“Are you sure you know how to drive this thing?” Kane asked, his heart racing.
Jack laughed. “Ah, you can’t teach a new god old tricks, son,” he said, working the controls.
Through the windshield, Kane saw what looked like a service truck pulling across two lanes as it made a turn. The lightracer clipped past it with inches to spare, nothing but a blur on the road.
Pushed right up against Kane, his knees up against his chin, Grant closed his eyes in a slow, meditative blink. “You know,” he said, “if we make it back to the palace I’m telling his wife.”
* * *
B
RIGID
CLAMBERED
DOWN
the crisscrossed walkways of the Doom Furnace, moving as swiftly as she could toward the door through which she had seen Wertham pass. Somewhere in the back of her mind she could still feel the tickle of that bogus instruction to obey, and each time she became aware of it she would clench her hands tight, pushing her fingernails into the fleshy part of her palm until it hurt.
“Keep with it, Baptiste,” she told herself, trying to think what advice Kane would give her.
She slipped down a winding metal staircase to bring her level with the doorway she sought. As she reached the bottom step, she spotted five dull-faced servants trudging toward her. They carried boxes of tools and equipment, each one filled to the brim, each one heavy enough to require a wheelbarrow for a normal man to move.
The Gene-agers stopped when they saw Brigid there, eyeing her suspiciously. “You don’t belong here,” the lead slave said, dropping his box of parts.
Oh, boy, thought Brigid, here we go again.
Chapter 29
Wertham was alone in his all-but-forgotten laboratory. He had spent seven hundred years alone in the single prison cell of Authentiville. Solitude held no fear for him now.
He reached for his hidden cache of mind drugs, a specially adapted mixture of Raka’ and Annunaki proteins and solvent compounds that he had stumbled upon and refined centuries before. Like the crown, the cache was where he had left it, hidden in a rift pocket disguised by one of the shapes that were impossible for a normal man to see with the naked eye.
The drug looked like a tiny capsule, smaller and rounder than Wertham’s little fingernail. He slipped it onto his tongue, reveling in the unpleasant taste, familiar even after all these centuries without it. The pill melted with a fizzing sensation, much as a meringue will disintegrate on the tongue, and Wertham felt things begin to slip inside his skull and his body, the way a contact lens will slip over the eye.
Hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste. Five senses.
Become six. He could
gloud
the air now.
Become seven. And now he could
frieb
the trace heat coming from the wall lights.
Become eight. He could
ize
the trace he had
friebed.
Become nine. And to
tomp
the very room with all its angles and planes.
They were senses impossible to describe without experiencing them firsthand, new senses that expanded Wertham the Strange into a whole other scale of being. An existence kaleidoscoped with glory.
He felt the buzz of his new set of senses, four new abilities acting in conjunction with the old familiars. They would all be necessary for the Titan work he was to do next.
The sensor rig was perched atop his head, its metal pads making contact with his cool skin. Wertham took up a position on the lip of an overturned desk, perching there like some hungry bird of prey, and gazed about the room. He could still see the shapes that hid themselves from human eyes, the shapes that only the alien races were supposed to see. They rotated in the shadows, glistening like diamonds, twinkling like stars seen between the clouds.
Nine senses fed information to him as he slipped his consciousness into the new form, seeking it out with the headset, discovering it right where he had placed it all those hundreds of years before. The Titan.
* * *
B
RIGID
HAD
FACED
Gene-agers before, so she didn’t hesitate this time. Instead, she charged at the nearest, the one who had dropped the box he was carrying as he formed his accusation, pulling her TP-9 from its hip holster.
The TP-9 sang its song of menace, a stream of 9 mm bullets launching from the sleek black muzzle and drilling into the chest of the artificial man. The Gene-ager stumbled back with the impact, surprised and wounded at the same time, dark ooze spreading across his overalls where his skin had been pierced.
Brigid used the man’s surprise to her advantage, flipping herself in midrun so that her body dropped low, taking all of her weight on her right leg as her left kicked up. The toe of her upthrust boot connected with the Gene-ager’s jaw, and his teeth closed with a loud clack. The artificial man was knocked back with the blow, staggering to keep upright.
Brigid continued to move, slipping from high kick into a crouch and sweeping the TP-9 in a low arc before her. As the first Gene-ager tumbled to the stone catwalk, Brigid’s bullets cut the legs out from under the next two, sending one of them staggering over the edge of the walkway while the other crashed to the floor. Brigid ignored the cry of surprise as the Gene-ager disappeared over the side of the catwalk, her heart pounding faster now, the pulse of adrenaline throbbing behind her ears.
The last two Gene-agers were only now beginning to react to this mystery attacker with hair the color of the furnace below. They dropped the crates they were carrying and ran at Brigid, hefting long-handled tools over their heads as makeshift weapons.
Brigid sprang back up to her feet, targeting the two figures as they charged her. The first reeled back at the hail of bullets, but the second reached near enough to throw his weapon, launching it across the space between them like a spear.
Brigid saw the metal shaft glint with the red radiance of the furnace as it sailed toward her, and she sidestepped just in time to avoid its impact. Then she was moving again, sprinting toward the remaining Gene-ager, ejecting the empty clip of the TP-9 as she ran.
A moment later she was on top of the false man, and she brought her knee up in a swift jab at his groin. The Gene-ager took the strike without reacting, reaching for Brigid as she tried to pull away. His arm snagged her right shoulder, pulling down to prevent her using the semiautomatic pistol. Brigid didn’t care—the weapon was empty right now, which meant it was little more than deadweight until she could reload it. Instead, she brought her left arm around, flattening the palm like a knife and using its side to strike a blow to the slave’s throat. The Gene-ager’s eyes bugged as he felt the blow, and his grip on Brigid slackened for a fraction of a second.
That fraction was enough. Brigid pulled her right arm free from her assailant’s grip and spun away in a graceful pirouette.
The Gene-ager recovered from the blow to his neck, rubbing at his throat with annoyance. Then Brigid dropped low, snagging her left leg behind his and flipping him onto his back. The Gene-ager toppled back, kicking out as he slipped over the side of the catwalk. In a second, he was tumbling down into the artificial lake of water that waited beneath the door in the wall, colliding with it in a great splash. Brigid watched for a moment as the replica man flailed in the water, struggling to keep himself afloat. There was no time to wait to finish him off. She had to keep moving.
Brigid was not a killing machine, but she could kill if she needed to. More importantly, these semi-men were some kind of clones; she was sure of that much, and while she didn’t have the full story yet, she trusted her instincts enough to dispatch them without it weighing on her conscience. Whatever Wertham was doing, she had a nasty feeling that bumping off a few artificially grown men would pale into insignificance by comparison.
* * *
T
HE
ROYAL
PALACE
came into view through the lightracer’s windshield like a behemoth rising from the sea. The structure took up a whole city block, and with the lights of the city out it looked all the more ominous as if it waited for them to enter and challenge it.
Kane muttered a curse as King Jack pulled the lightracer to a stop, the braking mechanism just as noiseless as the engine had been at full speed. “You’ve really got to warn us when you’re going to do that,” he told the king as he swallowed the bile that had appeared in his throat.
“Sorry, fellas,” King Jack said amiably. “I clean forgot the two of you didn’t have a velocity belt between you.”
Kane didn’t know what a velocity belt was, but he guessed it was some kind of gravity dampener, similar to the one used in the Mantas to prevent a pilot blacking out while traveling at very high speed.
The front of the lightracer peeled away like a waterfall, and Jack clambered from his seat and out onto the street. Kane followed with Grant pulling himself free of the space he had been wedged in during their rapid trek across town. Grant stood for a moment, bent over with his hands on his hips, trying to catch his breath.
“You boys up to this?” Jack asked, looking from Grant to Kane.
Kane nodded as he reloaded his Sin Eater, tossing the dead clip into the driver’s seat of the spear-shaped vehicle. “Yeah, let’s get you seated back on the throne.”
Behind Kane, Grant reloaded his own Sin Eater, as well as his Copperhead, and together the three men hurried up the grand steps that led into the palace.
* * *
T
HE
T
ITAN
CAME
awake at Wertham’s command, the designer’s mental faculties charging his masterpiece.
The Titan waited deep in the cavernous recesses of the Doom Furnace, where it had clung for seven centuries in the timeless void of the quantum rift, poised like a nesting bat. It looked like a man, or a mockery of a man, dressed in armor plate that shone despite all its years of neglect. Nothing rusted in the nonspace of the quantum rift, nothing aged, not really. Only people became older, and the residents of Authentiville had even found a way to get beyond that.
The Titan wore armor the color of the sunset and a helmet that towered high over its head like a hood. As Wertham sent the command to engage, lights came to life across its towering crown, and its eyes glowed a deep, fiendish red that lit the cave around the furnace as brightly as the furnace itself. Each arm on the mighty battle suit was ninety feet in length, each leg a hundred feet. Its fingers were large enough that a man could stand on just one of them, and a single clenched fish was enough to crush a modest-sized building.
The expression on the face was fixed in a grimace, with down-turned mouth and scowling eyes.
Wertham could feel through the suit, sense the world coming alive around him as the Titan—or more properly, the Target Invasion, Total Annihilation and Negation suit—powered up after seven centuries of waiting. The Titan itself knew nothing of this stretch of time—it could have been built just a week ago or a million years ago, it didn’t matter. All it knew was the mind that sat within its shell, and that was all it would ever know.
At a single command, the Titan began to move, mighty limbs shuddering as it rose from its seven-hundred-year nest in the shadows. The eyes surveyed the cavern by the furnace, watching emotionlessly as Gene-ager slaves scrambled out of its path. High above, the fleet was amassing, ready to go to war.
Through the eyes of the colossus, Wertham saw the rainbow swirl of the quantum pocket where lightning played, ever at a distance from the golden city that had hid there for a millennium. The Titan suit could feel; every inch of its armor body, every ounce of its armored flesh felt in a way that defied description. Wertham needed the drugs just to enter this trance, to give himself enough senses—nine in all—to function within the artificial body. Only he could do this, only he could control it.
With a single command, the Titan disengaged from the floor and began to rise, levitating on the field of birth energy that had waited all these centuries to be engaged.
* * *
B
RIGID
WAS
AT
the outside door of the laboratory when she heard the rumbling beneath her. She stepped away from the door and walked to the lip of the rocklike walkway, peering over the edge. What she saw made her heart race.
There, rising on a tide of energies, was a gigantic man dressed in red armor. She ducked back as he came crashing through the walkway, shattering it. Brigid cried out as the walkway snapped in two, the floor dropping away from her as she ran back to the doorway of the hanging laboratory. She reached out, grabbing the door handle with her free hand, hanging on for dear life as the walkway crumbled away beneath her feet.
Within moments, all that was left of it was a semicircle around the door, jutting out just nine inches from the wall. Using the door handle for support, Brigid stood there on tiptoe as the armored figure hurtled past like a launching rocket, a fantastic cushion of energy trailing and propelling it from deep inside the structures of the Doom Furnace.
Brigid watched, hanging from the door, as the figure ascended. Its proportions were almost more than she could contemplate. It towered at least two hundred feet in length, head to toe, perhaps more. It was hard to tell because it was moving so fast. Brigid watched as the Titan rushed up into the sky, joining the rest of the fleet that had gathered there.
“What the heck have we gotten ourselves into?” she muttered as she dragged the door open and pulled herself from view.
A moment later, Brigid was inside the corridor leading to Wertham’s laboratory, the reloaded TP-9 held ready in her hand.
* * *
W
ERTHAM
EXPERIENCED
THE
sense of being born as the Titan suit ascended into the sky above the Doom Furnace. Through the eyes of the armor, he looked left and right, admiring the invasion fleet he would lead to planet Earth.
With a single mental command, he began to drift, floating on the cosmic tides, fluttering away from the golden city of Authentiville like a feather on the breeze. A million tons of smart metal—the same substance that had been discovered on the skin of the Annunaki sky disks, which could expand and contract as required—dropped from the impossible city into the rainbow swirl of the quantum night, plummeting into the opening maw of a parallax point.
Target: Earth.