A stream of acid spittle came at one of the First Born, who vibrated out and left the viscous slime burning into the concrete wall. The four reptilians streaked forward with incredible speed upon the other three First Born. The energy blasters fired, missed, and blew the far wall to pieces as their targets went into slither mode across the floor. An elongated arm with a barb-covered mallet at the end of it swung within inches of Deathbringer’s faceplate. Deathbringer’s weapon destroyed the offending enemy. The fourth First Born ghosted back in a few feet away and blasted a second enemy into burning pieces. The reptilian commander sent a spear of acid flying at Deathbringer, who went to one knee the liquid passed over its left shoulder. Deathbringer fired but missed as the commander snaked aside. Then, as another First Born’s energy bolts blew the third reptilian apart, the commander camouflaged itself amid the rubble and vanished, leaving not a blip on the faceplate search grids.
The orders must be obeyed. Capture this specimen. High altitude tracker on station. Begin immediate deployment.
A shift of Deathbringer’s search grid showed their destination. It was a distance from where the four First Born of the Blessed Machine stood, but what was such a distance to an interstellar traveller who could enter and leave the fourth dimension at will? A mathematical picture of the specimen could be brought up, but that information was already burned into Deathbringer’s numeric code and the codes of the other soldiers. If the specimen moved during the time it would take to reach this destination, the tracker would maintain contact if it was not destroyed by enemy action, for the skycraft battleships fought even at the edge of this world’s atmosphere.
Deathbringer transmitted the coordinates and the path to the other soldiers. They took no notice of the headless body lying nearby, for that one had become a negative. They began to ghost out, one after the other. As Deathbringer began to vibrate into distortion a claw attached to a scaly and sinewy arm with a shoulder adorned by three spikes reached from the gray stones on the floor. It seized the ankle of Deathbringer’s left boot. Then the rest of the reptilian commander began to restore itself from the state of camouflage and rise up from the rubble, its facial hood flaring wide to show the same violent scarlet as the slitted pupils, its mouth opening to spew acid into the black faceplate.
Deathbringer knew two things that might be termed emotions: loyalty to the Blessed Machine and hatred of the enemy. In its complex mathematics, there was no room for anything else. Except, perhaps, an integer’s sliver of cruelty. Deathbringer fired its weapon at point-blank range, a single energy orb, and severed the left arm at the shoulder, thrusting the commander backward to the floor as a spool of acid flew into the air. The right arm was burned away by the next single burst. The legs were burned off one after the other, and the flesh of the reptilian commander’s scorched and squirming torso changed back and forth from the gray of the rubble stones to its yellow-and-black banding, the camouflage organ overcome with the chemicals of agony.
The black faceplate with its small red glyph of glory angled down at the tortured commander and drew in a numerical picture of the scene. Then, satisfied with its work, Deathbringer did not bring death but instead ghosted out.
A specimen had to be captured for the honor of the First Born, and for the triumph of the Blessed Machine.
Twenty-One.
“Let’s hear it,” said Major Fleming, his jaw set like a chunk of granite. “The truth.”
The mall’s maintenance room bristled with guns: automatic rifles, machine guns and pistols. The ashen-faced soldiers who held these weapons aimed them at two figures seated on metal folding chairs: Jefferson Jericho and Jack Vope. Ropes had been lashed around the prisoners, tying them together back-to-back under a harsh incandescent light. Standing out of the line of fire were Dave, Olivia, and Ethan, who had one blue eye and one silver with no discernible pupil. JayDee had come down on the elevator and stood leaning on his cane behind Olivia.
After the chaos was over, Ethan had gone into the bathroom to check out his silver eye in the mirror. He’d thought he would’ve been afraid to see it, but he was no longer afraid. Instead, he was simply fascinated. The feeling of power that had flowed through him during that encounter had been incredible…impossible for the part of him that was still a human boy to understand, but for the other part of him…whatever that was, and was going to be…an immense satisfaction at having been able to save human lives. There in the bathroom, with an armed guard still at his back, he had lifted up his t-shirt and seen that a new figure had appeared in the silver tattoo just above his heart. Now it read GUARD, with another symbol just beginning to come up from the dark slate.
He’d had no choice but to go to the major and tell him.
The Cyphers sent a recon probe and those weapons, because there’s a Gorgon here disguised as a man. I haven’t said anything because I can handle him. Do you believe that?
And the hard-assed major who thought he’d seen everything in this nightmarish war had said, Yes I do.
I’m sorry for not telling you, but I wanted to watch him. The man with him…Kushman…is a human, but he’s being protected by the Gorgons. I don’t know why, but I need to know. When you take these two men, I’ll need to be with you. The Gorgon is afraid of me, and so is the man.
Hell, the major had said, I’m afraid of you too.
You don’t have to be. My task is somewhere else, but as long as that Gorgon is here this place is in danger from the Cyphers. I should’ve expected that, but I’m thankful no one was hurt.
Except that…man who got burned up, said the major. What was that?
A Gorgon-engineered weapon. We should be glad for that, because those spiders were nearly too much for me.
Okay. Right. Well…how old did you say you were?
And here was the question, because Ethan knew whatever was in him was old. Whatever was in him, growing stronger and taking control of everything, was so ancient these runes on his chest might have been its most recent communication with the inhabitants of this world. What- ever it was, it knew the cosmic dust and dark matter that blew between the stars to seed the lifeless spheres of raw planets into new life; it knew how cold and remote could be the outer reaches of space whose distances and dimensions defied the minds of men to imagine, and it knew how ruthless these two enemies were, and how military men and women of Earth might wish to stop this war but it was the only entity who could, and it was not from around here.
I’m fifteen, going on way more than you can count, Ethan said, and the major asked no more questions.
“Waiting to hear something that makes sense,” Fleming said to the two figures tied together on chairs in the maintenance room. “Kushman? You want to say anything?”