. Instinctively, Kane sent his Sin Eater back to its holster and reached above him with both hands. His hands grasped that approaching foot, which seemed nothing more than a blur, grabbing the ankle and snapping it backward. The attacker shrieked as he toppled back, his trapped ankle acting as the fulcrum to his plunge. The millennialist struck the floor solidly with the back of his head, and Kane released his leg and scurried forward, scrambling over his foe’s fallen body.
Kane’s right fist pumped forward, smashing the millennialist across the face, caving his nose in a burst of blood. As the guard’s head reeled from Kane’s first blow, the powerful ex-Mag pulled his right arm back as though for another swing. As he did so, Kane unclenched his fist and commanded the Sin Eater back from where it had retreated in his wrist holster just seconds earlier.
His eyes blurred in double vision from Kane’s first, thunderclap blow, the Millennial Consortium guard saw Kane’s fist approach his face a second time and saw the hard, black shape of the pistol forming within it like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Then Kane’s hand seemed to flash in explosion as he unleashed the full extent of the Sin Eater’s unforgiving fury at his opponent’s head.
Kane leaped back from the bloodied corpse, turning to see how his partners were faring. Brigid came running toward him as her own foe lolled against the shattered distillation equipment. Behind her, Kane could see Grant scrambling between worktables as more of the millennialist soldiers spewed from the far corners of the stadium-sized laboratory.
“There could be a thousand treats on that hard drive,” Kane told Brigid through gritted teeth. “We can’t nab all of them. Now, let’s get up the stairs and make sure we’re alive long enough to grab the next one.”
Brigid continued running toward the staircase. She was annoyed, but she knew that Kane was right. Besides, there was every chance that Cerberus could acquire the blade from the Millennial Consortium at a later date—albeit at a high price. Reluctantly, Brigid led the way up the spiralling stairs toward the upper level. Kane scrambled after her, and a moment later Grant joined them as they hurried up the circling staircase.
“They’ve stopped shooting,” Grant said over the Commtact, relieved.
Kane peered over the high, icelike banister as he ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “But they are following,” he said.
“Guess they want to make sure we stay away,” Grant proposed as the Cerberus trio reached the top of the strange stairwell. “You know we could pick them off from up here,” he added, glancing back down at the scrambling figures who were fanning out across the lab, checking every area with grim efficiency.
Simona was bellowing fierce instructions, ordering her men to check everywhere to ensure that there were no other intruders in the buried laboratory.
Shaking his head, Kane jogged along the balcony toward the doorway of the trophy room. “Let’s just keep moving before we run into their backup,” he advised.
Ahead of Kane, Brigid was passing through the open doorway into the room at the apex of the buried Laboratory of the Incredible, heading back to the point through which the three of them had entered. As she moved into the trophy area, Kane’s words from just a moment before proved horribly prophetic. An arm snapped out from off to the side of the open doorway, grabbing Brigid around the throat and wrenching her off her feet before she knew what was happening. She swung the TP-9 pistol around and her finger jammed against the trigger, unleashing a spray of 9 mm, 158-gram subsonic bullets that sputtered around the brightly lit trophy room.
Kane bolted through the doorway after their companion, and saw Brigid move so swiftly to one side that he thought she had fallen.
“What the—?” Kane began as he heard the TP-9 spitting fire and saw Brigid being yanked backward, her heels sliding along the floor.
Brigid had been grabbed by a large man dressed in a thick coat with a fur lining, Kane saw. The man was over six feet tall, built like a grizzly bear and wearing a scarf and goggles that obscured his face. A Calico M-960 subgun hung from a strap over his shoulder. The long-barreled automatic rifle featured two handgrips for better control of the field of fire, and it was the preferred weapon of the Millennial Consortium. Kane took it for a sure sign that this man was with the other people they had encountered in the glacial fortress. And that could mean something else, too, Kane realized, his heart sinking—there may be even more millennialists just waiting to pounce on them.
TRAPPED IN THE huge man’s grasp, Brigid was struggling to find her footing, her boot heels scraping across the white floor as she was dragged backward away from the doorway. She finally unhooked her finger from the TP-9’s trigger, and the weapon went silent. She tried to gain purchase on the hard floor, but found that she was being pulled back so quickly that she couldn’t even regain her balance for a second.
Kane raised his Sin Eater, stilling his mind as he took aim at the man pulling his companion across the floor.
The huge millennialist dragged Brigid between the glass display cabinets of the room, swinging her this way and that, using her as a human shield to prevent Kane taking his shot. “Try it,” he growled, “and you’ll execute your girlfriend, chum.”
Kane held still, the Sin Eater tracking the man’s movements as he continued yanking Brigid to and fro.
“Now, why don’t you put your gun down,” the millennialist suggested, reaching for his swinging Calico subgun with his free hand.
“Better yet,” Kane snapped back, “why don’t you put my friend down and we’ll settle this like men.”
Just entering the doorway to the huge trophy hall, Grant’s voice came to Kane, urgency in its tone. “Kane, they’re coming up the stairs. Boxing us in.”
Kane’s eyes flicked around the room, taking in the curiosities that stood silent vigil in their glass boxes. Trinkets and tablets that glistened beneath the miraculous lighting from overhead: bones and stones; here a chunk of masonry shaped like a wing, there a frayed rope wrapped around itself in a knot as thick as a person’s torso.