Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) (34 page)

55

The worst part was the smell. After breathing sulfuric acid fumes for more than an hour, Pierce thought the suit’s oxygen supply would be a welcome relief, but as soon as the seals were clamped down and the O2 began to flow, he realized that there were worse smells in the world. It was the TALOS suit itself he realized, or more likely, its former occupant. A foul odor, like antiseptic ointment and cleaning fluid mixed with the smell of illness and decay, clung to the interior surfaces like a fungus growing on the inside of the helmet.

Probably just my imagination
, he told himself.

The controls were surprisingly intuitive. Once he was strapped in, he needed only to move his arms and legs as he normally would, and the suit responded. The first few steps reminded him of walking in ski boots. After that, he could almost forget that he was encased in titanium armor.

A heads-up display projected on the inside of the visor showed battery charge, oxygen pressure and a few other status indicators that were probably important to know, but there had not been time for Dourado to go over the operator’s manual with him. The meters were all in the yellow. “You have half an hour of battery life remaining,” Dourado told him.

“Augustina and Fiona probably don’t have that long,” he replied. “It’s more than enough.”

A fingertip sensor in the suit’s gauntlets allowed him to toggle on the weapons systems. The grenade launcher on the right arm, and a plasma torch on the left. Pierce doubted he would need them. The suit itself was his best weapon.

He approached the wall cautiously, unsure what he would encounter when he touched its surface, but there was no resistance, no sense of making contact.

He turned and glanced back at Lazarus. The big man was cautiously approaching the still motionless form of Carter. Pierce regretted that there was nothing he could do to help either of them, but time was running out.

He also spotted Tyndareus. The old man hadn’t gone far from the spot where Pierce had dropped him after manually disengaging the clamps that held the TALOS suit together. With his gnarled limbs and liver-spotted bald head, he looked like Gollum from
The Hobbit
. Gollum in a business suit, crawling across the scorching hot earth.

It was a better fate than Auschwitz’s ‘Angel of Death’ deserved.

“Cintia, I’ll probably lose radio contact in a second or two. If you don’t hear from me in half an hour…” He realized he didn’t have a contingency.

“You’ll make it, Dr. Pierce.”

“Thanks. And from now on, you can just call me George.”

“I’ll start doing that when you get back. Good luck.”

He took a step forward and was plunged into darkness. The high-intensity spotlights mounted to either side of the visor might as well have been covered with mud for all the good they did. The intangible wall through which he was passing was not like fog or dust. It didn’t reflect light. Instead it seemed to absorb it. He took another step and another, and then he could see again. He found himself in a wide passage, like an immense wormhole bored in the blazing hot rock, sloping away into the depths of the Earth.

The light revealed other details. A litter of what looked like bone fragments, globs of matted hair or fur and black nodules the size of softballs were scattered everywhere.

Droppings
, Pierce realized.
Bear-elk scat
.

That stopped him. The creature was here, somewhere. It had retreated to its lair, maybe to lick its wounds, maybe to die in the darkness, but it was between Pierce and the people he loved. Maybe he would need the weapons after all.

He tried to creep down the passage, but stealth was not one of the suit’s selling points. No matter how carefully he lowered his feet, his steps sounded like an anvil dropping on concrete.

Abandoning the sneaky approach, he set out at a jog, pounding down the passage, each footfall ringing through the suit like a pile-driver impact. He kicked through more litter, pulverizing fragments of bone and discarded antlers.

The part of him that was both a scientist and a scholar of mythology, regretted that there was not time to make a more thorough examination. Hercules had walked here once, fought another guardian of the Underworld gates. Not a mythological monster with supernatural abilities living in some kind of netherworld, where the laws of physics did not apply, but a hybrid animal living in a strange closed ecosystem. The bear-elk was evidently the latest creature to occupy that niche, but how did it survive? What did it eat? Were there others like it down here?

He would probably never get the answer to those questions. The job of the Herculean Society was to make sure that such mysteries remained unsolved. When he got Gallo and Fiona to safety, he would have to take steps to ensure that no one ever returned.

The passage opened into a vast cavern with walls that burned like magma. As Pierce swept the chamber with his headlamp, he spotted movement off to the left and froze when the reflected light showed a pair of glowing green eyes.

The bear-elk.

The creature remained perfectly still, a deer in the headlights. A deer with the temper of a territorial grizzly bear. It could, if it chose to, stomp him into oblivion…or peel open the suit like a sardine can. Yet, it did not move. Perhaps it remembered its previous encounter with TALOS. The animal was curled up, protecting its wounds. Pierce did not doubt that the grenade had done some serious damage—burns, broken bones, perhaps internal injuries as well.

“You made it.”

The voice—Kenner’s voice—almost made Pierce jump, which might have proved either comical or disastrous given the circumstances. Pierce turned slowly and searched for the source. He found Kenner a moment later, near the center of the cavern, with one hand holding a flashlight aimed back in Pierce’s direction. The other hand was gripping Fiona’s arm.

She stared dully into the darkness, conscious but limp in his grasp, her legs folded up beneath her, unable to support her own weight any longer. Pierce recognized the signs of severe dehydration and diabetic ketoacidosis, no doubt exacerbated by the extreme heat. Gallo stood nearby, looking defeated.

“As promised,
Herr Doktor
,” Kenner went on. “The Well of Monsters.”

He thinks I’m Tyndareus.

Kenner’s tone was triumphant but grudging. He hadn’t been prepared to share his discovery, but he knew better than to challenge his benefactor. Without replying, Pierce backed away from the bear-elk before turning to join the others. He was still twenty feet away when his headlamps revealed Echidna.

In Greek mythology, Echidna was described as both a serpentine creature and a beautiful woman. From what he knew of Kenner’s quest and his own experience with how the mythology of Hercules’s labors had been distorted over the millennia, Pierce had assumed that Echidna would be some kind of naturally occurring phenomenon: a pool of chemicals or a bubbling pot of primordial soup.

It was none of those things, and yet in a way, it was all of them.

The cavern was split by a wide fissure—thirty or forty feet across and at least a hundred feet long—filled to the brim with what looked like molten stone. In reality, it was a transparent liquid—probably a solution of water and dissolved minerals—reflecting the glowing red of the chamber’s walls. Dotting its surface but mostly concentrated at the edges, were clumps of what looked like vegetation. They resembled clusters of water lilies floating on the surface of a pond, except these were a coal black. They were plants of some kind, adapted to using thermal and chemical energy instead of sunlight. They probably formed the base of the underground food chain, but as strange as they were, the floating organisms were the least interesting thing in the pool.

Just below the surface, filling the bottom of the fissure, was Echidna.

It was alive, no question about that, but whether it was plant, animal or other, was a question that only Felice Carter might have been able to answer. It looked like an enormous flower, a many-petaled orchid, or perhaps a gigantic upside down jellyfish. Hundreds of snake-like tendrils reached up like fingers, not quite breaking the surface, while directly below, the main body was covered with oblong globules that resembled bunches of grapes. There was movement beneath the faintly translucent membranes covering the globes, the pulsing of something alive.

Eggs
, Pierce thought.
Like an octopus’s garden
.

Scattered around the eggs, atop the amorphous creature’s body, were chunks of debris. Pierce sensed that he was close to grasping the secret of Echidna, but such knowledge would serve no purpose other than to satisfy his curiosity. He tore his gaze away from the strangely beautiful monster and returned his attention to the more immediate problem.

He considered sustaining the ruse that he was Tyndareus so he could get Kenner’s cooperation, but he would be found out as soon as he spoke.
Better to stick with the truth
, he decided.

“Liam, it’s me. George.”

At the sound of his voice, Gallo looked up, a flicker of hope in her eyes. Fiona perked up, too, but the reaction made her dire condition all the more apparent.

Kenner was taken aback, but only for a moment. “George? Well, I’ll be damned. You are a lot more resourceful than I ever gave you credit for. No wonder Augustina fancies you.”

Pierce ignored the comment. “Liam, I don’t have a clue where your loyalties lie, but we need to get out of here. All of us.”

“Leave? George, do you
see
this?” He waved at the creature in the pool.

“We can come back,” Pierce lied. “But it’s not safe to stay here. The heat is going to cook you alive.”

Kenner’s eyes darted back and forth as he considered this. “You’re right, of course.” Then his gaze settled on Pierce. “But not you. That suit you’re wearing. I’ll wager it protects you.”

“That doesn’t matter. There’s only one suit. And we’re not alone in here.”

“You mean the creature? Cerberus or whatever it is that’s taken its place. I thought I heard something crawling around back there. But it’s beaten. And even if it tried to attack, the suit has weapons, doesn’t it?”

“Liam, this is insane.”

Kenner shook his head. “I don’t think so. Give me the suit, George.” He jerked Fiona up and then thrust her toward the fissure.

“No!”

Pierce reacted instantly, taking a step forward, reaching out as if to snatch her back, but he wasn’t close enough. Gallo let out a shriek of surprise, but she was too far away. In the pool below, Echidna’s tendrils quivered, stretching upward, as if in anticipation of a meal. Kenner, however, did not let go of Fiona. He just held her there, poised above the water’s surface.

“Give me the suit,” he repeated. “Or she goes in.”

There was a rustling sound behind Pierce as the shouts roused the bear-elk.

“Hurry, George,” Kenner urged. His voice was frenetic, adrenaline superseding reason.

Pierce glanced back and saw the beast standing on all fours, blocking the passage back to the surface with its bulk. He tapped the sensor with a fingertip, and the weapons menu appeared on the HUD. “Get her away from there. I can deal with that thing, but you need to move away. Find some cover.”

“That’s not going to happen. Take the suit off, and I’ll let the three of you go. Do it now.”

The creature took a tentative step, shoulder muscles bunching, as if preparing to spring.

“Damn it, Liam. There’s no time for this.”

“I’ll drop her! I swear to God, I’ll do it.”

“No! Wait.” Pierce swung his attention back to Kenner. Fiona hung from his outstretched arm like the bait in a snare. She was trembling…no, she was saying something. Mumbling, too faintly for Pierce to hear. Praying? “I’m taking it off, Liam. Just pull her back.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but quickly switched to the main menu and brought up the controls to disengage the seals. There was a hiss as the internal pressure equalized, then the scorching air of the cavern rushed in. The chest plate swung up and Pierce squirmed to get his head and arms out of the exoskeleton.

Fiona’s eyes lit up when she saw him, but her lips kept moving.

“Pull her back,” Pierce repeated. His voice, no longer amplified by the suit, sounded small in the dead air.

“Faster, George,” Kenner said.

Pierce struggled out of the suit and toppled forward, landing hard on the cavern floor. The impact awakened the pain of his injuries, but he scrambled up, reaching out to Fiona.

Satisfied with this victory, Kenner pulled Fiona back and sent her stumbling toward Pierce, and in the same motion, he leaped for the TALOS suit.

The bear-elk charged.

Pierce caught Fiona, hugging her close, but it was too late to escape. He pulled her down, covering her with his body. Gallo was there, too, huddling with them.

They would face the end together.

Kenner made it to the suit, but before he could even begin to figure out how to climb inside, a swipe of the creature’s massive forepaw sent it and him flying across the cavern. Both splashed into the pool and were instantly erased from sight. The light from the suit’s headlamps continued to shine, illuminating the waters from below, but the rest of the chamber was plunged into a ruddy darkness.