LITMIR.BIZ

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as seen the nightmarish change to the young sailor’s face. It wasn’t simply a cut, the way a knife would cut. It seemed almost as though that ancient blade had burned him like acid, eating into the flesh and sinews that hid beneath his fragile skin. But there was more to it than that. The young man was wounded at a cellular level; the very fiber that made up his being had been damaged in a manner that utterly defied human comprehension.

      For an awful moment, the name of the stone blade bubbled to the surface of Flag’s thoughts once more: Godkiller.

      But it wasn’t just the young sailor’s face that had been altered. Demy Octavo was changing, too, as she clutched the knife in her elegant hand. She stood there looking at it, holding the blade in front of her as though transfixed.

      “Demy,” Flag urged, his voice firm, “Miss Octavo? Please, put down the knife.”

      For a moment, Octavo did nothing. She just stood, as still as a statue, as the Pacific sun beat down on the thin black line of the naval airstrip. And then, in a movement that seemed eerily inhuman, her head turned and she looked at Abraham Flag with a fierce anger in her eyes. Those deep brown eyes seemed darker now, but that was not the most remarkable thing that struck Flag as he stared into the orbs; it was their whites. For their whites were no longer white at all—they had taken on a crimson aspect as the blood bubbled within them.

      “Put the knife down, Demy,” Flag urged once again. “It’s not safe.”

      In response, Demy Octavo’s lips pulled back in an animal’s sneer.

      Chapter 6

      Early twenty-third century

       Laboratory of the Incredible, Antarctica

      Seven armed troops came rushing from the corridor after Grant, and a moment later the clattering of feet from the far end of the vast laboratory area revealed more had been skulking in the distant shadows.

      Kane and Brigid were already running, weaving between work surfaces covered with electrical coils, vacuum tubes, microscopes and a dense forest of other scientific equipment. As he ran, Kane tensed his wrist tendons and the Sin Eater shot into his grip. He could already feel the angry determination welling inside as a hail of bullets whipped past him and Brigid.

      A little behind his colleagues, Grant leaped over a desk, sliding across it on his buttocks and back, blasting a burst of fire behind him from the muzzle of his own Sin Eater. His shots peppered the doorway around the corridor, felling two of the millennialists and driving the others to cover.

      Smashing beakers and test tubes out of his way, Grant landed on the far side of the desk amid a rain of breaking glass. Righting himself, the huge ex-Mag turned this way and that, searching for Kane and Brigid as gunfire echoed all around him. He spotted his partners crouch-walking between two rows of worktables roughly twelve feet away.

      “What happened?” Kane snapped as Grant caught his attention.

      “What always happens,” Grant replied. “Somebody looked up at the wrong time.”

      Kane stopped moving for a moment and peered over the desk he had crouched behind, looking across to the corridor. “We should have just ambushed them while we had the chance,” he chastised himself as he saw millennialist guards piling out of the exit there.

      From the doorway to the corridor, someone shouted, “There’s three of them.”

      A moment later, a cacophony of shots filled the air, shattering glass beakers and monitor screens on the work tops that he and his companions had taken refuge behind. The guards were followed a moment later by the dark-haired woman whom Kane had identified as Simona, striding through the open doorway, her high-heeled boots clattering against the hard floor with the pounding of a jackhammer. Kane saw her face properly for the first time, and not just the profile. It looked aristocratic, long with a pleasing curve to the chin. Kane noticed something else about it—something dark was marring the whole left-hand side of the woman’s face. Before he could ponder any further on this, the woman raised her voice, shouting instructions in an authoritative tone.

      “Don’t damage anything,” she ordered. “The material in this laboratory could be invaluable to our cause.”

      Invaluable was good, Kane thought. It gave them a chance to do more than dodge bullets. He switched on his Commtact and began to outline his plan, subvocalizing his instructions to Grant as he ushered Brigid toward the double-helix staircase at the far end of the vast laboratory room. “These ice rats have got us outgunned and outnumbered,” he said, “and it sounds like the only thing stopping them from shooting us where we stand is the equipment in this lab. Let’s use that to our advantage and get ourselves out of here while we still can.”

      Brigid turned to Kane as they rushed through the lab. “You’re crazy,” she spit. “We can’t just leave—”

      “Kane’s right,” Grant’s voice stated over their linked Commtacts. “I don’t much want to get shot in the head today, so let’s just get back to the Mantas and call this one a bust.”

      “But the Annunaki blade—” Brigid began.

      Kane silenced her with a look. “This isn’t the time,” he growled, and Brigid saw that steely determination in his gray-blue eyes.

      As if in response, Brigid’s arm snapped up and she thrust the TP-9 handgun at Kane’s face. “Get down,” she yelled.

      Kane didn’t stop to think. He was already dropping to the floor in a forward roll as Brigid’s semiautomatic weapon spit a burst of bullets where his head had been just a second before. Still rolling, Kane spun, tracking Brigid’s arc of fire with his own weapon. He saw three millennialist guards there, sprinting to keep pace with himself and his red-haired companion. One of the millennialists dropped as Brigid sprayed his head and torso with 9 mm bullets.

      Fast runners, Kane thought with irritation as he righted himself and snapped off a quick burst from his crouching position on the shiny floor of the laboratory. The remaining Millennial Consortium men continued running, bearing down on Brigid as Kane’s bullets cut the air all about them. Several bullets clipped the guards, but only slowed them momentarily, their kinetic armor diffusing the impact of the blasts.

      Then the two remaining guards were on Brigid, weaving past the worktables as they turned on her.

      A little farther back, Grant was trading shots with another group of guards. The millennialists were wary, careful not to hit any of the potentially invaluable equipment in the lab. Grant used that to his advantage, peppering the lab with bullets and punishing any of his foes who broke cover.

      The two millennialists who had chased down Brigid and Kane split up. Brigid fired another blast from her TP-9 at the nearer guard, but he rolled sideways just fractionally quicker than Brigid’s aim. A second later, the same guard sprung up from the work surface he had rolled behind, and his left leg whipped out in a snap kick. The guard’s foot slammed into Brigid’s stomach, and she flailed backward, a burst of fire from the TP-9 going wild, the bullets zipping into the air before disappearing with a staccato echo into the rafters of the vast room.

      As Brigid recovered from that first, savage blow, the millennialist swung his right fist at her face, a small pistol clutched in his fingers blasting bullets through the air. Brigid stepped backward just quickly enough to avoid the shots, and, gun in hand, her foe’s fist whipped through the air just beside her.

      Brigid’s reply was swift and deadly. Her right arm zipped up and her index finger locked on the trigger of the semiautomatic pistol she held, lacing her foe’s body with a stream of bullets that drew a continuous line from groin to face. The millennialist rocked backward with the bullets’ impacts as they smashed into his kinetic armor, and then he was toppling into the array of distillation equipment on a desk behind him. As blood spurted from his lips, the Millennial Consortium footman fell into the distillation tubes, smashing the fragile glass equipment to little more than a mosaic of shattered glass.

      Just two desks over, Kane was having his own problems with another of the guardsmen. Kane’s

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