Aetherial Annihilation (11 page)

One of them removed a ski mask and grinned. Others followed suit and began to speak, but I couldn't hear what they said over the background noise of the river and chirping crickets.

"They have a robot," I whispered.

Elyssa sucked in a breath. "I think they put a bomb inside the crater."

"They don't seem to be in a hurry to leave."

"Probably because they want to make sure it goes off." Her lips peeled back in a scowl. "Now we really do have to go down there."

"What about the robot?" Neither of us had weapons capable of destroying it, and it had just smoked an entire squad of soldiers in less than five minutes.

Elyssa looked frustrated. "Are you telling me you don't want to go down there now?"

"Oh, I want to go down there." My fists tightened. "They just murdered twenty people. I don't plan to let them get away with that."

"Agreed," Elyssa said. "Let's go."

We crawled down the slope until we met our first interloper at the fringe of light. Elyssa savagely twisted the man's head and lowered the corpse to the ground. We crept around the perimeter, taking out the mystery soldiers as we went.

At last it came down to the ten well-armed men standing around the impact zone and their robot.

A thin man with white scars on his cheeks said something in a foreign language to a bearded man. The other man answered and flicked his hand forward for the others to move out. A few seconds after they left the lit area, the other soldiers began shouting, presumably as they stumbled on the bodies of their former comrades.

The bearded man shouted an order and the survivors raced back into the lit area. He took out a phone and flicked his thumb across the screen. The robot extended its arms revealing wrist-mounted guns. Its torso rotated three-hundred and sixty degrees and its eyes glowed red, scanning the environs. I hoped our Nightingale armor would camouflage us.

Elyssa crept to my side. "I think we can take them out."

"Leave that bearded man and thin man alive," I told her. "I think they might be able to disarm the bomb."

"And the robot?"

"Use the enemies as meat shields until we can get the bearded man's phone."

She nodded then counted down from three with her fingers. When she hit zero, we blurred toward the soldiers. I slammed into two of them and knocked them out before the others could train their weapons on me, then held one in front of me as the robot spun my way. It held its fire, presumably because it recognized my human shield as a friendly.

Meanwhile, Elyssa attacked from behind. She whipped out her sai swords and slew three men before they could pull the triggers on their guns.

I threw the man I held right on top of the outstretched arms of the robot. The thin man took a shot. I juked right, twisted the gun from his grasp, and swept the bearded man's feet from beneath him.

The robot's torso swung around following me, but still didn't fire. "Error, error," it said over and over again.

The bearded man took out his phone. I kicked it from his grasp. Before I could retrieve it, the thin man surprised me with a quick martial arts demonstration. Thankfully, Elyssa had taught me well. I threw up an arm to ward off one attack, and leapt over a low kick. Then it was my turn. I went for a good old-fashioned karate chop. His forearm blocked me but couldn't withstand the brute force of my supernatural strength, and broke with a loud crack. He grunted as if he'd done nothing more than stub his toe, and I knew this dude was no pushover.

Even so, I pushed him over hard and he slammed to earth.

Elyssa appeared behind the bearded man, his phone in one hand. She flicked the screen and the robot slumped, dumping its cargo on the ground. Just as the bearded man climbed to his feet, she blurred to his side and pressed her sword to his throat. "Who do you work for?"

Her captive flicked a knife from beneath his sleeve. Elyssa gripped his wrist and twisted it hard, sending the knife to the ground.

The thin man leapt up and tried to roundhouse me. He was quick for a nom, but no match for supernatural reflexes. I grabbed his ankle and held up his leg, making him hop awkwardly on one foot.

"I can do this all night," I told him. "Who's your boss?"

When neither of them answered, I decided to get the bomb. I dragged Scars toward the crater. He clawed at the ground, shouting and squirming like an angry cat caught in a mouse trap. The man apparently knew when it was time to admit defeat and head for the hills, but he wasn't getting away from me.

I looked in the deep, bowl-shaped crater and saw a large screen with a timer counting down from eleven seconds.

My heart stopped beating for an instant and my stomach tried to buy a one-way ticket to Timbuktu.

Even running at top speed, we couldn't get out of here in time.

"No!" I shouted, turned, and grabbed Elyssa's hand. "We only have ten seconds! Run!"

She didn't even pause to question me. We blurred through the woods, but dodging trees and other obstacles made top speed impossible. The explosion in Thailand had traveled nearly half a mile. I made the mistake of glancing back to see if an explosion was following us and ran into a sapling. It smacked me in the face and sucker-punched me in the groin.

My armor absorbed most of the shock, but it was enough to send me reeling.

The countdown in my head hit zero.

Elyssa jerked me off the ground. I stared back at the impact zone for a moment.

"No boom?" I said.

Elyssa frowned. "No boom." She looked at me. "Are you sure that's a bomb?"

"Well, it looks like a bomb." I offered her a sheepish grin. "I guess we need to round up our prisoners again." I listened and heard rustling leaves to our right. With our night vision and super speed, we nabbed our quarry in a couple of minutes and dragged them back to the crater.

The device still sat inside, but now I realized the screen on the outside of it was running some sort of calculations and displayed a drawing of the meteor and the impact crater.

Elyssa bound Beard and Scars. "Who do you work for?"

"I don't see any markings on this computer," I told her. "It seems to be mapping the crystoid."

"Do you hear that?" Elyssa said.

I listened and heard a faint vibration. I located Beard's phone on the ground. He had one missed call. Thankfully, he hadn't secured his phone with a pin number, so I went into his texts. Most of them were in foreign language, but some were in English.

The latest read:
Air support standing by for retrieval.

Another thread from the day the meteors hit cast more light on the identity of these people.
You're hired. Fifty thousand transferred to your account. The robot is on the way.

"Mercenaries." I showed the texts to Elyssa. "They planned to steal this thing."

"I wonder if their air support is a helicopter." She pointed at the screen of the computer in the crater as it illustrated the crystalline tendrils anchoring the meteor to the ground. "Look at all those roots. There's no way they could lift it out with a chopper."

"Holy crap." According to the depth graph on the screen, the roots had drilled nearly a hundred feet down. We watched for a few more minutes, but the image didn't change. "It must be done."

"We're taking this computer with us." Elyssa hopped into the wide bowl of the crater and grabbed the box from its position near the meteor. "We could probably use it to figure out how to move one of these things."

"We will find you," Scars said in broken English. "Kill you."

I jerked him to his feet. "Who wants this meteor?"

"Don't know," Beard said. "Hired independent."

"How did you plan to get it out of here?" Elyssa asked.

"Chopper," he replied.

"Yes, but it's anchored to the ground. A chopper couldn't lift it."

He bared his teeth. "Robot help."

"Where did you get the robot?" It looked advanced, but could have been built by noms.

Scars scowled and spat at me. "I kill you."

Elyssa forbid me from using a squirrel, but she hadn't said anything about homicidal maniacs. "We're going to conduct a little experiment." I untied Scars then tossed him into the crater. He tumbled across the rough crater floor and thumped against the meteor. He rolled to his knees and grabbed one of the crystal shards to pull himself up.

He glared daggers and me, but appeared otherwise unharmed by contact with the meteor. I was just about to announce the findings to my impromptu investigation when the man's back arched and a ragged moan tore from his throat. His eyes glowed and crackled with energy. His body swelled like a balloon.

Scars released the meteor and turned toward us. He lowered his head and bellowed like a bull, spewing gouts of energy from his mouth and nose. Scars charged. He leapt from the crater and landed next to Beard. The other man shouted desperately in his mother tongue. Scars jerked him off the ground and held him up. He opened his mouth and made an awful sucking sound.

Beard screamed. His eyeballs popped from his head, and his tongue swelled and turned purple. Brilliant arcs of energy poured from Scars and into him. Beard thrashed like a wildcat and went abruptly still. Scars dropped him on the ground and for a moment, I thought the other man was dead. Then Beard rose to his feet, eyes burning with the sickly yellow light of malaether.

"Houston, we have a problem." I raised an arm and fired half a dozen lancer darts at Scars and Beard. They didn't even flinch.

Elyssa scooped one of the rifles from the ground and opened fire. Beard's jaw unhinged and his mouth dropped open. A beam of yellow energy crackled toward me. I leapt from the path just in time. The tree behind me wasn't so lucky. The trunk splintered and the tree toppled. Elyssa fired until the clip ran empty. Beard and Scars jerked and shook from the impact, but didn't go down.

Scars fired a torrent of malaether at Elyssa. She ducked, rolled, and grabbed another rifle from the ground. I reached for a rifle, but Beard flashed toward me. Before I could react, he grabbed my throat and held me off the ground. A nauseating feeling ran through me and my eyes started to burn. I was about to become a malaether zombie.

"Remind me to never ever experiment on anything ever again!" I shouted.

Energy coalesced inside Beard's mouth. My feet couldn't touch the ground so I used his chest to gain leverage. I ran up his body, twisted hard to the side. For a moment, I thought my neck was going to break. Beard's fingers gave out first with a series of loud cracks. I dropped to the ground. Rising from one knee, I delivered a jaw-shattering dragon uppercut.

Beard flew about ten feet into the air and landed with a loud thud. Before he could recover, I dashed up behind him and put him in a headlock. I noticed blood pouring from numerous bullet wounds in his chest, and a bloody hole in his skull. The man was no longer alive and yet his body still fought on.

He might possess incredible strength, but his body wasn't made to contain it. I'd seen a lot of awful things during the war. I'd caused my fair share of carnage. Even so, I felt sick to my stomach fighting this new abomination. I jerked ferociously on his head and pulled it off. Beard's body went into violent spasms. I hurled the still-glowing head at a tree. The skull shattered and a cloud of malaether exploded. Elyssa, meanwhile, held Scars face down on the ground while she hogtied him with diamond fiber. Despite his newfound strength, he couldn't break free.

She unsheathed a machete from one of the nearby bodies and hacked off his head. I grabbed Scars's head by its hair and sent it to the same fate as Beard's. The bodies flailed about, struggling slower and slower until they twitched their last.

I stared with horror at the corpses. "Thank god we didn't have to fight an army of malaether squirrels."

"I don't understand." Elyssa looked toward the crater. "How could aether control a body like that?"

"I think it was malaether, judging from the color." Malformed aether usually had a nasty color to it. "As for how it turned them into zombies, I have no idea."

"It's almost like the meteor has protective spells or something."

I nodded. "I wouldn't doubt it. It certainly has all the aether it needs to power spells."

"We can't be the first people to discover this." Elyssa waved a hand toward the rest of the world. "What if someone starts an epidemic?"

The meteors hadn't been here for long, but curiosity would no doubt kill a lot of cats in the coming days. Someone somewhere had probably touched a crystoid or tried to destroy it. Either way, the casualties would be staggering if it happened in the right place.

Elyssa dropped to the ground and buried her face in her hands. She blew out a long breath and looked up at me. "How are we going to beat this, Justin?"

I sat down across from her and shook my head. "We can't destroy them, we can't touch them, we can't move them." I didn't even know what to do next. How long could Eden hold out with her aether being drained?

Ley worms—earth dragons—were in charge of distributing the aether through the realm, though I didn't know precisely how they did it. I wondered if they could survive without aether.

"We need to check on the dragons and see if they can help us figure this out," I said.

Hope sparked in Elyssa's eyes. "You think Altash and Lulu can help?"

I held out a hand and pulled her up. "I can't imagine these crystoids are pleasant for them. They also might know what they are."

"How are we supposed to get there?" Elyssa tapped a finger to her chin. "I guess we could take an arch to Bogota and take a plane from there, but I don't have a clue where we'd land."

El Dorado was one of the first cities conquered and rebuilt by the Seraphim when they'd originally crossed into to Eden thousands of years ago. The ancient city sat over a way station, but the Obsidian Arch had been destroyed long ago. "We might be able to use an omniarch. The way station sits over massive ley lines, so maybe there's enough charge to open a portal."

Shouts echoed from faraway to the north.

"I hope you're right." She picked up the cube computer. "We need to go. The soldiers probably heard all the gunfire."