Chapter 33
Serra do Norte, Brazil
It was a second that lasted for eternity.
Then the lush forest and familiar snaking river materialized in Kane’s windshield like a vision from a dream. Something else had changed, too, Kane realized as he felt the sun beating down on the Manta’s cockpit. He was home, and he hadn’t even realized how much he had missed it.
For a single perfect instant, Kane luxuriated in the feel of the sun on the craft’s wingtips, the sight of the foliage spread beneath him like a painter’s canvas.
“—ne buddy? Do you read me?” Grant’s voice was loud in his ear after all this time.
“I read, over,” Kane replied, engaging his Commtact, unable to hide the joy in his voice.
“I’m right behind you,” Grant explained. “What do we have?”
Kane turned back to business as he brought up the heads-up display and began scanning for the Titan suit. From what King Jack had said, Kane guessed it wouldn’t be hard to spot. What the heck does a planet-invasion device look like anyway?
Up ahead, black smoke was billowing into the air from a portion of the forest. Kane had the sinking feeling that that was where they would find their quarry.
* * *
O
N
THE
GROUND
, Sinclair called to Edwards as he scrambled away from the Titan, foliage burning all around him. “Edwards, we have more company. Up there.” She pointed.
Using what cover he could, Edwards halted and peered up into the sky. Beside Sinclair, Mariah Falk and Roy Cataman were doing the same, the latter peering through field glasses as an evergreen burned like a torch behind him. Edwards could see the two shapes swooping through the sky roughly a mile up and a little to the west, but it took him a moment to recognize them.
“Are those...? They’re Mantas!” Edwards cried. “Dammit! Either we’re in the middle of another Annunaki invasion or Kane and Grant just arrived to pull our fat out of the fire.”
“Literally,” Mariah added, trees and bushes burning all around her.
Sinclair looked at Edwards with alarm. “But which is it?” she asked.
Already, Edwards was engaging the subdermal implant of his Commtact, sending a query out. “Kane? Grant? Is that you up there, buddy?”
“I hear you, Edwards,” Kane’s voice responded an instant later. “Grant’s behind me. Where are you?”
“About a half mile from the river below you and heading east,” Edwards told him. “I got a field team out here—just follow the line of fire and you’ll see us. And we have us a huge problem—big fella, armored, fell out of the sky about six minutes ago. Looks kind of like if Satan had mated with a cyborg. You can’t miss him.”
Bitterroot Mountains
K
ANE
’
S
LAUGHTER
BURST
from the speaker at the comm desk as the conversation was relayed over an open frequency. “Hah! I guess not,” he said.
Around the operations room, everyone was smiling and cheering. Several people shook hands in congratulations while others hugged, patting one another on the back. Lakesh stood poised over the comm desk, listening to every word of the conversation as he watched the satellite footage being relayed live from Serra do Norte.
“Kane, this is Lakesh,” he began, adjusting the headset over his ear. “I need to know—are you all right?”
“I’m fine and Grant’s with me,” Kane said. “And when I last saw them, Baptiste and Domi were both still alive. No time to discuss right now—we’ve got a planet invasion to repel.”
Lakesh watched the Mantas as they tracked across the satellite image, two bronze darts swooping over the green. “Good luck, my friends,” he muttered. “Good luck.”
* * *
I
N
THE
SKIES
above Serra do Norte, Kane and Grant angled the unfamiliar Mantas toward the colossal figure they saw looming above the tree line. As they approached, their heads-up displays brought the thing’s head and torso into sharp focus where they poked over the tree cover as twin beams seared from the eyes to set great chunks of the forest alight.
Edwards’s description was pretty much on the money, Kane thought—with its sunset-colored armor and burning eyes, the Titan suit looked darn satanic, truth be told.
“Now,” Kane muttered, toggling switches on the dashboard, “let’s see what kind of armaments we have.”
A targeting reticle appeared over Kane’s heads-up, twin circles adjusting and focusing as he eyed the colossal Titan.
“Launching Sidewinder missile,” Kane said into the Commtact.
“Advised,” Grant acknowledged, drawing his Manta away from Kane’s before the missile launched to ensure he didn’t get caught up in its path.
The missile blasted—a sleek shaft of gold ribbed with green—from a tube beneath the Manta’s sloping right wing. It wasn’t a Sidewinder—those were the missiles that their own Mantas were armed with—but at that moment Kane didn’t have time to split hairs.
Cosmic Rift
T
HE
WARSHIPS
WAITED
in the sky above the Doom Furnace, casting shadows on the vast body of cooling water. Two figures swam across that water, angling toward the side.
Head down, Brigid almost hit the edge, she was moving so fast. Her head bobbed from the water at the very last instant and she grabbed the side, yanking herself up and out of the water without missing a beat. Wertham was six body lengths behind her now, hurrying toward her, arm over arm, through the clear water of the tank.
Brigid turned and ran across the adjoining catwalk, eyes flicking left and right as she sought a path back up to the parked steed she had arrived in. She had an idea now— desperate, but it might work. It had to work. Otherwise she was dead. Maybe they all were.
Brigid ran.
Serra do Norte, Brazil
K
ANE
’
S
MISSILE
COVERED
the distance between his Manta and the Titan in less than three seconds. Kane pulled up, bracing for impact as the missile detonated. There was a boom, and whatever was inside created a green explosion, like the film negative of a detonation.
When the blast cleared, Kane saw that the Titan armor looked unhurt, just a few wisps of white smoke trailed up from its chest where the missile had struck. The head turned, eyeing the Mantas with its sizzling orange gaze.
“Okay,” Kane said. “We may need to rethink this.”
To his starboard side, Grant was launching his own missile, patching through a warning via the Commtact as he did so. Kane watched Grant’s missile draw a smoking trail in the air as it hurried toward the Titan. But before the missile could impact, the colossal head turned and the heat beam zeroed in, obliterating the missile into a million fragments.
“We definitely need to rethink this,” Kane said as he pulled the Manta into a corkscrew turn, barreling past the Titan’s shoulder at incredible speed. The Titan reached for him, one mighty hand grasping at the slope-winged aircraft.
Cosmic Rift
B
RIGID
SCRAMBLED
UP
an enclosed stairwell, her boots barely touching each step as she hurried back to the surface. Up above, Wertham’s war fleet remained poised, darkening the rainbow sky like some insane mechanical construct, waiting for the final command to launch.
Brigid reached the top of the stairs and kept running, weaving between Gene-agers who stood dumbfounded as if caught in the path of an approaching hurricane. They had lost their impetus, Brigid guessed, though she had no time to fathom why. It seemed that somehow all of the Gene-agers had simply been placed on “pause,” posed as if in a photograph.
Behind Brigid, Wertham was just reaching the top of the stairwell, his emerald jumpsuit dark with damp where he had been dunked in the lakelike pool. He still wore the sensor rig on his head like a crown, its wire frame glistening with droplets of water.
There was just one more staircase now, Brigid saw, a short flight of steps and she was at the parking bay where she had left the steed. She leaped up the steps, grabbing the handrail and taking them two at a time. Behind her, Wertham was almost near enough to touch, and Brigid could hear his breathing down below as she reached the topmost stair. She turned, one hand still gripping the handrail, and kicked out behind her, dipping her torso and head low and putting as much force as she could into the blow. It caught Wertham full in the chin as he ascended the staircase, and he went flying back with a satisfying yelp of pain.
There was no time to follow up. Instead, Brigid ran, leaping ahead like a runner from the starting blocks, arms and legs pumping as she hurried across the parking lot and back to her boxy steed.
The steed waited there, thankfully unmolested. Brigid willed the door hatch open, passing her hand across the space where she thought a sensor might be. She had never really thought about how the door operated, and now she could only hope that it worked, either feeling her need or responding to the touch of her hand. The door slid noiselessly back on its hidden track.
Then Brigid was inside, eyes focused on the thing she had come here for. This had better work, she told herself.
Behind Brigid, Wertham had reached the top of the short staircase and was making his way across the parking compound toward her.
Serra do Norte, Brazil
T
HE
GIANT
HAND
reached for Kane’s Manta, fingers grasping for him as he hopelessly tried to avoid it. The hand blocked the sun for a moment as it grabbed for the Manta’s tail, and in that moment Kane thought it was all over. But then something happened, and the hand seemed to lock, drawing fractionally upward and missing Kane’s Manta by the narrowest of margins.
Kane rolled the Manta through 360 degrees on its y-axis, slipping the wings out of the reach of the Titan’s grasping hand. The massive fingers seized in position behind him, closing slowly on nothing but empty air.
“What happened?” Kane asked as he goosed more power from the air pulse engines.
“We’ve got company,” Grant replied over the Commtact. “Looks like Bingo and Bongo came back to give us a hand.”
Kane checked the sensors of the heads-up display, scanning the skies. Two familiar sky craft flew high above, close to where the parallax point had opened from Authentiville. They were the golden pebble-like vehicles that the Authentiville pilots had used to kidnap Grant’s Manta during the sting operation. “Yahoo!” Kane cheered as he realized they were using their gravity beams to hold the Titan’s hand in place.
Grant’s voice relayed over the Commtact from where he was flying a parallel path to Kane. “That was a close one, pal,” he said.
“Yeah,” Kane agreed. “Don’t be fooled by that thing’s size—it’s faster than you’d think.”
Even as Kane spoke, twin beams of searing energy blasted from the Titan’s eyes, joining and burning a single path toward one of the pebblelike ships. Kane watched as the beam blasted against the aircraft’s armor, and in an instant the craft had been liquefied.
“We’ve lost Bingo,” Kane muttered as he watched the superheated golden rain fall from the sky where moments before there had been an aircraft.
Freed from the triangulated gravity lock, the Titan’s hand moved once more, reaching to swat Grant’s Manta to the ground as it hurtled past its head.
Inside the cockpit, collision alarms were going crazy, alerting Grant to the very real possibility that he was about to get batted out of the sky by a three-hundred-foot man. Grant pushed the joystick forward as far as it would go, sending the Manta on a downward trajectory that brought it just barely beneath the swatting hand.
Grant’s Manta continued on its new path, hurtling toward the ground at a vertical angle, engine protesting. Treetops came rushing toward the viewport at alarming speed, alarms singing in Grant’s ears. Grant held the joystick in place, forcing the Manta to loop-the-loop in a forward roll. The wings cut through the highest branches of the trees and for a moment all Grant could see through the cockpit portholes was burning trees and ground as he was turned entirely upside down.
Above him, Kane flew an evasive pattern around the towering Titan, launching two more missiles in quick succession. The missiles slapped against the Titan’s thick armor, exploding in great gouts of green fog, but the Titan merely stood there, absorbing the impacts without any effect.
“We’re running out of options,” Kane said over the linked Commtacts. “Anyone have any ideas? Cerberus? Edwards?”
* * *
I
NSIDE
THE
T
ITAN
control grid, Wertham the Strange was having the time of his life. He had never been an air jockey, and being given this opportunity to knock the grins off these pilots’ smug faces was one he could not resist passing up. There was no way that they could damage the World Armor, no way to penetrate its fabulous construction. It had been heat-sealed using the heart of a star dragged into the quantum rift—nothing could damage its skin.
Nothing.
In his mind Wertham turned his head, bringing the Titan suit’s head around before sending another burst of the heat ray at the retreating bronze vehicle.
“I could do this all day,” he trilled.
Cosmic Rift
B
RIGID
REACHED
FOR
the static figure who waited in the steed exactly as she had left her. The woman’s eyes were blank, and she took no notice when Brigid wrenched the mirrored headband from her head and pushed it down over her own. The headband was connected by a thin tube to the box at the woman’s belt, and Brigid remained close as a bank of lights came to life across its surface.
Suddenly, Brigid could see the woman in a different way. She was standing there and yet there was an aura around her head, a series of overlays in different colors, each one an oval, new colors forming where they met. The colors were dull, like lightbulbs without power, only the color of the glass remaining.