Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller

FORTY-FIVE

Knight was about to die. The man pointing an AK-47 at his heart had a long handlebars mustache under his Vietnam era helmet and a look in his eyes that said he was going to enjoy what came next.

Suddenly, the man’s chest ripped apart, small bursts of flesh and fabric spraying upward from the man’s chest. The sight was coupled by the staccato clap of an MP-5 being drained of its ammo. Bullets ripped into the man until he fell over backward.

Knight turned his head down and saw that Asya had slipped down between his splayed legs and fired her MP-5 upward from the floor — missing his crotch by inches — to fill the mercenary full of bullets and death.

She slid gracefully out from between his legs, popped to her feet, replaced her spent magazine and then checked both ways down the hallway of Sub Level 1’s laboratories.

“Thanks,” Knight said and walked out into the hallway, gingerly stepping over the dead man. A pile of bodies covered the floor at the southern end of the hall. He distantly recalled hearing gunfire, but thought it had been on a different level.

Then they heard yet another explosion, deep in the depths of the facility — but this one was stronger. The air in the hallway started rushing past him.

His mind didn’t have time to process what he was experiencing before his instincts took over. He grabbed Asya’s hand and dragged her toward the Microbiology Lab and its secret tunnel to the surface. Asya asked no questions, but simply ran with him. As they rounded the doorway into the lab, water began spraying out of the bottom and sides of the stairwell door.

Knight ran faster.

They reached the janitorial closet and found the secret door wide open. More bodies covered the floor on the other side. Knight heard the stairwell door blow up behind him. Rupture, was the word that swept through his mind. Water rushed into the hallway behind him with mad intensity, the wave crashing into the lab, upturning tables and equipment like a rampaging monster.

“Go!” Knight yelled.

They ran as fast as they could, but the water was faster.

The wave of water blasted into them from behind, knocking them down and launching them toward the tunnel’s end. Knight managed to shut his mouth just in time. He hoped Asya had done the same.

The salt water stung his eyes when he tried to look for her, so he snapped them shut again, and reached out with his hand, hoping he would be able to grasp the staircase railing.

But he didn’t have to. His body was tossed up and out of the water and onto the floor of the tunnel. The water sloshed around him, and then began to recede back into the tunnel. Knight raised his head and saw Asya a few feet in front of him. Her long hair was down in front of her face. After a moment’s stillness, she coughed the water from her lungs.

Knight heaved in a deep breath, then saw that the stairs were nearby — only they didn’t look right. He staggered to his feet and looked back the way they had come. They had been swept right past the amphitheater stairs and into the next tunnel. He didn’t know where these stairs led, but they went up. It would be an improvement over the flooded subterranean base.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think I swallowed most of Mediterranean,” Asya said between coughs.

“Let’s get out of here,” Knight said, taking the stairs and trusting that if Asya could joke, she’d be fine.

They ascended the stairs to another tunnel, and then found a door that led to a huge underground parking lot with concrete support columns, and a nearby vehicle tunnel leading down.

Not what I want.

Knight looked across the vast lot, but couldn’t find another exit.

“Come, this way. Entrance from fountain is near mosque.” Asya led the way across the garage.

Knight followed, looking for CCTV cameras or men taking cover behind the pillars, but once he was convinced they were alone in the echoing space, he began jogging faster. Then he spotted a black metal ladder on the far wall, and two dead bodies at the foot of it.

“No shortage of dead men here,” Asya said.

She climbed the ladder and opened the hatch at the top.

They climbed out of the fountain and into a small park. They were alone.

“Almost dawn. Mosque worshipers will arrive soon.” The sky was a pale blue, the sun just below the horizon.

“Can’t be helped,” Knight said. Then he keyed his microphone.

“Queen, you read?”

“Knight! Get your ass to the shore on the far side of the Baths. The shit is getting deep.” Queen’s voice sounded frantic. Then he heard distant gunfire.

He started to run toward the looming mosque, and the ruins just beyond it. Asya stayed right by his side. They raced through the concrete and manicured shrubs of the park to the road. Traffic was trickling through already, and several cars honked at them as they sprinted across the asphalt. Knight was drenched with sweat and sea water. The battle armor wasn’t helping. They angled across the road to a triangular parking lot where early arriving worshipers were already parking their cars. Knight paid them no heed as he made for the relative privacy of the trees beyond, which created a natural boundary between the mosque and amphitheater ruins.

When they reached a stand of trees and were free from the confused looks of the devout, he paused to catch his breath.

“Help me out of this crap,” Knight said, unbuckling one of the battle armor forearm plates. Asya stepped up and helped him unbuckle all the armor. Each new piece removed made him feel lighter and cooler. Even after the recent swim, he felt over-heated, and realized it had been hours since he’d had a drink of anything. With the armor off, he bounced on his feet twice, refreshed slightly by the feeling of lightness, and said, “Let’s go,” before tearing off again, much faster than before.

On the far side of the trees, they found a small path and a concrete bench. Next to it was a closed up and boarded food cart, with a hand-painted wooden board listing the food options in Arabic. He wanted to stop, break in and guzzle some water, but he’d trained to operate for days on minimal food and water. He could drink when the fighting was done.

His soaked BDU pants clung to him as he ran, but his synthetic t-shirt had nearly dried — damp only at the armpits and neck. He looked over at Asya as they ran through more trees right next to the concrete wall of a house. She glistened with seawater and sweat, but ran with the same look of determination he’d seen in King. The Sigler family had a lot in common.

Then he was on the ground, and Asya was shouting. His left arm burned with pain. He looked at it and saw blood. Gunfire rattled through the trees above him. He couldn’t move his head far enough to see what had happened to Asya.

Then he saw a man emerge from the trees. His scarred bald head gleamed in the first rays of the sun. The side of his face was horribly disfigured, and he smiled a huge leering grin. Then he took three running steps forward and kicked his boot into Knight’s stomach. The air left Knight’s body at the same speed the consciousness left his confused mind.

FORTY-SIX

Rook was nearly out of breath as he left the balcony rail. The oncoming rush of water subsided, but the room was completely submerged. He could feel the pressure of the deep mashing against his ears. It wasn’t easy to swim over the rail with the added weight of the impact armor plates and foam still attached to his legs, but he didn’t think he had time to take them off. The combat boots weren’t helping either.

Salt water stung his eyes as he stroked over the gallery toward where the Plexiglas wall had been. He thought his only chance would be swimming for the surface instead of trying to navigate up underwater stairwells and hallways. He didn’t know how far up the water went, but if the whole second level was under water, chances were good the entire complex was drowned.

His lungs burned as he stroked with his arms, hoping that outside the flooded gallery would be a clear shot to the surface — and not some underwater cavern with no air waiting for him.

The klieg lights in the water lit up the sandy bottom, from which the enormous statue was still rising. It had turned its head away from the exploded Plexiglas wall, and was now using its hands to push itself up. Rook couldn’t see the size of the gigantic thing — he was too close to it. What he could see were the enormous spikes on the crown, and the huge shoulders of the creature, as it started to rise up in the water.

He clawed for the surface, fighting the swirling waters created by the giant’s rising. He kicked and struggled, but as he rose, a sinking feeling began to grow in his heart.

He wasn’t going to make it.

He could see the glowing sky above. Layers of darting fish above showed him just how far below the surface he was. He just wasn’t moving fast enough. He lost some of his air in an involuntary exhale, then reached for his nose with one hand and clamped his mouth shut with his jaw. His lungs sucked hard at the scant air in his mouth, and he could feel the depth still trying to force its way into his ears.

His eyes moved to his left to where the stone behemoth was still in slow motion.

Bastard.

Then he had an idea. He used the rest of his strength to stroke madly with his arms, exhaling the last of his air and kicking wildly. As long as the giant didn’t spot him, he might have a chance.

But the monstrous statue started to turn its head again. Rook quickly shifted his direction, to stay behind the creature’s head as it rose, but the head was faster. One of the long spikes on its crown careened into him from behind, lifting him through the water faster. He twisted and tried to push off the spike, but it was too late. Rather than fight, Rook spun around and clung to the crown’s barnacle-covered spike.

A moment later, his head broke the surface. He took in a huge gulp of the sweet morning air. Then he started coughing and spluttering, drawing in deep drafts of air in between each fit. He fell from the crown and landed on the ground, hugging it as he coughed.

Then sense returned.

This isn’t the ground.

Rook had only intended to catch a lift to the surface of the water on the express train that was the rising statue. But his desperation for air had cost him. He was now lying face down and hugging the top of the giant’s crown. He leaned over the side and looked down to the water some fifty feet below him and receding.

The creature was standing up. It rolled over onto its hands and knees, then raised its waist. Rook clung on for dear life as he rose one hundred feet above the water, then two hundred, then more. When the gigantic statue was fully erect, only its lower legs were still submerged under the water — what Rook had judged to be fifty feet or more of salty brine.

“Well ain’t you the biggest fucking golem in the history of the world,” Rook said, and for the first time he realized what this statue was—the Colossus of Rhodes.

The statue took a step toward the shore and shallower water. Rook was at the back of the head, facing out to sea. He struggled to turn around so he could see where they were headed. He crawled across the head, hands and knees splayed wide like a water bug. The statue took another huge step, shaking its frame when it contacted the ground. Rook slid over the curved head and shouted as he saw the world ahead come into view. He slammed into the edge of the raised crown and clung on.

The head was enormous. Rook judged it to be forty or fifty feet in diameter inside the ring of the crown. He leaned back, inside the crown’s lip, and felt safer once he couldn’t see the immense drop. Inside the ring of the crown was like a balcony; the crown itself surrounding the top of the skull like a low wall. Rook slowly stood, wary of the next jolting step, and once again looked at the world before and below him.

The view was amazing.

Dawn had fully struck. The land was bathed in sunlight — except for a long stretch in front of the giant, where its shadow left a swath of ground in night. Rook was 300 feet up, and the few people he could see on the shore looked more like specks of ground-up pepper than ants. He knew how high he was. He knew what he was riding on. As a part of Chess Team homework, he’d had to study the ancient world, and the starting place had been the Seven Wonders: the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Halicarnassus mausoleum, the lighthouse at Alexandria.

And the Colossus of Rhodes.

He didn’t know how or why it was underwater off the coast of Tunisia, but he knew he was standing on its skull 300 feet in the air. And as it took its first step out of the sea onto the dry land of the Carthage ruins, crushing ancient stone under foot, he knew if Chess Team couldn’t find a way to stop it, or stop Ridley, the Colossus would grind half of North Africa under its heels before enough military might could be on hand to destroy it.

FORTY-SEVEN

King lost count of how many times he had died.

The wraiths kept coming, and their embrace was deadly. Every time King awoke, the battle began anew. He punched, kicked and head-butted until he was overwhelmed again. Then they would suck him dry, leaving his withered corpse on the floor.

And then…he would come back.

The cycle repeated for what felt like a lifetime.

But that was about to change. King was pissed. Instead of punching and kicking, he started eye gouging, and tearing out throats. He bit and growled and roared and slammed the full weight of his body behind every blow, knowing that any self-sustained injury would be healed by the time he struck again. At times, the crushing throng of Forgotten fell back, recoiling at his rage and ferocity. He stopped going for body shots and focused solely on heads.

This time he was alive long enough to see past the writhing, swarming bodies to Alexander.

The man was a whirlwind of rage and action. Wraiths were flying everywhere as Alexander hurled them and batted them away as if they were paper dolls. But still they came. King couldn’t understand how there could be so many of them, unless Alexander had gotten the date wrong.

They’re supposed to be locked up.

Then an idea grew with each strike, as he felt the energy leaving his limbs from every touch of a wraith. Tiny tendrils on the creature’s palms latched onto his skin, like a million tiny leeches. With just a glancing blow, they could suck a patch of flesh dry. When the idea finally resolved in his mind, King felt a burst of energy and began plowing through the wraith bodies around him, making his way for Alexander.

“You said they were locked up!”

Alexander flexed his brawn, sending half a dozen crouched creatures flying off his chest and back.

“Now really isn’t the time for recriminations!” he shouted.

“No! They are supposed to be locked up when she comes! Remember? We have to get them penned up!”

Alexander grimaced. King recognized the expression as pained agreement.

“Follow my lead!” Alexander shouted.

The big man started bulling through the swarm of wraith bodies, batting them away, so their deadly fingers could not drain his life force. He herded them toward a far wall of the cavern. King did his best to keep up.

The bigger man was building up momentum, and King could see he wasn’t really battling the wraiths any more, but was plowing a path through them. King did the same. They moved the battle through a low arch, the Forgotten crawling down on them from the ceiling and the stone of the archway.

On the other side of the arch, King found himself in the lab. Iron-barred cells lined one of the walls. They stood empty. Wall mounted torches lit the space. Crude scientific equipment, well before its time, covered the many stone tables scattered throughout the large room.

Alexander made his way toward one of the cells, swung the door wide and ran inside. A dozen of the wraiths followed him into the cell. King understood and did the same with the next cell. The spaces inside were no bigger than a ten by twenty room. Only so many of the Forgotten could squeeze themselves into the spaces without getting in their own way. King had the advantage in the space. He fought and pushed, slammed and crunched his way around the room following the perimeter until he was at the door again.

Reaching hands grasped at him from all directions as bodies continued to fill the cell, all swirling and rushing in search of his blood. He lunged out of the door, took a wraith by the neck and shoved it into the cell, knocking those by the door back. He slammed the door shut and heard the lock clunk into place.

Before he could feel some satisfaction at locking up a large number of the monsters, King was struck from behind and slammed into the cell’s bars. Arms grabbed at him from inside, and then from outside. Locked in place, his body was quickly sucked dry until the wraiths released him, dropping his dried husk of a corpse to the floor.

It took five more deaths to imprison the rest. King wasn’t sure how many times Alexander had fallen, but he’d seen the big man go down a few times. In the end, there were more bodies on the floor of the lab and the outer cavern than there were in the cells, but the cells were still tightly packed. Once the prison was full, it was easier to kill the stragglers than it was to try to stuff them into the already overcrowded cells. For every one they stuffed in, two would slip out.

When he killed the last wraith by ripping its throat out, King fell over onto its corpse, breathing hard and waiting for his regeneration to bring him back to full vitality.

“I was…right about…one thing,” Alexander said weakly. He must have been worse off than he looked, but King knew he would be back to his hearty self in a few minutes. “They didn’t…recognize my scent.”

“My God. Did you have to go through this every time you wanted them locked up?”

Alexander laughed softly. “No. They obeyed the younger me.”

“You told me once that their embrace was an awful thing,” King said, breathing heavily from his pile of corpses.

“I was telling the truth,” Alexander said, finally sitting up.

“I see that now.” King tried to stand, but his body wasn’t ready.

“You understand now, why I cannot let this happen to her.”

King just nodded and the men fell into silence.

After a few minutes, they had recovered sufficiently to stand. King was pleased to see he was able to stand first.

“We’ll need to get the bodies out of here. Can you drag them to the edge of the arena, while I start work on the duplicate corpse?”

“You want me to feed them to puppy?” King asked.

“It’s the quickest way to dispose of the bodies,” Alexander said. “The Forgotten occasionally have it out with Cerberus, so even if some scraps are left behind, my younger self will think nothing of it other than wishing he’d seen the fight.”

King nodded. “What about her face? Can you recreate it?”

“If I can’t get it right, I’ll finish it when she gets here. We won’t have a lot of time — he’ll arrive not long after.”

King started dragging the Forgotten bodies out of the lab. Some of the equipment had been damaged too. He’d have to ask Alexander about that. It took him several trips, dragging the pathetic withered bodies by the capes or hoods of their dark gauzy cloaks. He felt slight regret. To hear Alexander describe them, the Forgotten were like animals or children — not fully capable of taking care of themselves. Leaving their bodies in the arena for the hellhound was probably a fate they did not deserve. But there would be no time for a memorial service.

By the last load, Alexander had nearly finished with his lifelike corpse. The body was naked, but it was withered in places, and definitely female. The hair was right — just like King had seen in the market earlier in the day. The face was still a blank slab of creamy flesh. Alexander stood over the body repeating a sentence in a language King could only hear as grunts and rumbling murmurs. The corpse’s arm was growing less withered instead of more, and King realized where Alexander had gotten his raw materials for the body.

At last the man stopped speaking, but the face on the body was still blank.

“You used one of them,” King asked, indicating the Forgotten behind the bars.

“It seemed…right. I don’t know how else to explain it.” Alexander shrugged.

“I’m not questioning your choice. I know this can’t be easy for you. What about all this blood? And the broken equipment?”

“I thought about that,” Alexander said, standing and stretching his neck from side to side. “When I found her, I saw her body, and the spilled glass of water. We’ll need to remember that. But I didn’t see anything else. The whole room could have been in shambles and I wouldn’t have noticed. Afterward…well, there won’t be much lab left when I’m done.”

King nodded. If something were to happen to Sara or Fiona, whatever inanimate objects surrounding him would get the full force of his vented anger. He felt his concern over seeing them again well up, but he and Alexander were almost done. Alexander had sworn King would be returned to his time, his family, friends, daughter and future wife. The end was in sight. “Okay. Let’s get the glass of water,” King said.

“You could have mine, if you asked politely.” Standing in the door, watching the two of them, an earthenware cup of water in her hand, Acca Larentia looked angry.

FORTY-EIGHT

Acca Larentia placed a hand on her hip, waiting for an answer from the two men.

She wore the same dyed fabric dress from the market. Her sandals, interwoven with thin strings of gold, showed her wealth. Her hair was a little more windblown than it had been in the market, but it still strongly resembled the styles King had seen his mother wearing in photos from the 50s, when she was a young woman. Acca’s face was flushed with color, but her skin was perfect. The woman was absolutely beautiful, and once again, King could see waiting centuries for her.

“Acca…” Alexander whispered and took a step forward. “Do you recognize me?”

She took a step closer, lowering her cup. “You do look…familiar, sir. Perhaps a heretofore unnamed brother of my husband?”

Alexander took one more gentle step and then stopped. “Except you know he has no brother. You know the story of Iphicles to be a false one.”

Acca descended the remaining steps at the doorway to the floor, and walked close, but she kept one of the stone lab tables between her and Alexander. She also warily eyed King. He stayed still, waiting to see how things would play out.

“My husband, Carutius, told me only two people knew that story of Iphicles was false — he and I.” The anger on her face was replaced by confusion. She squinted at him. “You could be my husband’s twin, indeed.”

“You are also one of the few alive who know that your husband’s true name is not Carutius,” Alexander said cautiously. He moved closer to the center of his side of the lab table.

“Who do you think he is, then?” she asked. “And who are you?”

“You know who I am, my love. My appearance has changed slightly, but you see the same man before you. Others have called me Heracles, but you alone in this time know my secret name of Alexander.” A tear began to trickle from his eye down his bearded cheek.

Acca raised a trembling hand to cover her mouth with the tips of her fingers — as if she had suspected this truth, but the full revelation of it confirmed some madness in her soul.

“I left you in the market not an hour ago. Your hair was shorter. Your beard less wild. Your clothes different. Your manner, even, has changed. Is this some trick of the gods? How can this be?”

Alexander quickly related the story of his past — a future he hoped yet to avoid for her. He detailed his journey to the twenty-first century without her, and his constant search for first the secrets of immortality, and then later for a way to travel back into the past to save her. She handled it well, but King supposed the woman who married this man already saw the world as a far stranger place than most people would believe. Alexander finished by telling her his plan to replace her with a duplicate corpse and said, “I have waited a hundred lifetimes to return to this night, this very moment, and undo the darkness I allowed to befall you.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, her own tears now coming freely. “Why put yourself through that anguish again? Why not just keep me safe from your creatures now, and reveal what has happened to your younger self? Then return to your strange time, where events would have changed and caught up to you?”

“It won’t work like that. It…just isn’t possible. What happened in my past, happened. There’s no way to change those things — there is only the possibility of changing the appearance of those things. Do you see? I already know that’s not how things happen, because I’d already remember it.” He paused to sigh, glanced at King, and added, “And…I am a better man, now. Your death changed me. Broke me. Allowed me to be remade into someone who is more worthy of your love. I would not undo that.” He looked at King again. “Time has a way of giving us perspective…and strength to do what must be done.”

“Well, right now we’re a bit short on time,” King said. “The younger Alexander will be back from the market soon. We need to be gone when he arrives, and we need to finish.” He glanced at the faceless corpse.

“Who is this man?” Acca asked.

“His name is Jack,” Alexander replied.

“A strange name, but who is he? Why is he here?”

Alexander smiled. “Look at him closely. Can’t you see it?”

Acca squinted at King, focusing on his eyes. She sucked in a quick breath. “He has my father’s eyes.”

Alexander nodded. “He is our descendant.”

This revelation brought a new concern to Acca’s mind. “Our children?”

“Will lose their mother tonight. But they will survive. They will thrive, for countless generations.” He nodded at King. “Long into the future. And Jack is right, Acca. Please. Let us finish what we must. We’ll take you somewhere safe, I’ll explain everything carefully, and if you don’t like what you hear, I’ll let you make your own choice as to how to proceed.” He stepped around the lab table to her, his hand outstretched.

She looked closely at his face, then reached for his hand. As King watched, he could see an almost electric jolt go through the both of them when their flesh met. Her face changed instantly.

“It really is you,” she whispered.

His tears streamed from his eyes. “Yes, my love. It really is.”

She threw herself into his arms, the cup of water flying from her hand behind them, crashing against the floor, right next to the mostly finished duplicate corpse. Alexander gently placed his arms around the woman as she sobbed into his chest. He laid the side of his cheek on the top of her head as gently as if she were an egg that might crack. King had seen his friend in many moods and manners over the years, but he had never seem him be so very gentle.

King’s eyes returned to the corpse, the spilled water and the shattered earthenware cup. It looked perfect to him, but he didn’t have the memories to confirm that.

“Alexander,” he said softly. “The face.”

Alexander took a deep breath, then stepped back from Acca and delicately raised her chin. “We must hurry.”

She nodded, and Alexander turned to the body on the floor.

“Is the cup right? The spill?” King asked.

“It’s fine,” Alexander knelt to the floor and gently placed his hands over the blank slate where the corpse’s face should have been. He began chanting under his breath. The floor rumbled beneath their feet. King turned to Acca to reassure her if she was worried, but the woman watched without fear. He guessed the touch was enough to convince her of everything.

King looked back to Alexander, as the man stood and stepped away from the false corpse.

The face looked exactly like Acca’s now — if it had been aged by twenty years, and had most of the vitality sucked from it. There was a black necrotic spot on the cheek, and the eyes were closed, but the corpse could not be mistaken for anyone else.

There was just one problem.

“Alexander — the clothes.”

The corpse was naked.

“Of course.” He turned to Acca. “We will need your robe. And your sandals.”

King was about to turn away to give the woman privacy, but she simply slipped out of the dress, and stepped out of her sandals, completely unashamed of her nudity. She picked up the robe with one hand and tossed one sandal to King. The other she handed to Alexander. Then she slipped the dress over the corpse’s head. King and Alexander fixed the sandals on the body’s feet and helped to roll the body over so Acca could pull the dress down to where it would be. Finally, she pulled a bronze bracelet off her wrist and placed it on the wrist of the body.

“The bracelet…I remember it now. I hadn’t seen it before.”

“I bought it at the market after I left you tonight,” she said. “I liked it.”

Alexander stood and rushed to a long cabinet against one wall. The cabinet was made of wood, and had several shelves built into it, like a cross between an armoire and a Chinese herbalist’s chest of drawers. He opened a drawer and pulled out a folded piece of burgundy cloth — one of his own robes. He handed it to Acca, and she quickly wrapped the fabric about her body, folding and twisting it until it covered all but her shoulders.

“We need to go,” King said.

Just then they heard a loud clanking in the stairwell beyond the doorway from which Acca had appeared.

“He’s back,” she whispered.

“Run,” Alexander said.

FORTY-NINE

Queen’s fingers went slack. Her weapon fell to the ground.

Her jaw hung open, and a single phrase got lodged in her mind.

Not. Fucking. Possible.

To say that the immense statue rising from the sea was gigantic would have been an insult to it. She had been to Liberty Island once in New York. She had learned that the Statue of Liberty stood 151 feet tall — just over 300 feet with its concrete and granite pedestal. This thing was probably close to 300 feet on its own. The spires on its crown made the resemblance uncanny. This monstrosity could have been Liberty’s father. It wore a long cape of bronze with a greenish patina, and while the cape was stiff, and did not move like cloth, it did move. The rest of the statue was nude except for a small loin-cloth. The muscles of the bare chest were flat and chiseled — a bit un-lifelike, if she thought about it. The pecs were too square, the abs too circular. The sculptors had envisioned a perfect warrior, but the dimensions were off just slightly. The overall effect was compounded by the inclusion of sea growths of coral and large swatches of seaweed, draped over the joints.

Through her disbelief and shock, she recognized it for what it was.

The Colossus of Rhodes.

But how? I thought it had been dismantled years after it fell. And how the hell did it get here, all the way across the Med?

Bishop, ever the man of few words, simply leaned down, picked up her dusty MP-5 and handed it back to her.

Queen took her weapon and forced her mind back to the moment at hand. “Kill Ridley and Seth. That’s priority number one. We get them, and that fucker topples.”

“What I was thinking,” Bishop said. He started running for Ridley’s position on the shore, as the immense statue took another step out of the sea, and onto land.

Queen raced after him.

They were already within an effective range of Ridley’s group, but she held off until she closed to within seventy-five feet. She raised her weapon, and while still running at the group of men on the shore, she started firing a spray of bullets at a rate of 800 rounds a minute.

Bishop took cover behind one of the standing columns of the Baths. He joined her in laying into the enemy.

Queen took up position behind a block of stone at the end of a wall and kept firing.

One of the men in black was hit in the arm, but then both men quickly returned fire with their AK-47s.

The world’s most recognizable assault rifle had a much longer effective range than the MP-5 submachine guns, but they were all within range of each other now, so it made little difference.

Seth and Ridley had leapt for cover. To Queen’s satisfaction, the humongous statue had stopped walking once it reached the shore. Ridley needs to concentrate to control it. Hard to do that with bullets flying all around.

She smirked, but she knew the reprieve wouldn’t last long.

“Queen, you read?” Deep Blue was in her ear. “What the hell am I seeing on satellite?”

“That would be the Colossus of Rhodes, golem-style. We really need that support. Now.”

“They’re forty minutes out.”

“This will be over in forty minutes! This thing is 300 feet tall. And it looks pissed. We’re trying to keep Ridley and his twin under fire. If they can’t concentrate, they can’t use the language to work the statue. But that won’t last long. Especially if they have reinforcements on the ground already.”

“They do. I’m seeing close to a battalion of men coming your way.”

“Then you better tell them to hurry. That or bring body bags. Lots of them.”

Queen switched channels, and called for Knight. No reply. She tried Rook.

“Where you at, ma puce? You better have some fuckin’ good news for me.”

Rook’s voice came through with a lot of background hiss, like he was in a wind tunnel. “Would it help if I said ‘I can see my house from here?’”

Queen raised her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the morning sun as she looked up, up, up, to the top of the statue’s immense head. She could only just make out movement all the way up there. He actually looked like a flea at that height.

“Sweet holy Moses,” she said.

FIFTY

Darius Ridley whipped his foot back and delivered another whopping kick to the tiny slant-eyed bastard’s stomach, a huge grin spreading across his face. His plan had gone completely to hell, but he was still having the time of his life.

Somehow, and he couldn’t figure out how it had happened, Richard’s lackey clones had co-opted his mercenary force, and turned at least some of them against him. It should have been simple. Wait until the doubles and the Chess Team were inside, then swoop in covering all the exits and kill everybody. But the Chess Team, had put up a fight, and his team was sloppy. Stepped all over each other. The facility had jammed their communications — although that should have worked to their advantage, preventing the Chess Team from coordinating their response to the unexpected attack. His men shouldn’t have needed the coms — they knew what to do and how to do it.

Still, things had gone pear-shaped. As soon as he heard that their communications gear wasn’t working underground, he had held back. After the first explosion, when he began getting reports back to him by runner that they were encountering heavy close quarters resistance, he had retreated to the safety of the loading dock vehicle tunnel. The enemy had dug in from the gallery and the security suite on Sub Level 3. Even though his men should have been able to flank the bastards from the north stairwell, they were suddenly encountering resistance on all levels of the facility — and his reinforcements never came. That was when he had left his men behind and run up the ramp to the parking garage, looking for his men at the fountain entrance.

What he found were slit throats and an unguarded entrance. He had gone topside then, and found a similar scene at the amphitheater. Someone had killed his men, and his reinforcements were nowhere in sight. He’d contemplated going back to the cemetery, but he had suddenly understood what had happened. The clones had arranged it for Richard. They would get him out, using the men Darius had paid for. If he returned to the cemetery — his command center for this operation — there would be killers waiting for him.

Instead, he had waited in the shadows near the amphitheater for a time. Then he had gone back to the fountain entrance, waiting in the darkness patiently. Eventually the Korean—Knight, yes, that’s his callsign—and a Russian woman emerged. He had followed them as the smaller man ditched his armor and frantically radioed his people.

Darius really couldn’t believe things had come to this. First his brother had sidelined him for some minor failings, shuffling him off to act as head of security for a mostly pointless facility in the Ukraine. Ostensibly it was to keep him away from the more violent actions going on at some of the more important bases in Peru and the States. But in the end, that hadn’t mattered. The female member of Chess Team, Queen, had stumbled upon his base and infiltrated it before they even knew she was there. After a pitched battle, the bitch chewed his ear right off the side of his head.

She had gotten away, and he had barely escaped with his life. There was no chance of going back to his brother’s people then, and Richard himself had been missing and presumed dead. Instead, Darius had used his own resources to slowly comb through Manifold installations, hunting for any sign of Richard or the damned Chess Team. In the end, his people had located the Greek, and from that, Darius had found the clones. His people — well, he had thought they were his people — had watched the doubles long enough to learn that they thought Richard was being held in Tunisia at the Greek’s captured installation.

But Darius’s plan to kill off the clones, his brother and Chess Team, as well as to capture the bitch and torture her until the sun went out, was off the boards now. Now he just needed to make the best of the situation, kill as many of the traitorous bastards as possible and get out of Tunisia alive.

When the chance to ambush the little Korean presented itself, he couldn’t resist. And now, as the man coughed blood in the sand, Darius was suddenly feeling fine. Great, even.

He kicked the man on the ground again. He had knocked the Russian chick a good one, and he would turn his attention to her when he was done with this one.

He didn’t know why the ground was shaking. Didn’t care. He guessed maybe a shit-ton of explosives had gone off below in the base. It didn’t matter.

The squinty-eyed fucker was crawling away from him, looking up in horror. As if that would help him. He could crawl all he wanted. He wasn’t going to get away.

Suddenly something slammed into Darius from behind, and the ground shook violently again. He hit the dirt face down, taking a cloud of dust in the mouth. Now he was pissed. He rolled to the side and saw it had been the feisty little Rusky. Okay, bitch. We’re gonna dance. But instead of fighting, the woman was frantically trying to drag the Korean away.

He pulled a long Kennesaw Cutlery survival knife from its sheath on his leg. He couldn’t believe the little slut wasn’t even looking at him.

The ground rumbled again, and he had a hard time staying on his feet this time. When he regained his balance, he noticed the two of them weren’t looking at him.

They were looking up.

FIFTY-ONE

Knight couldn’t tear his eyes away, as the giant foot came down.

The bald mercenary with the missing ear, who had kicked the crap out of him, only thought to look up at the last second. By that point, he wouldn’t have been able to even understand what was about to flatten him.

The immense foot smashed to the ground, squirting the mercenary out from under its heel like a stamped-on ketchup packet. The giant foot had fallen so close to Knight that for a few seconds, he wasn’t sure whether any of the gore had come from his own body. He wondered whether he would have even felt a limb or two being flattened that fast.

But then the huge foot took another step, and Knight could see the grotesque imprint of the flattened man on the underside of the thing’s massive foot, dripping wetness, as it swept overhead and pivoted, back the way it had come.

Knight coughed feebly, spitting up a wad of bloody phlegm. He was faring better than the man who’d attacked him, but he’d taken a beating.“Probably…gonna need a doctor.”

“I’ll get you to the others. Contact Queen,” Asya said.

Knight couldn’t stop coughing, so he fumbled at his ear with one hand and passed the earpiece to Asya, along with his throat mic, which he peeled away from his neck. The glue on the microphone had turned gooey in the heat.

“Pawn to Queen. Knight is in bad shape. Need assistance right now,” Asya donned the communications gear, pulling the transmitter pack from Knight’s belt. “Also, there is velikan on the loose.”

“A what?” came Queen’s reply.

“Velikan. Is Russian word for Great Big Fucking Giant.”

“We’ve seen. What’s wrong with Knight?”

Asya sighed. “Mercenary kicked crap out of him. He’s coughing blood.”

“Where are you?”

“That thing nearly stepped on us a second ago,” Asya said, as Knight finally settled down and stopped hacking.

“Okay. Stay put. I’m sending your parents to you.”

Asya turned to Knight. “She is sending my mother and father. We’ll get you to a hospital.”

“I’ll be able to limp around with an adrenaline shot,” Knight said.

“I haven’t got one. We will see what we can do. Queen says to stay here.”

Asya sat on the ground next to him and wiped some of the muck from his face with her hand.

“Flat man was a pig, but this end was undignified — even for him.”

“Quick, though,” Knight said with a laugh, and then winced at the pain in his ribs. He was pretty sure a few of them were broken. His face felt butchered too. His left arm was sore where a bullet had grazed him, and he felt like he had to pee, but if he did it would be extremely painful.

“Not gonna be much use fighting whatever the hell that thing was.”

Asya patted him on the head. “Don’t worry, Sniper-Man. We’ll just blow it up. Won’t need a steady shot for that.”

“I knew letting Ridley out was a bad idea,” Knight said, as he rubbed his forehead.

Asya said nothing.

He turned to look at her. “About Jack…I’m sorry, Asya.” She nodded, then turned away. “Now is not the time.”

They lapsed into silence, and Knight closed his eyes. He was in no shape to help her repel any more mercenaries if they showed up, and she was a pretty good shot with an MP-5. He could rest.

A minute later, Peter and Lynn Machtchenko came rushing down the path. She carried another MP-5, and he held a couple of small nylon pouches in his hands. Peter skidded to a stop and began frantically unzipping the pouches. Lynn remained standing and kept looking behind her.

“We have to hurry,” Lynn said.

Peter pulled out an adrenaline auto injector and stabbed it into Knight’s arm. Then he handed Knight two huge white pills. “Dry swallow. Sorry I don’t have water.”

Knight took the pills and ground them in his teeth, then swallowed the ground gritty remains. They were prescription-strength painkillers — he recognized the bitter taste.

The adrenaline started flowing through him.

Peter crawled behind him and slipped his arms into Knight’s armpits. He started to haul Knight up, and Asya came over to help from his front. In a few awkward seconds, Knight was on his feet. He actually felt better on his feet, since his ribs weren’t resting against anything and pushing painfully on his innards.

“Now what?” Knight asked.

“Now we run,” Lynn said. “That thing is coming back. And fast!”

Asya had one side of him and Peter the other, as they started to run. It was only now that Knight paid attention to the thunderous footfalls vibrating through the ground. Whatever belonged to the huge feet wasn’t walking now.

It was stomping.

FIFTY-TWO

Alexander stopped them in the shadows of the next room. They waited from the edge of the darkened doorway, watching the lit lab, where they could see but not be seen.

“Shouldn’t we go?” King hissed.

“We need to make sure our assumptions about time are correct. I remember what I did back then. We have about twenty minutes after he finds the body before he goes on a full-on tantrum, destroying everything in sight. If it doesn’t go down that way, we might need to reconsider our next steps.”

They waited in silence.

After a few minutes, the younger version of Alexander — the Hercules of myth — stepped drunkenly out of the far doorway and staggered down the steps into the lab. He was whistling a tune of some sort, when he saw the body on the ground near the bars. The tune died slowly on his lips, as if his lungs had just run out of air to continue blowing.

He stood in place for a full thirty seconds. Then he walked slowly toward the body on the ground. He looked up at the Forgotten wraiths, clustered around the bars, watching him, and reaching through the bars for the body’s ankle, which was just a few inches too far away.

King noticed that as the shaken man walked to the cell and the body, he suddenly exhibited none of the drunken stagger he had just a moment ago. The sight of the body had sobered him in an instant.

Young Alexander knelt down next to the body, but did not touch it.

From the shadows, the older Alexander held his hand out to the others in the dark, as if to say: Wait. Here it comes. We’re either right or very, very wrong.

The younger man, still dressed in the clothes he had worn to the marketplace, reached out a hand slowly, and touched the body’s neck, feeling for a pulse. The hand stayed in place for an interminably long moment, then simply dropped to the man’s side. A low moaning escaped the man’s lips, but the sound went on and on, without a new breath. It grew in intensity until it was more like a siren then a moan.

He lowered his head, and the sound grew raspy like a growl.

In the shadows, the elder Alexander waved the other two down the hall as the younger Alexander threw his head back and howled in anguish. The sound was heartbreaking.

King turned and led the way down the long room where he had fought and died several times, and into the narrow tunnel beyond. As the last of the ambient light receded, Acca placed her hand on his shoulder. She couldn’t see. He slowed his pace in the dark as the younger Hercules’s screams echoed through the caverns.

Soon they came to the edge of the arena. King was about to tell Acca about the hellhound, but Alexander beat him to it. King saw that most of the bodies he had piled were gone now. The three of them circled around the perimeter of the massive cavern, but the huge dog didn’t notice. It was busy devouring and crunching the bones of a Forgotten.

When they reached the far tunnel that led to the forest, Alexander had them wait. He ran back into the center of the arena and quickly climbed onto Cerberus’s back. The animal was startled and began twisting its head, trying to snap at him. He quickly pulled the pin securing the chain around the hound’s central head. Then he leapt off of the beast and ran for the tunnel. The huge animal gave chase for just a second, but then thought better of it and turned back to its easy meal.

Alexander led them through the night forest and around the lake, until both Acca and King were so tired they could barely stand.

“We need to stop soon,” King said.

“It won’t be safe to stop anywhere near here. We need to get at least another town over. Tomorrow we can make for Antium, where I have another lab.”

“I am so very tired, my love. I do not think I can go another step tonight.” Acca sounded half asleep already.

Alexander reached into a small pouch on his belt and produced a tiny tin, in which King knew he kept the last of his herbs. By the light of the full moon, King watched the man pull out a small leaf and crush it between his fingers, before sprinkling the crumbs into his mouth, his head tilted back. He sighed heavily, and then swept Acca up into his meaty arms.

“I hope you can manage on your own, Jack. I don’t think I could carry you both.”

“I’ll make it,” King said, his body already easing the pain in his lungs. Then he started off through the forest again, taking the lead. Alexander’s speed slowed with the weight of his wife, but they still put a lot of distance between themselves and the lake, before the moon went down in the sky and only stars lit the way.

Acca had long since fallen asleep in Alexander’s arms as they walked. He had shifted her into one meaty arm, so he could allow the other to rest for a time. Then he would shift her to the other arm, and vigorously shake the first, as if it had gone to sleep on him. King knew the extra strength the herb had provided the man would be fading from his system soon. Even though Acca was slim, her sleeping dead-weight must have been exhausting to carry. King would have offered to carry her for a time, but he was barely able to keep going himself. If not for his body’s ability to heal, he would have collapsed long ago. They walked on under the stars in silence.

For a few minutes, King felt like it was old times for the two of them, but then he reminded himself that their mission was nearly complete, and soon he would be going home. He blinked and saw Sara’s face. It came clear to him for the first time in a long time. Perhaps knowing he would see her again allowed whatever mental defenses he had created to collapse. Whatever the cause, the brief mental glimpse brought a smile to his face.

“What’s next? We get to your place in Antium, and then what? How do we get you home? How do I get back? All you’ve ever told me was that you had access to the technology — but not until the time was right.”

“That’s the tricky part, Jack.”

“Saving Acca wasn’t tricky?”

“What comes next involves untested technology I created in this time, but never found a power source for. We have to examine the machine I made when I was younger, alter it and incorporate the things I learned from the Norway technology. We couldn’t get to the tech early, because I couldn’t be sure my younger self wouldn’t stop in for a visit. That’s not going to happen now. I spend a few days tearing up the area around the lake, and then months in a depression, rarely leaving that villa. It will be safe for us in Antium, now.”

“So the tech is dodgy, but why is this the tricky bit?” King asked, understanding the issue with avoiding Alexander’s younger self. The two had discussed such things for years, debating issues of paradox and destiny.

“Powering the machine,” Alexander replied. “I never used it to return home, because I couldn’t power it. Not until the twentieth century — but by then, I had come up with this plan to save her. The hard part is we have to power the device with this…” Alexander held up a small brown rock the size of a golf ball, which hung around his neck on a thick chain he had worn since they arrived in the past. He let it fall gently to his chest, then awkwardly tucked it back into his robe with the one hand, while his other arm cradled Acca.

“What…exactly…is that thing?” It looked familiar, but King couldn’t place it.

“Paris,” Alexander said.

The single word triggered King’s memory. He’d never forget Paris and that he’d nearly been sucked inside out by a sentient…

“Wait. We closed that portal. Completely. That can’t be what I think it is.”

“If what you think is a dwarf black hole, hidden inside the flimsiest of rock coverings? Then yes, that’s exactly what it is.”

FIFTY-THREE

“You’ve been wearing a black fucking hole around your neck for twenty years, and you didn’t think to tell me?”

Acca stirred in Alexander’s arms, so he shifted her to both arms. She laid her head against his chest and went back to sleep.

“Quiet, Jack. Let’s not wake her.” They continued walking across a pasture. “I’ve told you before how much I’ve been playing this whole thing by ear. I wasn’t sure any of this would work. But there’s simply no power source in this time that is strong enough. I took this thing in Paris for this very purpose. It’s an immense source of power. If anything can power up the portal I have here, this will be it.” Alexander moved over to a soft rise of grass and gently set Acca down on it. She stirred briefly, opened her eyes and looked around, then blinked and went back to sleep on the grass.

King plopped down on the ground himself, ready for sleep. Alexander sat cross-legged. “I’ll take first watch. Get some sleep, Jack. You’re going to need it.”

King yawned. “Why? What’s waiting for us in Antium?”

“Man eating birds with sharp bronze beaks and projectile metallic feathers,” Alexander said.

King sat up. “Seriously?”

“No. Just joking.”

“Dick,” King laid back down.

Alexander laughed. “Go to sleep.”

Hours later they began walking south again. King walked ahead, allowing Alexander and Acca time to discuss the extremely complicated story their lives had become. When they stopped in a small village for a lunch of bread, cheese and wine, Acca seemed convinced. She no longer questioned the impossibility of their having travelled back in time. Her only questions were geared toward what they needed to do next.

“Jack,” she said, “Alexander tells me that you have a woman for whom, you too, would cross the oceans of time. You must miss her very much. I am so grateful you were willing to come assist him.”

King just nodded. He didn’t think it would be right to tell her how he didn’t have much choice in coming. It was also water under the bridge for him. But the mention of Sara, made him yearn to be done with this mission — especially since they were so close to the end now.

Alexander had left them after lunch to obtain some horses. King was left to chat with Acca over wine.

“He’s missed you terribly. Everything he’s done over the years was to keep his identity a secret and to make this all possible.”

“Tell me about your time,” she said, sitting back in her chair.

He laughed. “It’s so different in many ways, but still the same in others. We’ve made many advances. Men have travelled to the moon in a flying cart, I guess you would call it. Most of the carts on the ground are propelled by what would seem like magic, but is more of a complicated series of metal parts that make the wheels move, fueled by a liquid we pump from the ground and refine. People live indoors, and we have boxes to keep our food cold in the kitchen, and other boxes to cook with. We have rooms in our homes where you can defecate and urinate, and water will flush those things away from your house to a place where the waste is treated and broken down into mostly harmless parts. We can hold a small device in our hands and speak to people on the other side of the world with it. But we’ve also made so many terrible things. Weapons that can kill a man in a blink. Weapons that can destroy entire cities just a fast. There are wars in the future that will claim millions of lives, and there are men, who would, if given the chance, destroy all of humanity.”

Acca sat up in her chair. “It sounds terrible. How did so many things come to be made? Were they gifts from the gods?”

King smiled. “No. Most of these things were simply developed over time by man, to fulfill one purpose or another. It’s our nature to turn just about everything into weapons.”

Acca seemed to digest this information, while sipping more of her wine.

“And what do you do to make this strange world of yours a better place?”

King thought about the question for a while. He thought about his life — first in the military and later with Chess Team. He decided to break it down into the simplest terms possible. “The people who kill innocents, who seek out power at the expense of others, or who, in their madness, want to destroy the world…” He looked up at her eyes, saw his mother for a moment, and said, “I find them. And I stop them.”

“And if they can’t be stopped?”

“Then I kill them.”

Acca nodded in understanding. She was no stranger to violence. “Why do you do it?”

King had often thought about the bizarre nature of what he did, but he rarely gave thought to why. It was like breathing. He just did it.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said.

Acca smiled. “I can see why she likes you.”

FIFTY-FOUR

Richard Ridley was sweating. It took concentration to use the mother tongue to animate inanimate things, like mud and stone. The larger the golem, the harder it was to not just grant the thing life, but also give it direction. Purpose. A mission it would follow until its undoing. And as far as golems went, it didn’t get bigger than the Colossus.

The statue was made of iron, bronze, brass and stone, but unlike other such statues built many centuries later, this one was not hollow. It had been filled with crushed stone and rock of varying sizes. Over the centuries, coral and sediment had cemented the interior spaces between the brass plates forming the skin, so that even though much of the iron tie bars inside had rusted away, the statue held its integrity. Making the thing stand and walk, as if it were alive, meant forcing breaks along joints that did not exist, and grinding the stone and metal past each other, then re-bonding the molecules, so the limbs did not simply fall off.

He had used the tongue to animate things before, but the Colossus was huge, and it was taxing his abilities. Sweat poured down his face, and his arms felt weak. He mumbled the guttural language, repeatedly, like a mantra, to keep the statue alive.

Once the shooting had started, he had a hard time seeing where to direct the statue. He was startled initially at the automatic weapons fire, and he had simply stopped the thing from walking. He should have known some of the Chess Team would make it out of Omega and past his men. Their skills, while a constant annoyance, were impressive. He had ducked behind the ruins with Seth and sent the Colossus toward the sound of gunfire, stomping on anything that moved, while Trigger and Carpenter returned fire. Without time to imbue the statue with intelligence enough to control its own actions, Ridley really needed a higher perch from which to control the statue. If he could see where he was sending the ancient statue, he’d be able to steer it better. He considered the minaret on the nearby mosque, but then realized he’d only need to keep the Chess Team busy for a few minutes longer.

The statue was his. It was one of the first antiquities he had discovered in his endless search for ancient knowledge and power. He had built his Omega facility right next to it on the shore, and had paid a fortune for the sea wall in his office, so he could look at it and dream of one day making it walk. It had been a long journey from there to here. Now, he was finally making the thing move. If only the last members of Chess Team could be dealt with, he would soon have the Chest of Adoon, and then the remaining military forces of the world would fall before him. Oh, certainly they would try to destroy him first, with their special forces teams, assassins and probably even a nuclear warhead. But none of those things would work.

He stuck his head up over the stone barrier, quickly checking on the position from which the gunfire was coming. Then he looked to the sky to see where he had sent the Colossus on its last blind sprint. He was getting closer.

He dropped down behind the stone wall, just as a bullet pinged off the top of it, missing his head by less than an inch.

“What can I do?” Seth asked from beside him.

“Crawl that way. Peek around the side of that rock and shout directions to me, while I try to steer our large friend.”

Ridley returned to mumbling the ancient language commanding the statue, as Seth scrambled away to another nearby block of stone exposed from the sandy soil.

The ground trembled as the Colossus charged back into the center of the Antonine Baths, its footfalls crushing blocks of stone and fragments of columns as it came.

“Turn right a bit,” Seth called from his vantage point.

Ridley made the mental adjustment and uttered the harsh words from the back of his throat.

“Good, now bring it closer to us.”

The rumbling footfalls sped up, as the creature lumbered faster toward their location.

“They are running for the trees now. Try to angle it to the left—” Seth began.

Suddenly, their position was riddled with bullets, shots ricocheting off the stone, and hitting all around the ground of their hiding place.

“Fuck!” Ridley’s concentration was broken. He lost control of the Colossus, and it stopped moving, frozen in mid stride. He and Seth scrambled away from the stone and down the embankment to the beach, away from the gunfire.

Somehow, it was coming from above them. Ridley scanned the skies, looking for a helicopter or something, but he found nothing. He looked up the beach to their former hide. Carpenter was dead. Trigger was scooting across the sand toward a stone block, trailing a river of blood from one limp leg. The man wouldn’t last long.

“Where they hell did that come from?” Ridley asked.

He frantically looked up and down the beach. At the north end, he saw figures in black moving into the ruins — more of his men. Finally. The local military would be dressed in garishly bright camouflage — exactly the wrong color for the local environment. The police would be dressed in black, but they would be carrying plastic riot shields with Arabic text emblazoned across them.

Now he just needed the mercenaries to keep the Chess Team busy long enough. He needed to get the Colossus under control and bring it to him. All he needed was a few uninterrupted minutes.

Suddenly, more bullets ripped into the sand from above, and Ridley and Seth leapt back, diving into the water.

“There,” Seth was shouting and pointing. “It’s coming from up there!”

Ridley looked up the body of the Colossus. Right up its chest to the cape bunched around its neck and the head with its pointed crown. On top of the head, next to one of the spires jutting off the crown, Ridley could see brief flashes of light.

“Son of a bitch! One of them is on top of it. How the hell did he get up there?”

“Can you toss him off?” Seth asked.

“I can do better than that,” Ridley said. He tried to ignore the hail of bullets occasionally peppering the sand of the beach, and he sat down in the shallow water, letting the warm water rise to his neck.

He began uttering the strange ancient language. He closed his eyes and let them roll up into his head, as he focused on one thought.

One command.

He repeated it in his mind, and then his mouth and tongue uttered the thought in the foreign language over and over again.

Slap. Your. Head.

FIFTY-FIVE

Bishop swore as his MP-5 ran dry. He’d been firing at the spot where Ridley and his men were hunkered down, when the gigantic statue went on a thunderous rampage, crushing everything under foot, before returning to the shore and suddenly stopping.

Then Rook had started firing from his perch up on top of the statue’s head. Ridley’s concentration must have broken.

“Longer you keep them off guard with shit like that, the more chance we have of finding you a really big step-ladder, Rook,” he spoke into his throat mic, as he set his submachine gun down on the sandy ground, and pulled out a pistol. It was better than nothing. If Peter and Lynn made it back with Knight, he’d get a spare magazine from them.

“Hardy har har,” came Rook’s reply. “I’m getting sun burnt like a friggin’ scorpion up here.”

Queen fired off a final blast of gunfire from her own weapon until the magazine was empty. “Just keep firing on Ridley’s position. If he can’t concentrate, he can’t move that thing.”

Queen turned to Bishop. “Any more mags?”

He shrugged. “Was gonna ask you,” he said, even though he knew she was out.

“Shit.”

Bishop heard movement behind his position and whirled the 9 mm around. Peter and Asya were struggling along, with Knight in between them. The little man looked like he’d been worked over by someone Bishop’s size. Lynn came behind them with an MP-5, covering the group as they moved. Bishop got up and ran to them. He slipped into Asya’s place, taking Knight’s weight.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Some bald guy missing an ear kicked the crap out of me. He said something about ‘his forces’, so I guess he must have been in charge,” Knight’s voice was weak.

“Ridley’s not running the show?” Bishop said.

“He looked a bit like Ridley, but it wasn’t another duplicate.”

Queen came and joined the group. They all crouched as another fusillade of bullets came their way, pinging off the stone ruins.

“This guy is missing an ear, you said?” she asked.

“Was. The golem squashed him flat.” Knight closed his eyes.

“I think I know who that was,” Queen said, accepting a fresh magazine from Peter, as Lynn handed Bishop her MP-5. He gave her the 9 mm in exchange.

“You do?” Bishop asked.

“Darius Ridley. Richard’s brother. I met him in the Ukraine. I’m the one who took the ear.”

“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer prick,” Knight mumbled. “Where’s Rook?”

Bishop pointed, and Knight tiled his head to look up to the Colossus. “That’s the Colossus of Rhodes. Rook’s on top.”

“Is he steering it?” Knight asked, his eyes wide.

“Nope. Just hitching a ride.”

As if to prove the point, another burst of gunfire erupted from the crown of the stationary statue, raining down on the beach. Rook let out a whoop, his voice faint, but he was clearly enjoying the crazy situation that would petrify most people.

“He ought to just chuck grenades down,” Knight said.

“I think he’s out. Besides, I’m not sure they’d make it to the ground before going off.”

“Who are we shooting at?” Knight asked.

“Ridley, one clone, two mercs,” Queen said. “I might have hit one of the mercs.”

“So let’s rush them while Rook has them pinned,” Knight suggested, then fell into a bout of coughing.

“Yeah, ’cause you’re in shape for a quick sprint up the beach followed by some hand to hand,” Bishop said.

“Let me at ‘em,” Knight wheezed.

“It’s not a bad idea,” Peter said. “I know I’m not my son, but I’ve been in a few scrapes. We can flank them while your man on the statue keeps them pinned. If we wait until their reinforcements come, we’re dead. If we wait until Ridley can control that giant again, we’re even more dead.”

Queen looked like she was running through scenarios in her head, then she nodded. “Bishop, the beach from the south. Lynn, stay here with Knight. Peter, with me to the north. Asya, you stay in the middle and make them think we’re still here.”

“I’m a better shot than Peter, why don’t I come with you?” Lynn asked. Queen and Bishop looked at her and Peter. The man nodded in agreement with the plan.

“Fine, let’s go.”

Bishop ran down a dirt road to his right, keeping low, so the short rock walls still standing from the ancient bathing complex shielded him to some small degree. He scanned the area ahead, then the tree-line to his right, the giant statue near the beach and back toward Knight’s position with Peter. As he brought his eyes back to the beach, he caught a glimpse of motion where there shouldn’t have been any, far to the north, through the ruins. He dropped behind the low wall and rolled to a stop. Then he crawled next to the wall, inched up to the top and took a peek.

He didn’t see anything for a full minute. Then he saw a man dressed in black dart from one block of stone to another. He wondered if Ridley’s boys were trying the same thing he was. But then he saw another man move through the ruins. Then another.

Shit.

He keyed his microphone. “Queen, you read?”

“What?”

“Reinforcements. North end. Wearing black and leap-frogging through the ruins.”

“Dammit.”

Bishop checked the statue again. Its hand reached up toward its head. “Rook! Get out of there! The hand is coming up! You gotta move!”

The gunfire from the top of the Colossus stopped, as the creature’s huge hand swung up and slammed down on top of its head, as if it were trying to swat away the world’s largest deerfly. The impact made a cracking sound as loud as a peal of thunder.

FIFTY-SIX

The machine was amazing, especially considering the date. The lab was full of metal components that shouldn’t exist for thousands of years.

There was a massive arc of thin metal that looked like gold, supported by a wooden frame, shaped roughly like the Greek symbol Omega: Ω. The top of the arch was taller than Alexander — easily enough room for three normal people to use the arch as a gateway. The structure stood in the middle of a huge lab. Rough unsheathed copper wire wound around the frame and the golden metal. At the far end of the room, an old wooden waterwheel stood. King could tell at a glance that the younger Alexander had tried to power the arch with crude electricity from the waterwheel, but he knew it wouldn’t have been nearly enough power.

The design of the electrical wiring, the layout of unsheathed coiled cables across the stone and the bent metal plates that lined the outside of the arch like armor reminded King of the dimensional portal he had passed through in Norway. There were other molded metal shapes, the purpose for which King could not fathom. In one part of the room, a small pit was gouged out of the stone floor and filled with a noxious green chemical liquid, through which some of the exposed copper wiring ran.

“A lot of this stuff looks like you built it with knowledge of future sciences. If this is your first trip back to the past, how did you pull that off?” King asked.

Alexander sat heavily in a chair near the apparatus and looked at King. “You’ve lived here in the past long enough to know that history and myth often present a less than accurate picture about ancient events. Science becomes religion, or witchcraft. Sometimes even the most extraordinary events or discoveries are forgotten and erased from time.”

King leaned against a wall and nodded. Acca sat in a chair nearby, listening, but her face revealed nothing about whether she was already privy to the information Alexander was about to share.

“How do you suppose people of this time would have explained me? A man of my strength and vitality? Someone with knowledge of things most people would consider magic? Even though I’ve spent most of my life keeping what I knew hidden, people occasionally catch a glimpse of what I can do. How do you think they would explain it?”

“Hercules. Bastard son of Zeus,” King said.

“Precisely. You’ve known me over two decades. Do I like snakes?”

“No. You always let me go first if there were snakes.”

“So what’s the likelihood I throttled some of them in my crib? People make up stories about people they perceive as heroes. I didn’t always keep to myself. Before Acca, I was arrogant and a showoff. Stories got told, and they amplified over the years. Some of it was based in truth. You know the Hydra was real, and you met Cerberus. But was I the offspring of Zeus? Of course not. As far as I know, Zeus doesn’t exist. And I’ve told you this was my first trip back to the past. What does that leave?”

King thought about his encounters with Alexander before their trip to the past. The man was mysterious. He kept to himself. He led a devoted group of followers. He was immortal. He had an army of the Forgotten around the world — failed scientific experiments, he had claimed. He knew things before others did. He obscured the truth about history, allowing the myths to obfuscate the truth further.

And he knew about Chess Team’s battle in Norway, even though he wasn’t there. King had traveled through a dimensional portal to another dimension, where he had encountered a creature that called him one of the ‘Children of Adoon.’ King had come to learn that Adoon was another name by which Alexander was known. And now King was looking at yet another dimensional portal that Alexander had created. The design was clearly the same basic structure.

“You’re…not human, are you?”

Alexander smiled. “Depends on your definition of human, Jack. I am a man, with biology roughly similar to most people on the planet, though more similar to yours. I don’t have two hearts or scales on my skin. I am human, but no, I’m not from this dimension. I was a scientist. A simple man of science. And I found a way between worlds. This dimension wasn’t the first I visited. I saw myself as an intrepid explorer. I investigated several dimensions and encountered many different kinds of…people, including the monster Fenrir, you encountered in Norway. I became addicted to discovery and with each new dimension, I became more arrogant. And sloppy.”

King interrupted. “You got stranded here.”

Alexander chuckled softly.

“I had the know-how to design this machine from scratch. I just didn’t realize that I wouldn’t find any suitable power sources.” Alexander stood and paced back and forth. “Can you imagine how I searched? I was just over four hundred years old when I met Acca.”

“Four hundred years old?” King asked, a skeptical eyebrow raised.

“A natural lifespan for people in my dimension, where a richer atmosphere, free of pollutants, and slightly different biology allow for longevity. There was a time in this dimension where men lived nearly a thousand years. Methuselah. Adam. Noah. All are said to have lived more than nine-hundred years.”

“You don’t believe that—” King stopped his argument, remembering the age of the man to whom he spoke.

Alexander grinned. “I travelled the world in search of power. I investigated every meteorite that fell to Earth. I followed up on every rumor of the supernatural and the strange.”

“And you built a portal home from scraps and bits you cobbled together yourself…”

“I mined some of the gold in those connectors myself.” Alexander pointed at the machine.

King looked to Acca. “Did you know he was from…somewhere else?”

She simply nodded.

“Can she live in your world?” King asked.

Alexander nodded. “Of course. The air is almost identical. It’ll be like living on the side of a mountain for her. Clear crisp air, with a slightly rarefied atmosphere. It’s a peaceful world, with far more wide open natural spaces than here…even in this time.”

“So even after Acca ‘died’…” King made quotes in the air with his fingers, “you worked to find a power source for the machine.”

“At first, I was destroyed by the grief, and like most people, I just wanted to go home to my loved ones. My family. And I had been trying for so very many years. I operated out of the shadows as best I could. For a while I affected the outcome of events and wars. If a potential outcome could get in my way, I got involved. After a while, I realized little could get in my way. So I worked from the shadows. I kept my identity a secret, and when something powerful from antiquity came along, I got my hands on it first. If something didn’t suit my purposes, I kept it safe and out of the wrong hands. Eventually I gained some followers — the Herculean Society — people dedicated to my ideals of preventing powerful objects from being used for evil and protecting historical sites — many of which hold meaning to me personally — from desecration. They also helped obscure the truth about the past with mystery and myth, though not even the Society always knew why.

“And then I encountered Chess Team. My first encounter was with Rook and Queen. They were rude but brave…and expected. I saw a recording of that battle in New Hampshire. I watched how you handled the monster, and I knew our time together had nearly begun. I kept an eye on you from then on, knowing you would become an ally. I had inside information, after all.”

“Inside information?” King asked. His face darkened. “Who?”

Alexander smiled, but it quickly faded. He became serious. Quiet. “Before the Hydra. Before Ridley and Delta. Before Julie died. I have always known you, Jack. How is that possible? Think. You have all the pieces. Use that incredible mind of yours. You were never just a soldier.”

King looked at the machine and thought about what he had just heard. He had Alexander’s genes in him. He was a descendant. Did his parent’s know more than they had told about that? Or was Deep Blue holding back on a secret alliance with Alexander? No, that doesn’t make sense. But then, as he looked at the flimsy portal and the crude copper cabling, he realized what was missing from the machine — a computer.

This machine couldn’t be automated.

Someone had to run it.

Someone…who stayed behind.

FIFTY-SEVEN

“I have only the one machine, Jack, and only one black hole to power it. It’s good for one trip. One way. If you want me to use it to send you home, I will. But Acca and I will be stranded here, out of time and space. Even if we go into hiding somewhere, the danger of me running into the younger version of myself will be extreme. I travelled broadly.”

“You bastard,” King stood up, and stalked across the lab to shout in Alexander’s face. “You brought me here against my will. Now you’re emotionally blackmailing me—again—telling me I’m the only hope you have for getting home. What made you think I would go for this?”

Alexander’s face was sober, but friendly, despite King shouting at him so hard that spittle had flown from King’s mouth and landed on Alexander’s face in little specks. “Because you already did.”

King frowned, confused.

“How do you think I snuck into your highly secure base in New Hampshire and stole that laptop with the plans for the Norway machine, Jack? Without triggering a single alarm? Without anyone seeing me? I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

“You’re saying I took the laptop?”

“You already made this decision.” Alexander reached out to place his hand on King’s shoulder, but King yanked away.

“You fooled me into believing you were a good man,” King said.

“This is all new to you,” Alexander said, “But to me…Jack, we’ve been friends for a long time. A very long time.”

King shook his head and stormed away. He was flustered. His face felt hot. Blood rushed through his ears. The possibility of what Alexander was telling him scared the shit out of him.

Sara. Fiona.

King felt the muscles in his neck constrict as panic set in. He wasn’t one to run from a fight, but he ran from this, as fast as he could, out of the lab. He blindly stumbled through the hallways and passages in Alexander’s Antium villa, looking for the way out. Eventually, he opened a window and just climbed outside, sucking in the evening air in huge gulps. He felt like he couldn’t breathe.

He was trapped. He couldn’t get home.

He was stuck in the past.

He ran a hundred yards away from the building toward the beach. They were on the northern shore of a town called Antium — a place Alexander had told him would eventually be the modern city of Anzio, made famous by the Allies landing here in World War II.

He staggered down to the water, thinking about the Allied landing, trying to keep his head from the enormity of what lay before him.

At the water’s edge, Jack Sigler, callsign: King, gave up. He fell to his knees in the sand and hung his head.

He stayed like that a long time, until the sky turned dark, and he heard Alexander’s footsteps behind him. The man sat softly in the sand next to him. He was quiet for a while.

“If there was any other way—”

“There is,” King said weakly. “Send me home.”

“If you really want me to do that, I will. It’ll take a few months to recalibrate the machine…but—”

“But, you know that’s not going to happen,” King said. “Because it would have already and you would have no memory of me. Did I tell you why?”

“Why, what?”

“Why I decided to remain in the past? Why I decided to give up my life?”

“You’re not giving it up,” Alexander said. “Merely postponing it.”

“By 2800 years!” King shouted, clenching his fists.

They stayed quiet for a minute and then Alexander said, “You told me…it was the right thing to do.”

It was a God-awful stupid answer, but King recognized the thought as his own, the primal force that motivated all his decisions. The right thing. But this didn’t feel right. “This can’t be how it happens…” King said softly.

“A lot of good will come of it,” Alexander said.

“For you,” King said, “I’m sure.”

“For us both.” Alexander leaned forward and lazily traced his finger through the sand. “For the world. You…make a difference, Jack. The world needed saving long before you were born.”

King perked up. Alexander was playing to his sense of duty, he knew, but he couldn’t hide his interest. “Explain.”

“The details, I’m afraid, will have to be discovered later on, but simply put, there are times throughout history when grievous wrongs need to be undone, when men and women need saving, when all of humanity finds itself on the brink…and sometimes, more often than not, I am not the one who stands up to the darkness.”

“You are full of shit,” King said. “You think a good speech is going to—”

“I didn’t save Fiona.”

King turned to him. “No, you kidnapped her.”

“Before that, Jack. On the reservation, where you found her, in the car. That was you. She would have died with the rest had you not been there. This circle…this path…it saves my wife, but it also saves your daughter.”

“How do I know that anything you’re telling me is true?”

Alexander leaned back revealing a drawing in the sand, two vertical lines joined by a circle, the symbol for the Herculean Society and Alexander’s calling card.

Mental tumblers once again fell into place. If Alexander was telling the truth, this symbol wasn’t just used by Alexander. According to his stories, King left a note bearing this symbol, once after saving Fiona and once after stealing the laptop.

“You have always misinterpreted this symbol,” Alexander said. “It was never an H. Never stood for Hercules. The circle is the world. The lines are two pillars, holding everything together. The two leaders of the Herculean Society.”

“The wraiths in the library in Malta,” King whispered. “This is why they obeyed me.”

Alexander nodded. “They could see you were different. Less sure of yourself. But the Forgotten, in the future, would never harm you.”

King searched his mind for an argument, for some other reality that made sense. Sara and Fiona were within his grasp. They had never been further, but he’d been expecting to see them soon. But if Alexander was telling the truth, and King did not stay, Fiona would die. King’s life would be radically altered. The circle that bound him and Alexander would be broken and Acca would also die.

“She’s a good woman,” King said.

“Unparalleled,” Alexander agreed. “You…will stay?”

King forced the smallest of smiles. “You already know the answer.” He stood and patted Alexander on his shoulder. “I’m glad you got her back.”

Alexander stood as well. “What now?”

“Now…we send you both home,” King said. “Before I change my mind.”

They walked back into the villa. Alexander led them directly to the lab. Acca was waiting there, sitting in a chair, wringing her hands together.

She stood when they entered. “Are you alright, Jack?”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Alexander explained what you must do. I am very sorry.” She took his hands. “Do you remember what you told me? About why you do the things you do? You said because it was the right thing to do, but you never said it was also the hardest thing to do.” She wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him tightly. “Thank you.” She had tears in her eyes when she stepped away.

He nodded, then turned to Alexander. “Show me what to do.”

Alexander procured the rock on the chain around his neck. He tugged the chain hard, until it snapped off the top of the rock, where it had been affixed. Then he held it out to King.

“You’ll need to set it into the machine…there,” Alexander pointed at a round receptacle he had made from a cup, with wires running into and out of it. “The portal should open instantly. When we step through, there’s a good chance that everything will blow up on this end. I suggest you run like hell. Immortality isn’t a blessing if you’re buried alive.”

“Sounds like you speak from experience,” King said, taking the dwarf black hole in his hand. It was far heavier than he thought it would be. Probably over thirty pounds.

“I’ve seen the inside of a few jails, yes. Keep to the edges of history, Jack. You can change the world, but be subtle. Keep your face out of the history books. Stay in the shadows.”

King smiled. “Sounds like business as usual.”

“There will come a day when you will return to your present, as promised. It will be hard to remember them…your family, your friends. Do what you can to preserve their memory and do not forget Carthage. Chess Team will need its King.”

King didn’t think he could ever forget the most important people in his life, the people who made him who he was, but 2800 years was a long time. He felt his resolve waning. “We better do this now.” He stepped up to the machine and held the stone above its receptacle. “Ready?”

Alexander walked to him and held out his hand to shake with King. King grasped the hand and felt it warmly close over his. “Thank you, Jack. For everything.”

“How will I know you made it over there safely?”

“You won’t. You just have to take some things on faith.”

Alexander walked back to Acca, and they stood in front of the empty portal. “Say hello to Lancelot for me.” Alexander smiled broadly as King laughed. He pulled Acca close to him. She smiled nervously at King, then looked up at Alexander. He met her eyes with a reassuring smile and gently stroked her face with his hand.

King heard him whisper to her. “We’ll be fine.”

King dropped the golf-ball sized stone into the cup, where it connected with the copper wires.

Blue arcs of electricity shot across the bare metal cables, filling the room with a burnt stench instantly. The stone shell burst into dust, revealing a small black swirling sphere. Smoke poured off the apparatus, and the arch began to glow with a wall of bluish light.

“Goodbye,” King said.

Alexander gave a nod and led Acca into the blue light. It washed over them like a wave of water and then — they were gone. The light bowed out of the arch, stretching across the room for over twenty feet, before it snapped back into the arch and inverted. Then the frame of the arch buckled and it toppled inward, sucked into the portal. King watched, unable to turn away as the light stretched inward for what looked like a mile. Then it stopped and snapped back toward him.

He closed his eyes.

When King woke, it was daylight, the sun streaming down from overhead where the roof of the lab should have been. He stood up and breathed in the salty smell of the sea. As he stood, a large piece of burnt timber slid off his back and onto the ground. He was standing in a field of rubble.

He could see the beach and the blue waves to his left, and far off to his right he could see a shepherd leading his flock of sheep and carrying the long hooked stick of the trade. No one else was around, but the explosion would eventually draw the curious.

King stepped over the rubble and saw that his robe was in tatters. Although it still covered his crotch, there were more than a few holes singed through to his chest. That would have to be one of his first steps. He paused at the ruined wall and admired the view.

The sound of a jangling bell turned his attention away from the sea. A boy, accompanied by a goat, ran toward him. The boy couldn’t be more than ten. His eyes were wide, his face streaked with tears.

“Help!” the boy yelled. “You must help me.”

He knelt down and caught the panicked boy by his arms. “What’s wrong?”

“Thank the gods for sending you,” the boy said. “I knew it would be you.”

“You know me?” King asked. He’d never seen the boy before.

“Everyone knows you,” the boy said. “I prayed to the gods for help. The ground shook. I saw the smoke. You must have leapt from Olympus!”

King glanced back at the crater left by the explosion. The place looked like it had been struck by a meteor. “Tell me, who do you think I am?”

The boy smiled despite whatever emergency had sent him in search of aid. “You don’t know your own name?”

“Tell me,” King said.

The boy’s smile widened. “You are Perseus, son of Zeus.”

King returned the boy’s smile. “Let’s go.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

Knight watched in horror as the Colossus slapped its hand down on the top of its head, hard enough to break two of the huge spires off the rear of its crown.

They tumbled end over end, until one fell in the sea and the other plunged, tip first, deep into the sand of the beach, where it stood like a modern addition to the surrounding ruins.

“Ohooiet!” Peter said in Russian, standing beside Knight.

“You still there, Rook?” Knight said into his microphone. “Rook?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m still here. I’m on the friggin’ shoulder now. This mega-pecker missed me by inches.” Rook’s voice came through Knight’s earpiece with a lot of static.

Knight heard gunfire then and ducked his head down. Peter crouched down next to him behind the rough, pitted stone.

A few of the structures at the baths, mostly those further from the sea, were still intact, forming nearly complete rooms and doorways, and in a few cases, a second story. But after the Colossus’s rampage, very few structures were left higher than six feet. The few remaining Doric columns had been knocked over, and walls that had stood for hundreds of years had been shattered into little more than stone and pebbles.

But there were still enough walls and rocks to hide behind, and plenty of opportunities for cat-and-mouse games, if the enemy was willing to fall for them. He had spotted some of the mercenaries jockeying for position at the far end of the ruins, and knew the others might be caught unawares.

“Queen, you’ve got hostiles slipping into the complex. Get out of there and rendezvous back with me. We need to move to more level ground.”

“I hear you. We’re on our way,” Queen said. Bishop responded similarly.

“I’d love to make it,” Rook said, “but I think that would end a little messy for me.”

“Understood, Rook,” Knight heard Queen say. “We’ll get you down as soon as we can.”

“Team: this is Deep Blue. I’ve got no satellite coverage for another twenty minutes, so I can’t advise on position, but based on what I’m seeing in older satellite maps, getting out of the ruins is probably a good idea. I’ve got reinforcements coming your way. ETA, thirty minutes. Best I can do.”

Then gunfire erupted all over the ruins. The newly arrived mercenaries had tired of waiting. Queen and Lynn came rushing back to Knight’s position from the north. They slid to a stop behind his low wall, ducking for cover, as the top of the wall pinged with shots, blowing dust over Knight and Peter.

“Nice of you to join us,” Knight said. “Lovely day for a stroll.”

“Fuckers are starting to really piss me off. This whole op is a steaming pile of shit. No recon, no idea of how many we’re up against and…” Queen’s volume dropped off. Knight understood she was about to say that they had lost King, but had stopped herself because Peter and Lynn were present.

Just then, Asya came bounding over the wall, landed a full yard beyond the four clustered people, and rolling gracelessly in the sand. Knight almost fired his pistol at her, thinking she was a threat. Bullets riddled the top of the wall, just a fraction of a second after Asya came hurtling over it. He wondered if she had been hit.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’ll be sore tomorrow. Worse if we get killed. I think we are about to be seriously outnumbered.”

“I’m pinned down,” Bishop’s voice came through the earpiece. “Move out and I’ll join you by going straight to the trees from here. Where are we meeting up?”

Queen spoke up. With King KIA, she was the field team leader. “After the trees, head north. The mercs will cut over from the ruins and try to push us south. That’s just where we want them. If we head too far west, we’ll be back at the mosque and endangering thousands of morning worshippers. The sea is to the east. South is residential neighborhoods. To the north is the Presidential palace — and I can’t believe they haven’t sent out troops yet. But they will soon. Assuming the locals aren’t in Ridley’s pocket, then I want the Presidential guard on the far side of our tangos, putting them in a crossfire.”

“Sounds like a plan, Boss,” Bishop said. “I’m on the move.”

The fact that Bishop had called her ‘Boss’ wasn’t lost on Knight. He knew that Bishop had used that nickname for King sometimes. It meant that Bishop had accepted King’s demise, and already in his head, Queen was King’s permanent replacement as the head of the team. Knight didn’t think he could process King’s loss that fast.

More bullets ripped into the sandy soil to the side of their position.

“We need to move,” Queen said. “Peter. Lynn. Get him up.”

Asya came around to the south side of the group and Queen stayed on the north side. Peter and Lynn slipped their arms around Knight and helped him to a crouch. He took in a deep gasping breath as his crushed rips stabbed into his innards.

“Go,” Queen said.

The five of them made a mad dash for the tree line, with bullets blasting past on both sides and ahead into the trees.

Knight looked back, and once more he caught a glimpse of the brilliant turquoise sea. He wanted nothing more than for his ribs to stop hurting and to be able to take a swim in that water.

Maybe, if we get out of this alive, I’ll take Beck to an island somewhere. Maybe the Maldives.

He and Anna Beck, a support member of Deep Blue’s Endgame organization, had been seeing each other for over a year now. When their relationship began, he’d thought it might not last long, but it had. Now, with bullets flying all around, and him feeling like he might die at any moment, his thoughts turned to her, and he realized how much he missed her.

Peter stumbled on a rock, and suddenly Knight fell toward the ground, with Lynn on top of him. When they hit, the impact from both the ground and Peter on one side of his ribs, and Lynn’s full weight on the other side, made Knight shout out in pain.

“Oh God, sorry, sorry,” Peter said, and he and Lynn both scrambled to disentangle their limbs from his, while Knight’s whole world contracted into a tight ball of pain. His vision went white, and he could hear a loud noise in his ears, but he couldn’t process it. His whole body was shaking with giant thumps.

As the pain subsided, he realized what was happening.

The Colossus was on the move again.

FIFTY-NINE

Queen thought they were done. The gigantic statue had resumed its rampage. They were taking fire from multiple locations. Knight was in no shape to move, let alone walk. Bishop was on his own, and Peter and Lynn had just dropped Knight in a heap on the ground.

Bullets ripped into the sand nearby as the ground rumbled from the Colossus’s thundering footfalls. Queen dropped to one knee and fired back into the ruins until her finger squeezed the trigger and nothing happened. She was out of ammunition. She looked to Lynn again, who had recovered and was helping Knight up.

“Any more mags?” Queen asked.

Lynn shook her head. Peter looked down.

Queen turned to Knight. “What do you have?”

“Just a few shots left.”

Queen dropped her MP-5 and pulled out her Browning handgun. She held her fire, waiting to have a clear shot at one of the black-clad mercenaries darting in and out of the remaining ruins. Then she looked up to see the statue moving her way, across the crumbling walls. It looked like it might step on some of the mercs, too, but there would be no avoiding it once it arrived.

At the edge of the grass, where they had stopped because of Knight’s fall, Queen saw a metal sign fixed to a post. Across the top was a maroon strip reading ‘Danger’ in English and Arabic. Under that was a somehow comical silhouette icon showing a man either about to walk off the end of a crenellated castle’s tower or about to break out into Cossack-style dancing. The end of the tower was crumbling and dropping stones to the ground. The sign had warning in Arabic, French and English to not walk on the ruins. Just then, the Colossus took a sweeping step and its massive foot landed on top of one of the remaining structures in the ruins. The impact sent stone flying in all directions, and a cloud of dust rose up where the structure had stood.

“We’re gonna take as many of these bastards with us as possible,” Queen said. She spotted a man darting for cover and fired a shot. It was well beyond the practical range of her weapon, but she clipped the guy on the shoulder and he went down in a tumble. Peter and Lynn got Knight moving again toward the relative safety of the trees. Asya fired twice more as they ran. Queen held back on her shots, making them last.

When they reached the trees. Queen took up position behind a huge palm and extended her pistol back toward the ruins. She waited patiently, breathing in slow shallow breaths. Soon she saw just what she wanted. Another fool in black, standing out against the sand colored stone. She loosed three shots from her pistol until the man’s body jerked and shuddered, then fell. Two more men popped up in the doorway of a barely standing structure. Most of the left of the wall had crumbled, and only a foot of the right edge of the wall remained. Queen emptied her weapon, but missed the last two men, who returned fire with their AK-47s. She pulled her arm back with the empty 9mm just as the side of her tree splintered outward from heavy fire.

She holstered the handgun and looked down at the ground. Okay, she thought. Now we do things my way. She pulled out an SOG Creed knife from its sheath on her armored leg. The knife was her new favorite. At nearly thirteen inches in length, it was still useful for field operations, but the broad head gave the thing more of a machete look than a typical Special Forces knife. Marketed as the perfect tool for cutting and chopping wood, she knew its true purpose was to increase the length of the cutting edge, for opening up your enemy.

She planned to open anyone stupid enough to get too close.

“Bish, you out of the shit yet? I’m about to start cutting over here,” she keyed the mic, while keeping her eye on the fast approaching Colossus.

“Changed my mind. I went for the beach instead. About to lay the hurt on Ridley’s position with the last of my mags. Should slow up the golem.”

“Okay,” she said. “ Do it. We’re moving north.”

Queen heard gunfire across the ruins and suddenly the Colossus stopped moving. She saw muzzle-flare up on the thing’s shoulder, and knew Rook had joined the fray again.

She raced through the park’s clustered trees, staying off the few paths leading to the other sites of Carthage’s ruins and quickly caught up with the others. Knight was taking more of his own weight now, running with Peter and Lynn, despite his extensive injuries. She guessed the drugs were kicking in now. It wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t find some weapons though. They were pretty much out of bullets.

They burst out into a clearing, and she saw they were too late.

Peter, Lynn and Knight stopped running. Asya started to dart to the left back into the trees before she saw it was useless. Across the clearing, at least forty men stood waiting for them with rifles raised. Queen stopped and swore. Lynn glanced back at Queen, then lowered her weapon to the ground. Peter and Knight dropped theirs as well. Asya looked unsure of what to do.

Queen clutched the grip of her knife tightly, feeling the grooves in the metal grip under her fingertips. She toyed with the idea of rushing the men and slicing up a few of them before they riddled her with bullets. She figured she could get three of them for sure. A fourth or fifth, if luck was with her.

“Put it down lady,” one of them men said in a heavy French accent.

That made her grip the knife tighter. She took a step forward with the knife clutched in her hand. The mercenary raised his AK and seated the stock into his shoulder, pointing it directly at her. It wasn’t the most accurate weapon in the world, favored more for its availability and cheapness, but Queen had no doubt the man could hit her from where he stood.

A warm wind blew through the space, raising a swirling cloud of dust and fine sand, shifting the blond hair hanging over her forehead and revealing the bright red brand of a skull encased by a star.

The merc blinked in surprise.

Queen took another defiant step.

The man’s finger twitched.

And then, a man screamed. Then another.

In the snap of a finger, pandemonium erupted through the mercenaries’ ranks. Dozens of dark bodies in flowing gray cloaks ripped into the clearing, leaping and running. The mercs opened fire at the creatures, but there were too many of them. The mercenaries were overrun, killed or bled dry by the fast-moving Forgotten who struck with surgical precision and timing.

Queen watched stunned, as the wraithlike Forgotten, Alexander Diotrephes’s strange creatures, mauled and destroyed the black-clad soldiers. She had never seen them in the sunlight, and she believed they couldn’t bear it — much like the legends around vampires. But the creatures attacked the mercenaries without flinching from the light, or from the bullets, and before she could even comprehend what had happened, they raced deeper into the ruins, hunting out and attacking more of the soldiers. She heard gurgling screams and random gunfire from the walled ruins.

She turned to see Asya and the others looking just as shocked as she was. The clearing in front of them was now littered with bodies — mostly mercenaries but a few Forgotten, as well. And to Queen’s delight, there were more assault rifles than she knew what to do with. She ran over and picked up an AK-47 from the hands of a now headless mercenary. Then she looted the corpses for more of the distinctive curved magazines. She tossed a few to Asya, who expertly loaded a rifle and passed it to her mother before taking up another.

“That might have been the strangest fucking thing I’ve seen all day,” Knight said. “And it’s been a strange day.”

Queen heard more thunderous footfalls and looked up to see the Colossus shimmying and shaking, swatting at itself like a human being assaulted by black flies. But there was nothing there. Nothing she could see, anyway. But she knew Rook was still there. Only he could irritate a 300-foot tall golem that much.

“Day ain’t over yet,” Queen said.

SIXTY

Rook clung to a crack at the back of the creature’s neck. He’d moved down from the head to the shoulder when Ridley had figured out he had hitched a ride. That climb wasn’t easy, moving down the side of the head, but the folds of the ear had made decent handholds.

After he had fired down on Ridley’s position one last time, using up the remaining rounds in his submachine gun, the bastard had figured out he’d moved. The giant statue shook and shifted about in unexpected ways — trying to throw him. The shoulder offered little cover, but he couldn’t climb back up to the safety of the ear with the damn thing doing a dubstep dance under him. As he reached out for another crease at the back of the neck, where the cape began, a huge hand came up to swat at the shoulder. The collision missed, but sent up a cloud of dust and stone. It struck a second time, the crashing blow booming like a truck accident.

Rook scrabbled behind the head, hanging from his fingers.

Then the statue lunged forward. Rook’s body flew upward. He jammed one fist deeper into the crack between the neck and the bunched cape just in time. His weight yanked hard on the jammed arm, and he felt the skin on the back of his hand grinding off against a sheet of barnacles. Then the Colossus lifted its body up, slamming Rook against the cape.

As pain pulsed through his body, Rook considered sliding down the cape again, but knew there would be nothing to arrest his fall as he got closer to the bottom. He’d simply drop the 250 feet to the ground and splatter. Then he saw the huge arm raise up again, aiming for its head. Under the arm, he spotted notches on the side of the body, where the metal plates came together at a seam. He knew what they were instantly — a ladder for the creators and maintenance people to climb the statue. He remembered images he’d seen — most based on conjecture and the scantest of written descriptions — almost universally showed the Colossus with one arm raised, like the Statue of Liberty. This arm. The right one.

Rook moved to the edge of the cape and let go of the large crack at the neck. If the statue made any violent movements now, he’d be flung away. He pressed his arms on either side of the cape’s ‘fabric’—broad metal plates, long since corroded to a sickly green color. He wrapped his legs around the edge and was pleased to find that the rough impact foam that bulged from places in the leg armor improved his grip.

The massive arm swept up again. Rook reached out, not looking down at the precipitous fall. His fingers grazed the little chiseled-in nook in the armpit, just missing it. He swung his arm back and then reached out again, committing to the act. He’d either catch the handhold or fall to his death. His fingers slipped inside the notched ladder rung, fitting perfectly. There was grit inside, and what felt like a smooth sea shell, but hanging hundreds of feet off the ground, he was just glad for a handhold. He let go of the cape with his legs and swung out over the open space beneath the Colossus’s armpit. He shoved his free hand inside a second notch and found it empty and solid.

Now if I can just climb down two hundred feet before this bucking bronco throws me.

He started to descend and soon found that not all the nooks were created equal. For one thing, they were hand carved, so their shapes and sizes were not even. But more troubling was that some were filled to bursting with shells and other marine debris. He was able to scoop out some of the muck with his fingertips on the first two notches he found clogged, but the third one was hardened to the consistency of cement. He could skip a ‘rung’ of the ladder, but if he ran into two or three in a row that were clogged, he’d be in trouble.

The Colossus had stopped pursuing him, probably because he was now hidden from Ridley’s sight. The giant was now moving forward carefully, crushing any structure that remained standing — giving his team no place to hide. Ridley was coordinating the mercs on the ground.

Rook looked up again. The most precarious thing in his current position, besides being hundreds of feet in the air, was the swinging right arm. If the damn thing brushed the statue’s ribs, he’d be ground into paste.

After five more rungs, Rook felt himself tilting. He paused and held on tight. The Colossus was bending at the waist.

Oh shitfizzle.

As the statue’s chest bent forward, Rook’s fingers slipped in the notches, squashing together in a much smaller space. Shouting in pain, he fought against gravity and lifted his legs. He shoved his feet into two lower rungs and pushed up, while he pulled down with his arms. His already tired muscles shook, but he’d effectively locked himself in place, like a gecko on a window, without the suction cups.

The huge statue swung its hand like it was about to slap someone across the face, but instead, it swept through several of the ancient walls, as if it was cleaning breadcrumbs off the dinner table. Its massive legs were crouched, and the waist was nearly horizontal to the ground now, but Rook was still a hundred feet up. If they were still over the sea, he’d have dived for it, but over land, it was still too high to jump.

The Colossus made another huge sweep with its hand, slamming into stone walls and archways. When the arm lifted away, almost a third of the ruins were flattened, but the statue was also missing its hand at the wrist. Rook couldn’t see through the dust whether the hand had just fallen off or been pulverized by the tremendous impact.

The force of the strike revealed that Ridley wasn’t just clearing a path, he was using the Colossus to attack Queen and the others. Rook hated how helpless he was, but he had to use all his strength just to hold on as the statue stood tall again.

Rook let his feet fall out of the holes as the thing’s body went vertical. His body swung down and his hands once again held his full weight. He grunted at the tug on his fingers. He could feel them getting sweaty. He wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer. He reached his left hand out of the hole, and quickly wiped the tips of his fingers across his chest. He was hoping to dry them off, but the exertion meant his t-shirt was doused with sweat and tacky. Wiping his fingers didn’t dry them at all.

Then he reached for the next lower handhold. It was packed tight with grit. He scraped his fingernail across the rough surface, but none of the debris was loosening. He reached lower for the next hole. It was full too.

Son of a bitch!

He looked down and saw the third rung was free and clear. He’d have to let go, fall a few feet and catch himself. Sure, he thought, no problem. Then he counted off in his head, one… two… three!

He let go.

And fell…up.

It took his mind a second to register that he was moving in the wrong direction, but then he realized what had happened. The Colossus’s left hand had reached across the chest and plucked him free like a wood tick.

The hand wrapped around him tightly. He couldn’t move. The fingers stopped their grinding flex, just before they crushed him to death. The arm extended out in front of the Colossus as it turned around. The face tilted down to look at him, as the hand held him up for the face to see. The face sneered at him. Then the mouth formed two words. There was no sound emanating from the mouth, no actual lungs or voice box to create sound, but the shape of the lips and tongue was unmistakable — a message for him, directly from Richard Ridley. Then the wind blasted past Rook’s head as the left arm whipped past the face and the torso twisted to the side. Rook felt his stomach lurch like he was on a fast elevator or an amusement park ride.

Then suddenly the hand stopped. The arm was cocked back. The head turned toward him and the lips formed a nasty smile.

Rook had only just started his reply when the arm launched forward, the hand moving like a rocket to pitch him out to sea.

“Yeah, fuck you toooooooo!”

The fingers opened and Rook felt his body launch out over the water.

SIXTY-ONE

Bishop watched Rook sail out to sea before his position was fired on and he had to tear his eyes away. Five mercs in black were advancing down the beach toward him. He darted down to the rocky shoreline and laid down, the barrel of his recently acquired AK-47 aimed back up the beach. The sand stretched south for a bit before becoming a rocky pile, no doubt used as a kind of breakwater against storms. Still wearing his armor, Bishop didn’t notice the rough surface of the rocks below him.

He wished he had more firepower, but the AK would work for now. Instead of firing wildly, like the mercs, he switched the weapon to its semi-automatic mode, prepared to make every bullet count. He controlled each breath, blocking out the rest of the world, not worrying about Rook’s fate. He gently squeezed the trigger, and one of the three mercenaries on the beach toppled over backward, his head spraying out to the sides in a burst of red, coating his companions in gore. The other two men dropped to the sand.

Bishop could still see them. He wasn’t anywhere near Knight when it came to being an accurate shot. He had a lot of bullets though, and he knew how to take his time. He lined up the next shot and waited, allowing two full breaths to come and go. The shot was trickier, because the man was low to the ground and so was Bishop. But the head was still visible. Bishop brought his aim just a nudge higher before firing, anticipating that the bullet might drop in its arc slightly before it reached the man. It missed.

He breathed in again and released. He held his breath. When he fired again, the boom of the rifle was joined by a geyser of red further down the beach. The third man scrambled to his feet and retreated, dropping his rifle as he went. The man shouted as he ran, but Bishop couldn’t make out whether the man was saying something or just shrieking in terror.

Bishop heard a rumble and turned his gaze upward. The Colossus stared down at him.

And things were going so well.

He jumped to his feet and ran for the ruins.

The Colossus took a huge stride up the beach toward his position, then bent over and swept its massive handless arm across the ruins to Bishop’s right. A tidal wave of broken walls and chunks of rock, along with a cloud of roiling dust and sand barreled toward him, propelled by the sweeping arm. Bishop dropped the AK, made an about face and ran for the water.

He reached the rocks and dove headfirst into the shallow water. He slid beneath the waves, his armor slowing him some, but his prodigious strength more than made up for the extra drag. Then the first piece of the debris hit the water, far ahead of him. It had flown over him and crashed into the water. A large slab of stone wall, maybe seven feet tall and four feet wide sliced vertically into the sea, stabbing into the sandy bottom. Bishop turned to his left, heading north along the shore as more rock and sand arced over his head into the drink. The thunks they made under water sounded gentle, but he knew each piece of stone had the potential to crush or pin him under the surface.

He raised his head for another breath and saw that the statue had moved on, rampaging across the ruins, stomping wildly. He realized then that Ridley couldn’t actually ‘see’ through the statue. He was striking blindly, hoping to hit something.

Bishop swam back to the rocky shoreline, and activated his throat mic.

“Queen, the statue is blind. Ridley can’t see where he’s steering the thing.”

There was no reply.

Bishop clawed his way out of the water and checked the small pack on his hip for the radio — it was waterproof but it was dented in. Something must have hit him. He had no way to get in touch with the others.

The Colossus took another two rampaging steps, kicking at the ruins as it went. Bishop could see several black-clad bodies take to the sky along with crumbling blocks of stone. The bodies twisted and turned in the air before they hit the ground, screaming the whole way. They reminded him of Rook.

Bishop turned to look out to sea, but before his eyes got that far, he spotted something else about 600 yards up the beach.

The helipad. And the bird sitting on it was starting up its rotor blades.

Bishop quickly unstrapped his armor plating, and removed his boots. Then he pulled off his sticky t-shirt. Wearing just his wet BDU pants, he dove back into the water and started swimming diagonally across the water from the beach — kicking for the helipad.

On his left along the ruins, the Colossus had ceased moving again. More of its right arm was missing now. Bishop couldn’t see Ridley or any of his people. He guessed the fight had moved inland. It was hard to see anything from the water. He turned his focus back to swinging his arms and kicking his legs. He needed that helo.

By the time he got to the rocky side of the helipad, the chopper’s rotors were in full spin. Bishop wasted no time. He climbed up the rocks and sprinted around the back of the bird, to the right side of the craft, going for the pilot. He didn’t bother ducking his head like you always see in films. He knew the rotors were so high above him that they wouldn’t touch him.

The helipad was deserted, but the pilot sat inside the little Eurocopter. Bishop wasn’t sure what model it was, but it had a small body, just big enough for five passengers total. With a white body and navy blue skids, it looked more like something the Tunisian President might fly in.

As he got closer, he could see the pilot was wearing camouflage and not black. A local, he thought. Not a merc. Bishop whipped open the Pilot’s door and punched the man in the side of the head, then dragged his unconscious body out of the bird.

He was pleased to note that even though the helicopter was a civilian craft, it had a rocket pod mounted on the pilot-side skid.

He strapped himself in and gently placed his feet on the rudder pedals. He held the cyclic with his right hand and grabbed the throttle grip on the collective with his left. He had had exactly five helicopter pilot lessons, and none of them had gone very well, so he handled everything delicately.

He began raising the collective and twisted the throttle to increase his engine speed. The helicopter lifted off the ground. He moved the cyclic forward ever so gently and he felt the craft shudder as it transitioned from vertical movement to forward movement. He kept gaining altitude, but he was heading straight into the ruins, where he didn’t want to be. He pressed the cyclic to his left and depressed the rudder pedal to make a turn out to sea. He spun almost 180 degrees — more than he wanted, but he was still heading away from the land, which was what he wanted. He pressed the cyclic forward more sharply than he needed to, and the nose of the craft dipped as it moved forward. He increased the throttle and the craft sped out to sea.

Now all he had to do was keep the craft level and look out the windows for any sign of Rook. The latter proved to be more difficult. When he was sure he was further from the shore than Rook could have been tossed, he turned the craft with some difficulty, and started back.

Then he spotted something in the water. He smiled.

“You are seriously hard to kill, Rook.”

The water was splashing slightly around him as Rook swam toward shore. He was much farther south than the beachfront adjacent to the ruins, but Bishop supposed it would be hard for Rook to know exactly where to head, that far out to sea.

Bishop brought the helicopter lower with some dithering. He’d learned that nearly everything he did with the controls needed to be done gently. It wasn’t like driving a car or a motorcycle. It was like driving a car with hypersensitive power steering through an obstacle course, while sending a text message and eating a messy burger without getting any on you.

He moved toward Rook’s position, and hoped the man wouldn’t shoot him out of the sky. He came up behind Rook, and lowered the helicopter to where it was just two feet above the surface of the water. Rook turned in the water to watch him. Then Bishop gently wiggled the cyclic side to side, making the helicopter dance left and right across the water — the only thing he could think of to send a signal to the swimming Rook that he wasn’t a threat.

Bishop could see Rook mouthing the words “What the fuck?”

The windows were tinted though, and Bishop knew Rook couldn’t see who was flying the chopper. He held the bird steady as Rook swam toward him. When Rook grabbed the left side skid, Bishop could feel the helicopter dip slightly toward the water, and he raised the collective just a nudge. Then he waited.

A few seconds later, the passenger side door of the craft opened, and one of Rook’s Desert Eagle hand cannons was pointed in the doorway. Then Rook looked in. His face changed in an instant from hostile to confused.

“When the hell did you learn to fly?” he shouted.

Bishop couldn’t hear him over the rotors, but just smiled. Rook slammed the door shut and strapped himself in. Then he donned a headset, and flicked a transmitter button on the side of it. Bishop raised the collective, and brought the bird up away from the water, as Rook grabbed the second headset and reached across to seat it on Bishop’s head, before flicking it on.

“Thanks for the rescue. I thought I’d break my friggin’ back when that Frankendouche chucked me.”

“How did you survive, man? You we’re flying like a missile.” Bishop brought the helicopter up and pointed it straight at the giant statue on the shore. When he felt the helicopter was roughly the height of the giant’s head, he leveled off.

“You mean other than being the toughest S.O.B. you know? My legs hit first. The armor absorbed a lot of the impact. If I’d landed on my back, I’d be dead. It still felt like being dumped onto concrete from about twenty feet.” Rook leaned forward, looking out the window. “You have a plan beyond saving my ass?”

“There’s a rocket pod on the skid,” Bishop told him. “I was thinking we blow something up.”

“My specialty.” Rook smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Then we can use the chopper to run Ridley down and grind him into chuck.”

Bishop laughed. “Now we have a plan.”

SIXTY-TWO

Queen watched in amazement as the helicopter approaching from the sea fired a rocket at the Colossus of Rhodes. The rocket raced from one of the skids on the underside of the helicopter, and left a long thin trail of white smoke as it zipped directly for the statue’s immense head.

The detonation was spectacular, spraying rock and metal fragments in all directions. The remaining giant spires on the statue’s crown went flipping end over end in all directions, as giant slabs of stone came raining down all around the ruins.

Queen watched the sky, but none of the debris would reach her. The wind was picking up, and clouds were filling the sky out to sea. The breeze cleared the cloud of smoke hanging over the shoulders of the Colossus.

The statue now had no head.

But it was still moving.

She needed to find Ridley. The arrival of the Forgotten had turned the tide of the ground battle initially, but more of the mercenaries had arrived from the north, and this time they were not startled by the wraiths. The end result was a lot of bodies littered around.

She picked her way past savaged corpses of soldiers and bullet-riddled wraith things with shriveled gray skin and mutated faces. Asya was by her side, but the others had hung back, Knight being mostly a liability in a firefight at this point.

She turned to Asya. “You know what? The hell with this. We need that statue stopped. We need Ridley dead, and we’re too outnumbered on the ground even with the wraiths helping. I want you to go get a vehicle. I don’t care if it’s a school bus, a freight truck, a bulldozer or a friggin tank. Make it big. This skulking around is getting us nowhere. I’m gonna try to find Ridley and stab his black heart.”

Asya nodded curtly, then ran off through the trees, headed for the main road.

Queen slipped off to her right, deeper into the remains of the ruins. She knew Ridley and Seth were holed up somewhere near the northern end of the ruins, but she didn’t know where. She ran through a still-standing archway, and slipped out the other side, hiding behind fragments of stone as she moved. Most of the area was covered in a cloud of dust and fine particulate sand now, but she could still see the Colossus looming above, as its headless form moved up the shore, toward the northern end of the ruins.

When Queen rounded the next corner, she could finally see Richard Ridley.

He was wearing a black jumpsuit and stood atop a round structure at the far northern end of the ruins. Bullets struck the northern side of the structure, causing Ridley to flinch, but he just ducked and ignored them as he commanded the Colossus. The statue continued its steady approach, heading straight toward him.

“Who the hell is that, then?” she asked herself, wondering who was shooting at Ridley. Maybe Deep Blue’s reinforcements are early? she thought.

Didn’t matter, they were taking the heat off of her for the moment. She moved two more walls closer to the round structure, and took aim with her AK-47.

She fired three shots in rapid succession, the third found Ridley’s arm and severed it at the elbow. But there was no blood, and the Colossus was still moving. Then the man’s arm began to grow back.

What the hell?

And then she realized. She wasn’t looking at Richard Ridley. It was Seth acting as his decoy. Seth wasn’t controlling the Colossus at all. He was using the mother tongue to regenerate his body as he was continually peppered with bullets, while somewhere else, hidden, Ridley pulled the strings of the statue. “That’s alright,” she said.

She changed the selector to fully automatic and blasted away at Seth’s head until his body fell off the raised wall. She wanted him dead too. She understood that he might not have actually died, thanks to that damned magic language, but he was out of the game for now.

She made her way toward the water, through the ruins, occasionally coming across a pitched battle between men in camo and mercs in black, or between mercs and wraiths, or some combination of the three. When she saw camo, she went the other way. She didn’t know who the newcomers were, but she suspected they were locals, trying to protect the nearby Presidential Palace. When she came across a straight merc/wraith brawl, she popped as many of the mercs as she could. The wraiths appeared to be losing, perhaps struggling in the sunlight.

Finally reaching the sea side of the ruins, she looked toward the helipad. She saw a tennis court, a few trees, and crouched down by the trees — Richard Ridley. He was looking up as he directed the Colossus toward the group of camo-clad soldiers closing in on Seth’s location.

I got you now, you son of a bitch.

She raised her rifle, only to have her position peppered with bullets from the ruins to her left. She dropped to the ground, and rolled in the sand, trying to take cover behind a nearby rock. She could see a literal swarm of black-clad men emerging from the ruins. These weren’t mercenaries, they were a private army. Bullets rained down all around her, punching divots in the sand until one of the shots found her calf.

She cried out, as the bullet found its way between her armored plates. Blood oozed warmly over her skin.

She curled into a fetal position and began removing the armor on her calf to get at the wound. When the plates and foam pieces were off, she used her knife to slice open her black BDU pants leg. The wound was mostly into meat in the back of her calf, and she didn’t think any bone had been hit.

She shredded the pants with the blade of the knife, and then cut a thin strip, that she shoved into the hole in her calf, pushing it in with her pinky finger and wincing and grinding her teeth the whole time. Finally, she wrapped another strip around the wounded leg and tied it off.

When she looked back up, with her knife in hand, she saw a mercenary standing over her, his rifle pointed at her head. He had a full beard, and the sleeves of his BDU jacket had been rolled up sloppily. One of his arms was covered in dried blood.

She pulled her knife arm back, prepared to throw the blade up at the man. He stepped back and brought the AK-47’s stock tightly into his shoulder and aimed.

She threw the knife, and as a buzzing sound filled her ears, the man squeezed the trigger of the rifle, unleashing a torrent of bullets.

SIXTY-THREE

Richard Ridley watched the nearby exchange with great interest. He had seen his mercenaries flooding out of the ruins, and had then spotted Queen on the beach, closing in.

He smiled when his soldiers arrived and pinned her down. Smiled wider when they shot her leg. She was pinned, and nothing was going to save her.

Then he heard the buzzing noise, out of place in the seaside battle. He looked further down the beach. A man on a motorcycle — a dirt bike really — raced toward Queen. A hooded cape billowed out behind him and concealed his face. He was large and brawny, and dressed all in black. As the man approached the mercenaries that had pinned Queen, he pulled a katana from a sheath on his back, under the cape. Somehow the man maintained his hold on the bike at that speed, with just one hand.

But the most staggering thing about this man was what came in his wake. Wraiths. Hundreds more. They kept pace with the speeding motorcycle, but suddenly broke away and headed for Ridley’s army.

Then everything happened at once.

Queen threw her knife at the mercenary above her. The man fired, but missed as the stranger on the dirt bike ripped past, the blade of his sword slicing neatly through the mercenary’s neck, toppling his head into the sand a full two yards past Queen’s body.

The rider continued straight past…and headed directly for Ridley as a tidal wave of wraiths poured out of the ruins.

Ridley had thought there were a lot of the hideous creatures before, when they had attacked his men, but now there were too many to count, leaping, clawing, climbing and clinging to every surface. They ripped into the mercenaries on the beach, and Ridley saw limbs start to fly. The mercenaries fought back, but it was a hopeless situation. They would be quickly overrun by the wraiths. Ridley could see it clearly. He quickly began chanting a healing mantra.

The man on the dirt bike arrived a moment later, leaping off the speeding vehicle. He landed on his feet in a crouch, with the blade extended horizontal to the ground. The bike continued for a few yards and then crashed spectacularly, flipping end over end until it came to a halt against some trees.

“Waste of a perfectly good bike,” Ridley said. He knew who he was facing. The man’s long hair and brawn, plus the arrival of the cloaked, gray-skinned creatures was a dead giveaway. Somehow, the damned Greek had survived.

The man stood slowly, facing Ridley. Only the bottom of his beard could be seen under the long hood on his cloak, but his muscled forearms rippled with menace. Good, Ridley thought. I’ve wanted this for a long time.

The cloaked man came in fast, swinging the katana. Ridley stepped inside the swing and blocked it with his left arm, still mumbling his chant in the mother tongue. He punched hard with his right hand, the knuckles of his fingers extended to strike his opponent’s throat.

The strike was lightning fast, but the man dipped his chin at the last second, and stepped back.

That’s right, I can fight.

Ridley was glad he had invested the time in studying the Krav Maga now. The Israeli martial art was based on real street-combat techniques designed to incapacitate or kill the opponent as quickly as possibly. Ridley had had no need of studying katas and dance moves. He wanted a martial art that could kill quickly and efficiently. Krav Maga was just that. But his opponent was incredibly fast. Possibly trained in the same techniques. This would be a fight.

The Greek circled Ridley slowly, keeping his head low, and the sword well out to the side, which seemed like a foolish place for it. Under normal circumstances, a blade was a threat, but while Ridley chanted the mother tongue, he would heal from any wound. Well, nearly any wound. If he takes my head off like he did to that mercenary…

Ridley vowed that wouldn’t happen. He rushed in, kicking down at his opponent’s inner leg and punching out for the face under the hood. He would go for the eyes and the nose. Then the throat again, then the groin with a knee. He envisioned the movements as he was in motion.

But the man spun in a tight circle, bringing the blade in and slicing Ridley across the stomach. He could feel the blade tear into him, slicing through the zipper of the jumpsuit, and chewing its way through all the layers of his skin. But he ignored the pain and followed through with his plan. His fist hit the back of the man’s head, just as his mumbling made his skin lining seal up before it spilled his stomach onto the ground. The itch would be maddening if he wasn’t so focused on his next moves. His foot came down in between the spinning man’s legs. He missed his intended target, but his leg now tangled the other man’s. They fell together. On the journey down, he launched his other leg, solidly connecting with the other man’s groin from behind.

Before they hit the ground, the man threw an elbow around, continuing his spin. The bone connected squarely with Ridley’s nose. He felt his cartilage snap and blood spray out of his face and back through his nasal passage, filling his mouth with a copper tang. As they hit the sandy ground under the tree, the man remained in motion, head-butting Ridley, and then rolling out of reach.

Ridley twisted around and got to his feet in a crouch. His mouth still mumbling, the wound on his stomach was nearly healed. The Greek was on his feet too, his blade lost and now lying within Ridley’s grasp. The tenets of Krav Maga suggested he pick up the blade and use it to end the fight quickly, but he had suffered for too long at the hands of the Greek, when he was in those cages.

No, he would prolong the fight and take pleasure out of every strike he landed.

The Greek stood up slowly to his full height. He undid the cloak’s button at his neck, and pulled it away. His hair — both on his head and his beard — was long, black and a bit messy.

The hair wasn’t exactly how Ridley remembered it, but a more glaring inconsistency held his attention.

This man did not have the Greek’s eyes.

“You’re not Alexander Diotrephes,” Ridley said.

The man shook his head. “You’re going to wish I was. He’d go easier on you.”

Ridley’s eyes widened. He recognized the voice.

Then the two men ran at each other.

SIXTY-FOUR

Chaos surrounded Queen.

The newcomer raced past on his dirt bike, lopping off her would be murderer’s head. Queen struggled to her feet, her leg driving bolts of pain straight through to her brain. But she ignored the agony and rushed at the two mercs nearest to her. She tore their throats out with her hands.

The motocross man was fighting Ridley. Hundreds of wraiths streamed out of the ruins, attacking the newly arrived army. Bullets cut through the air in every direction. A thick choking smoke roiled through the atmosphere. Wraiths leapt like killer monkeys, bounding over the rubble before landing on the shoulders of men who suddenly shrieked at the hideous touch of the creatures leeching their blood away.

But the wraiths never turned on her. For whatever reason, the creatures were here as allies. And she welcomed the fuck out of them.

Queen picked up a rifle and started shooting down mercs. She stopped firing entirely when she saw Knight approaching from the far side of the ruins along with Peter and Lynn. They were all armed with stolen mercenary rifles. She didn’t want to risk hitting them in a crossfire.

“Knight, you read?” she said into her mic.

“I thought it would be just mop up at this point,” Knight replied.

“Things didn’t go exactly as planned,” she said.

Just then the helicopter came ripping by overhead. Rook hung upside down from one of the skids, his legs locked over the bar and a shit-eating grin on his face. In each hand he held a Magnum Desert Eagle.50-caliber pistol. Each pull of the trigger dropped another of the mercenaries, who were too busy worrying about wraiths to think about a danger from above.

“Eat it, Jockey-Stains!” he shouted over their communications channel.

The big guns pounded the air, boom, boom, boom.

“Who the hell is flying the chopper?” Queen asked.

Knight replied. “Bishop’s been taking lessons.”

The helicopter wobbled and then took a long sweeping turn around the stationary Colossus, before wobbling again on the other side of the statue, almost hitting it, spinning around in a circle, and then moving sideways, facing the wrong way.

“I’m gonna guess not too many lessons yet,” Queen said.

“Not sure he knows how to land,” Knight chuckled.

Queen fired off a few more shots at the mercenaries, but it was apparent the wraiths would win this battle now.

Fresh gunfire erupted from the far side of Colossus. The camouflaged soldiers were firing on the wraiths with a heavy machine gun. Suddenly the shots from Rook’s handguns sounded quieter. Someone fired an RPG into the mess. Queen dove for the sand of the beach again.

The rocket smashed into one of the last upright walls of the ruins, spaying wraith and mercenary guts alike in different directions.

With a shriek of tires, a huge blue Mercedes truck came roaring over the dirt road behind the camo soldiers, scattering them to the left and the right, as it came barreling through and loudly honking its horn.

It left the road and bounded over the ruins, running over wraith and mercenary alike.

The camo soldiers redirected their fire on the rear of the covered heavy truck, but their small arms fire did little to deter it. Even if they could get the.50 cal on it, they’re not going to stop her now.

Asya looked small through the windshield of the massive truck, as it bounced high over the rocky rubble, more in the process of crashing than driving over things. The truck had arrived so suddenly that it looked out of control, but Queen knew exactly what the feisty little Russian was planning. Smart Girl. She’s going to ram it.

Just before the blue truck crashed into the leg of the Colossus, Asya threw herself out of the driver’s side door. The truck, without its driver, swerved sharply to the side and looked like it would miss. But then the right front wheel caught on a solid piece of rubble and the back side of the truck lifted into the air.

The truck flipped and smashed into the lower calf of the statue’s leg. The truck ripped the lower leg of the statue clean off, and then tumbled further into the ruins, flipping and rolling.

Unbalanced, the Colossus toppled over, slowly falling toward where Ridley and the thickly bearded man were still fighting.

Gunfire forced Queen to hobble back down the beach, trying to get away from the camo-soldiers and the Colossus’s impact zone.

Just then the helicopter came screaming overhead, Rook now clinging to the skid with one arm and bleeding from the other. The bird was streaming smoke, and it looked like Bishop was going to crash into the sea. As soon as the helicopter was over the water, Rook let go of his skid and dropped about thirty feet, sending up a big splash. At less than twenty feet over the surface of the water, Bishop banked the craft hard to the left and dove out the right side door, the spinning blades missing his ankles by what looked like inches. The helicopter crashed into the water just as a rocket streamed in and slammed into the chopper, sending parts of the white metal skin high into the sky, amid a gurgling roiling ball of orange flame and black smoke.

Queen looked up at the falling Colossus, and back to the combatants locked in a furious fist-fight under the trees near the tennis court. Then she recognized the stranger’s fighting style and skidded to a stop.

“It can’t be,” she said.

The man seemed to sense her attention. He turned toward her for a moment. He was far away, but beyond the beard and the hair, she knew she was looking at Jack Sigler, back from the dead and commanding an army of wraiths.

Then the mighty headless Colossus slammed into the ground, flattening him and Ridley, and sending up a plume of sand and dust so thick that Queen couldn’t see anymore. The thunder from the impact nearly ruptured her eardrums, and the shockwave knocked her down onto her back.

“Queen, are you alright?” Knight was asking in hear ear.

Queen closed her eyes. She could still see his face, but it wasn’t possible. Not only had Asya seen him die, but he didn’t just grow his hair and beard that long overnight. She shook her head. “I’m just going to lie here for a while. I need to bleed for a bit.”

SIXTY-FIVE

Queen lay in the sand, listening to the wraiths tear the last of the mercenaries apart to her left in the ruins. The Tunisian forces had stopped firing and were in full retreat. She couldn’t see any of them on the fringes of the battle anymore. She suspected she knew the reason for that.

“Deep Blue,” she coughed a few times to clear her throat. “You read me?”

“Go ahead, Queen.”

“You behind the withdrawal of the Tunisian forces?” she asked.

“Yes, but there will be some big hell to pay later. The President is shitting bricks, and the bricks are building pyramids. I still don’t have eyes on you. Give me a sit-rep.”

“Sure, why not? I’m just relaxing on the beach.”

“Not exactly the time for sarcasm,” Deep Blue said.

“Wasn’t kidding. I am actually lying on the beach. Leg is shot to hell. What else? Ridley turned the Colossus of Rhodes into a golem. It kicked our asses, then fell over. Pawn did that. Crashed a truck into the golem’s leg. She might be dead. Bishop and Rook crashed into the sea in a helicopter that blew up. They might be dead. There’s an army of Alexander’s wraiths killing the last of the mercenary forces. I think Ridley got squashed, but I can’t confirm it. Seth took a few rounds to the head, but was doing his healing thing, so who knows? I haven’t heard back from Knight — he’s got some broken ribs.”

“My God. Anything else I should know?”

“I saw King.”

“His body?”

“Going toe-to-toe with Ridley before the Colossus dropped on top of them.”

Just then a single shot rang out loudly, cutting through the silence that followed the battle. The sound sent a jolt through her body. She sat up quickly.

“Be right back, Blue.”

“Wait! Queen—” she switched channels.

“Knight?” she asked into her microphone.

She heard another single shot. And then another.

“It’s me,” he said in her ear. “Seth is alive. About a hundred yards out from me. I keep shooting him, but he keeps getting back up. If I can’t take off his jaw, I’m not sure I can keep him down while he’s whispering that mother tongue crap.” Queen heard another single shot.

“Try to keep him incapacitated. Where are you?”

“Northwest corner of the ruins. Better hurry. I’m running out of bullets and I’m not going anywhere fast.”

She heard another shot echo through the ruins, as the smoke and dust started to clear. The wind was picking up fast now. The sun slid behind a wall of dark storm clouds coming in from the water. She struggled back to her feet and saw wraiths zipping into the ruins and away from the shore — there were no more mercenaries standing. The field in front of the shattered bits of history was strewn with bodies and parts of bodies — more parts than full corpses. She staggered over the first few arms and legs she saw, not wanting to step on the dead. But there were too many of them. She gave up and just started walking on whatever was underfoot, heading toward the ruins, armed only with her knife. She could bend down and pick up any number of rifles, but it seemed like too much work. Right now she was having trouble walking. The pain shooting up her leg with each step on her damaged calf was excruciating. But there were priorities. She needed to get to Knight and help him keep Seth down. She wanted no loose ends this time.

She tried to reach Rook and Bishop to no avail. It was down to her. So she fought against the pain in her leg and clutched the knife tightly in her hand. If Seth was still down when she got there, she’d cut his head off. That would keep the little pecker from regenerating.

As she stumbled past a three foot high wall of stone, she saw someone coming toward her through the dust. She crouched, ready to deal death if whoever was coming was another hostile.

Once she got to the ground though, she realized she wouldn’t be getting back up. She was done. Her leg felt like it was on fire, and she was having trouble staying awake.

“Queen, are you alright?” It was Peter. He knelt in front of her. Lynn stood behind him, helping Asya stand. Asya had blood streaming down her face. Lynn looked pretty banged up too.

Queen reached out the knife to Peter. “Knight. Northwest ruins. Needs help now.” Another shot rang out. “Go.”

Peter didn’t question. He just took the knife and started running through the ruins.

Lynn brought Asya limping over and gently lowered her to the ground next to Queen. Then Lynn sat down next to them, breathing hard.

The three women didn’t say a word to each other. They just watched as the dust parted and settled, blown by the increasingly wild winds of the storm. The view to the beach cleared, revealing two figures emerging from the water. Bishop and Rook. They headed up the beach toward Queen’s position. Bishop looked fine besides a small limp. He was barefoot, and bare-chested, wearing only his black BDU trousers. Rook’s arm was coated in fresh blood. He was wearing only leg armor, his chest now bare also, his shirt tied over his shoulder as a makeshift tourniquet.

They walked up to the women, and sat wordlessly on the ground next to the ladies.

The shooting stopped.

Queen toggled her com. “Knight?”

“Seth is down. Won’t be getting back up. Peter and I are on our way to you.”

“Knight okay?” Rook asked her.

“He’ll live. They’ll be here in a minute. Nice swim?”

“Brisk,” Bishop said.

They lapsed into silence, all of them just breathing hard.

She turned at the sound of a grunt coming from the Colossus, which was hidden by slowly settling dust. There was a thunk, but then much closer, the sound of footsteps. From behind. Queen turned to see Peter helping Knight walk. Peter was covered in blood.

“It’s not mine,” he said to Lynn, before she could ask.

He plopped onto the sandy ground next to his wife.

Knight leaned down, and inhaled sharply. Then he lowered himself to the ground with the group.

“Seth?” Queen asked him.

“Papa Sigler dropped a big rock on his head,” Knight said.

Queen looked at the blood covering King’s father.

He glanced down at himself. “It was more of a column. And it rolled, more than fell.”

Queen squinted at the red covering Peter. “He bled?”

Knight nodded. “Looks like Ridley got one of them right, or maybe it was the healing mantra he was using over and over. But at the end, when he saw the blood, he looked just as surprised as us. Hate to say it, but he died with a smile on his face.”

While the others watched the storm coming in, Queen watched as the dust cloud still concealing the Colossus slowly melted away. She wondered how she was going to tell them she’d seen King again, and then considered not telling them at all. He’d suffered the same fate as Ridley. Why make them relive his passing?

A distant grunt followed by a wet slap tickled her ear.

She looked to Rook. He heard it too.

“What is that?” he asked. “Survivor?”

The clouds finally reached them and the bottom suddenly fell out of the sky. The rain came down in huge cold globules. Queen never would have guessed that the rain could be so cold with the temperature so warm. They were quickly soaked, but no one made a move to find shelter from the torrential downpour. None of them had the strength.

Queen heard the clapping noise again, and looked back to the Colossus. The rain dissipated the last of the dust cloud. She could see the immense headless statue on the ground.

Standing on its chest, still beating the shit out of each other, were Ridley and the man she thought might be King.

“Oh, wow,” she said. She struggled to her feet. The others all turned to see what she was talking about.

Ridley head-butted his opponent, but the man recovered quickly, pulling back and then launching into a spinning kick that connected with Ridley’s head. Ridley rolled with the impact, bringing the back of his fist into the other man’s throat. Instead of recoiling from the blow, the man pulled in tighter, jabbing a thumb into Ridley’s left eye socket.

Ridley grunted and pulled his head back, the thumb sliding out in a bloody mess. The rain spraying from the sky washed the blood down his face. Then the eye was back, whole again. His mouth never stopped moving, mumbling all the while he was in motion.

The two combatants flowed around each other in a ballet of violence. Elbows flew, kicks snapped, punches twisted through the air. For each strike made by either man, another rapidly followed by his opponent. Both men were covered in blood that washed down their bodies in the rainwater. Neither man slowed. Ridley reached in and gouged out the flesh of his opponent’s throat. The man didn’t pause. Barely noticed. He threw an uppercut into Ridley’s solar plexus, then hooked his fingers into Ridley’s nose, ripping the skin.

Ridley’s face was already healing, and the torn nostrils didn’t slow him. He used a forearm smash to hit his opponent in the face, but the man took the strike and bought up a knee, slamming it into Ridley’s kidney. As he turned, Queen saw the man’s throat looked fine.

The grunting and thunking noises of the two opponents beating on each other was the only sound besides the falling rain.

“Should we stop them?” Lynn asked softly.

“How?” Rook said.

Just then the dark-haired man caught Ridley’s forearm and twisted while thrusting with an open palm strike. The group heard Ridley’s bone break, and saw the jagged end of a shattered Ulna bone rip through the flesh in a bloody spurt. Ridley leapt up, driving a knee into his opponent’s chin. The bone jerked sideways with a loud pop, as the man’s jaw broke. And then unbroke. He retaliated with a double punch, straight ahead, hitting Ridley’s momentarily unprotected throat, as the man landed from his kick. Ridley staggered back a step, before launching a deadly kick at his opponent’s chest. The man slipped backward and started to spin, but he lost his footing. The chest of the statue on which they stood had become slick with blood and rain. His foot went out behind him, as he face planted into the statue, then he flipped backward and rolled off the other side of the Colossus.

Ridley raised his arms and started chanting, his voice rumbling over the rain. At his feet, the giant statue’s chest bubbled and boiled up. The surface broke, spewing rocks and pebbles like a miniature volcano. The almost liquid flow of rubble carried a small wooden chest up and out of the torso of the statue, and deposited it at Ridley’s feet. The box was a dark wood with stripes of glinting metal.

Ridley bent and picked up the box. He held it reverently. Then he lifted it up to the sky, as if it were an offering, and he began chanting again.

This time, the Colossus stirred. It tried to sit up, but without a head or a leg, and missing half an arm, it was unable. Ridley looked across the ruins, and began chanting again.

Queen heard rumbling from the stone behind her in the ruins.

Then she heard a voice that left no room for doubt. “Ridley! Put the box down. I’m not done with you yet!”

The man she knew was King climbed back up onto the chest of the Colossus from where he had fallen. He was once again holding the sword.

Ridley turned to King and smiled.

“Nor am I done with you.”

He held the box in front of him and began to open it.

Queen willed King to attack, to finish the fight. She couldn’t explain how he was alive or why he looked so different, but this was King, and she knew what he could do — and that he’d been holding back.

But instead, he just stood there.

Waiting.

SIXTY-SIX

Ridley didn’t mess around with trying to figure out the latching mechanism. He used the mother tongue to undo the lock and opened the fabled Chest of Adoon.

The chest hissed as its airtight seal was broken and the lid came up. Accompanying the hiss was a loud ping as a curved piece of metal spun into the air. Ridley followed the spinning metal with his eyes and then looked down. His forehead furrowed.

Then his face, his hands and the chest were erased in a concussive explosion.

Ridley’s headless torso crumpled to the Colossus’s chest. Without his genetic ability to regenerate and no face with which to utter the language of God, he wouldn’t be coming back. Ever.

King stepped up next to the corpse, and he saw the mangled head lying nearby. He reached down the front of his shirt to a leather band he wore as a necklace. He had worn it around his neck for so long, that most days he forgot it was there. Some years he had worn it on a gold chain, and at other times, he had worn it on a string, but the pendant on the necklace was always the same. A reminder of things to come. Of this very moment.

The safety pin for the grenade he had planted in the box, back in 799 BC. He had taken care of and polished the pin for centuries, and when the metal was starting to give way from age, he had had it coated in silver, and years later in stainless steel. He held it up now on the end of the brown leather cord, and dangled it over his enemy’s body. He wasn’t sure the grenade would work after all these years in Alexander’s airtight box, but if it hadn’t, he had been prepared to use the sword.

He dropped the pin, the reminder having served its purpose.

As the rain pelted the back of his head, he turned and saw the group of people staring at him.

Queen was bleeding from a tourniquet-covered leg. Rook was favoring a wrapped shoulder. Bishop looked exhausted. Knight was coated in blood and clutching his chest with one arm. Ribs, King thought. Asya had cuts on her head and was holding a cloth to the side of her face. His parents were there too. They both looked like they had been dragged through an abattoir, but they appeared mostly unharmed. Besides being wet from the rain, every one of them had one thing in common.

They all stood with their mouths hanging open in absolute shock, staring at him.

He slid down the side of the Colossus, and dropped to the ground below. It was a thirty foot drop, but he took it with ease, absorbing the shock with bent legs. Feeling no lingering pain from his battle, he stepped over to his friends and family.

“Sorry I was late,” he said, but the joke was lost as his voice became shaky. He had done and seen things few people would believe. He’d witnessed the rise and fall of nations and empires, and he had played a hand in some of it. He had watched civilizations grow, had seen humanity rise from the ashes again and again. But none of that compared to this moment.

He had watched his team over the years. Watched his naïve younger self, too. On several occasions, it took all of his strength to not get involved. To let things play out as they had. But he’d managed to never once interfere in their lives. Because of that, this was the first time in over 2800 years that he had stood, face-to-face with these people. And it nearly broke him.

His mother saw the pain in his eyes first, and whether or not she understood it, she threw her arms around him, not just hugging him but keeping him on his feet. Peter was there next, then Asya and the others. King shook with sobs, the mental walls that had kept him strong through millennia crashing down.

As King calmed and the group began separating, Rook whispered, “King…”

King looked up at his old friend.

“That was the coolest friggin’ thing I have ever seen in my life.”

King laughed and wiped the tears from his eyes. “There has never been another man like you, Rook.”

“I don’t know about never,” Rook said.

King grinned. “Pretty sure.”

Asya stepped up to King. “I saw you die when Alexander’s machine exploded.”

King shook his head. “I’ve died many times, but that wasn’t one of them.”

Lynn placed her hand against the side of his beard. She looked into his eyes. She was seeing things only a mother could. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

He nodded. “It’s a long story.”

“We have time,” Peter said.

“It’s a very long story.” King smiled and pointed to the sky where the VTOL Crescent II descended toward them. “And I would really like to see my daughter and the woman I’m going to marry.”