Angel of Doom (10 page)

Grant winced. “I'm already getting a headache trying to figure that all out.”

“So when do we leave?” Sela asked.

“In the morning,” Brigid said. “I'll need time to work
on the translation. It is a frustrating blend of Babylonian and Etruscan, which is annoying as it's a prototypical language to Latin…and there are only ten thousand textual examples of the tongue that I can work from in this mix.”

“Only ten thousand,” Diana murmured.

“And most of which I have not read,” Brigid confessed. Even though she couldn't have been expected to know everything, she hated feeling underprepared for this mission, especially in regard to linguistic translation.

“Get some sleep at least,” Kane ordered. “And I mean you, too, Myrto. We're going to pay a visit to Vanth and Charun. Without the benefit of armored support.”

Aristotle frowned. “I'm sorry, my friends, but that sounds too dangerous.”

“To you, it sounds dangerous,” Grant interrupted. “To us, it's another day at the office.”

Brigid Baptiste made her way to the quarters she was sharing with Sela Sinclair and Domi. The Mount Olympus barracks were full, so the accommodation of an individual room for each of the Cerberus envoys was an unlikely thing. The other two Cerberus Away Team women had agreed to share their quarters while Kane was stuck with the gigantic Grant and Edwards as his “dorm” partners.

“Still not walking good?” Domi asked.

Brigid had wrapped her sprained ankle underneath the leg and boot of her shadow suit. It had been all right for the start of the day, but as the time stretched later, the ache grew and grew.

“It's just slowing me down a little,” Brigid returned.

The little albino slowed her pace to match Brigid's, then let the taller woman drape an arm over her shoulders. Brigid appreciated Domi's tightly muscled arm supporting the small of her back. Sinclair dropped back and lent her shoulder for the other side.

“Honestly,” Brigid said. “I'm not a cripple.”

“We're a team,” Sinclair told her. “We watch out for each other.”

Brigid smiled. “Thank you.”

“Besides, you interrupted workout,” Domi added.

Brigid looked to the ruby-eyed girl, a frown turning the corners of her mouth down. “Are you saying carting me around is a workout?”

“It's not like toting Grant around, but…” Sinclair piped in.

“And it's a big butt.” Domi giggled.

Brigid wrinkled her nose.

“Just kidding, girlfriend,” Sinclair said.

“I know you are,” Brigid replied with more than a little indignity. “But you two jokers wouldn't be having as much fun if I took it in stride.”

With that, Brigid lifted both feet off the ground with a grin and Sinclair and Domi let out gleeful yelps as they were suddenly off balance. Before anyone fell, though, she put her feet back down, wincing as that action only aggravated things more, which only added to Brigid's laughter, this time at herself for being so silly that she ended up hurting even worse.

The three of them reached their quarters and Domi and Sinclair helped Brigid onto her cot. It had been a long day of preparations and briefings, so getting some rest would be good for all of them. Tomorrow would be a huge day and there was no telling what Charun and Vanth were truly up to.

Brigid was glad for the sheer comfort of the shadow suits. Their body-conforming nature and environmental adaptations made them quite easy to sleep in without need of a cover, so she merely stretched out on her cot's mattress. There was a stretch and a tentative pivot of her foot on the other end of her sore ankle. She hadn't caused serious harm to it with her horseplay, so once that was done, she closed her eyes.

Even as she did so, she was only resting some of her brilliant brain. The other part was still working, separating and attempting to translate the individual syllables of the ancient song. Brigid imagined herself sitting in an empty room, the object of her translation separated onto different note cards that she could arrange appropriately.

There were great segments of this blasphemous-feeling chant that had grammatical syntax that made German seem blunt and straightforward. Merely moving words and syllables seemed to alter the chant dramatically. All the while, she kept herself on guard against any hidden message that could manifest itself as an “information virus” that would threaten her.

In her barren, mentally constructed study, she held one of the cards, and thought back to Zaragoza. There, too, had been a hellish song, which had stolen lives, literally. This had been done mathematically, and as soon as she thought of that, she mentally summoned a chalkboard with Ereshkigal's song upon it.

That had been an easier translation simply due to the fact that it had been spoken in a living language, not one dead, without the option of a still-extant speaker providing a verbal context. Brigid had thought about speaking the song that Smaragda had heard and allowing the Commtact and its built-in translation matrix to take care of any understanding.

This one was different, though. Ereshkigal sang her call of suicide in Spanish.

This language was a dead and gone variant of Italian, much more primitive, and seeded with words originating on lips not too different than those of the Annunaki overlords who had been the origin of far too many threats to the world.

Brigid turned to the shadowy tune of Ereshkigal, then back to the song of Vanth and Charun. The ancient goddess who tormented Zaragoza ferried her tune of reanimation on temple bells, urging life to the townspeople who had taken her song to heart and killed themselves. The shambling walkers were of a different flavor than the Olympian troops who carried a lifeless, dead-eyed pallor. Those were actual revenants, horrors that should
have been buried or returned to the cycle of death and life being eaten by scavengers.

This instance was the theft of some form of energy, rendering them as operatives for the two winged horrors. Brigid didn't want to speculate on the potential of a human soul as that kind of power source, but as she ticked down through the possibilities, eliminating all the possibles, no matter how improbable, she found herself coming to the conclusion that it was the theft of just such a higher mental function that was at fault. And why preserve the bodies?

Charun and Vanth both showed the capability to overwhelm even the armed Mantas, as well as other phenomenal feats. The very act of using her torch as a kind of threshold/interphaser proved to be more than sufficient as a weapon, to the point where she'd been capable of transporting a dozen humans and two giant humanoid robots.

Brigid looked closer at the monitor, studying how the Gear Skeletons were not summoned back to the torch; they were too busy carrying the Manta overland, back toward the west. This momentarily confused her, when she realized that the Manta wasn't connected to a living being, much like the piloted oversize battle suits. The amputee pilots were literally plugged into the powerful robots by means of a cybernetic access point on their spine. As much as the Olympian soldiers were able to be transported along with their weapons and armor, there must have been some form of “life prerequisite.”

Or, simply, it could have been that there was an actual limit to how much the torch could pick up and deposit. Occam's razor. Vanth had come to retrieve Charun's hammer, and possibly take the human pilot who'd disarmed her partner. That was why there was a limit of how many soldiers and Gear Skeletons were transported in.

“So you do have limits,” Brigid mused, quickly adding up the combined weight of the deposited Olympian troops,
the two skeletons and the Manta. “And on closer examination, she decided that she couldn't ferry the weight of the Manta. However, rather than destroy the ship, she's using it as bait for the pilot and his companions…namely us.”

Brigid rubbed her chin as she watched the two beings. They weren't moving their lips and neither of them had spoken aloud to be heard on the audio pickups in the shadow suit hoods. And yet they did seem to have a shorthand; gestures and facial expressions that told each other as much as any conversation could. Brigid had seen similar relationships, between Kane and Grant, primarily, and it was slowly growing among the members of CAT Beta.

It was also an element of her friendship with Kane. These two had been together, seemingly forever. And yet, if they had been around for so long, what would have been the impetus for their suddenly expanding their influence?

Of course, there had been the war with the Hydrae and Danton that kept New Olympus from hearing about the winged “soul thieves.” With that kind of distraction, there could have been endless wars going on on the Italian peninsula, and the besieged Olympians wouldn't have heard a clue. Only recent expansion of trade and exploration allowed them the luxury of exploring further than their doorstep.

Brigid went back and played the testimony she received from Diana and Aristotle. In her memory construct, she put down a small room, the conference table where the Olympian regents spoke with her.

She knelt to look into the room, to play back the scene…and something gave her pause. She looked around at the note cards strewed across her work area. Even as she was multitasking mentally, there was an anomaly, an oddity that was itching in her mind.

Brigid cleared the distractions, returning her white room to its clean state. It was a symbolic means of cleansing
her mind of everything competing for her attention, and it usually worked.

Not now.

The mental note cards, for all their existence at the whim of her will, had not disappeared.

“Dammit,” Brigid murmured. “There is much more psycho in these psychopomps than I anticipated. Even Smaragda's testimony has a dangerous weight to them.”

The note cards began to swirl around, building into a twisting dust devil. Though this was all occurring in Brigid's mind's eye, she
felt
the pressure of the winds building. She pursed her lips tightly and immediately summoned a brick wall between herself and the rising storm.

“You're in my mind, whoever you are,” Brigid announced. “And you walk here at your peril, intruder!”

The note cards rattled against the wall she'd constructed out of her will and she then heard a hiss she wasn't quite certain of. Within moments, however, she saw sharp corners slicing through the wall, trying to dig deeper, to penetrate the barrier of her mental defenses.

Brigid slammed another wall against the other, buying herself a moment more. In the same instance she armored up, summoning a variant of Kane's and Grant's old Magistrate armor, a carapace that in the real world was composed of black polycarbonate materials and Kevlar, rendering her two partners immune to all small arms. This one, however, was cast in the same shade of emerald as her eyes, a small amount of narcissistic affectation on her part.

Within a few moments the second wall was sliced to ribbons by the active, dangerous song of Vanth and Charun.

Brigid held her ground, summoning her own version of a Sin Eater.

This one, however, was not a mere gun. This was a
focus of her personal will, a twin-barreled beast that bracketed her right hand like the claws of a crab.

The notes stopped swirling, the tornado of force that made them up fading and settling into a shape. It was a winged woman, tall and beautiful, with flowing hair.

It was Vanth, and she did not have her torch. But she did possess her bow.

“Pitiful human.” Vanth spoke. “You have let me in, and that is your doom.”

Brigid smirked. “I've had worse between my ears, lady.”

In a flicker of motion Vanth raised her bow and opened fire with it, arrows spitting out as if she was firing a machine gun. Had Brigid not steeled herself behind the armor of her will, it would have proved impressive, but even as she stood her ground, she felt the pricks of dozens of impacts. The archivist swept the ends of the arrows, snapping shafts off her armor. A moment of concentration and the winged huntress's arrowheads popped from her shell, clattering to the ground.

“You resist,” Vanth mused.

“Because I know what you are. I know what these attacks are. And having looked behind your curtain…”

Brigid swept up her double-barreled Sin Eater, spitting out molten yellow spears of flame that lashed toward Vanth. The goddess let out a wail of surprise, folding her wings around herself as Brigid's mental counterattack splashed against her feathered shields.

Brigid could feel the blazing heat of her own onslaught and watched as feathers fluttered away, burning and flickering out of existence on the battleground of her mind.

Brigid opened fire again, slashing another searing swath of destruction. Vanth spread her wings and flew at the last moment before the Cerberus warrior's beams
struck. Vanth shot up like a rocket, accelerating away from Brigid.

“No. This is not how we play this game,” Brigid growled. She gave a moment of concentration and then in the next instant she was parallel to Vanth, who hurtled through the white void.

Vanth's face flashed from grinning victory to shock and surprise. “What?”

“I've spent a lot of time alone in my mind. I know everything inside it. It is large enough to encompass a universe, but there is nowhere that any intruding program, no mathematical trick of thought, can escape my focus,” Brigid told the envoy of the goddess. “You are inside my brain and I am
everywhere
!”

With that, Brigid cut loose once more. This time Vanth was unable to bring her wings up to shield herself, nor could she swerve. The twin-barreled burst of energy slammed into Vanth's near-naked chest, the heat of the Earth's own blood searing and charring flesh. Instead of the stench of human flesh, however, it was odd, twisted, alien. It did not matter, for Brigid's take on the Sin Eater held a bottomless supply of the blazing energy of her will. She held down the trigger, blocking out the huntress's screams of pain and the snap-pop of roasting flesh and fatty tissues.