Soon he was in range so that he didn’t even need the telescopic zoom on his helmet to inform him that three Gear Skeletons, one adorned as a “hero” suit, two others as Spartans, had arrived at the base of the ramp leading to the top of the oracular spire.
The giant exoskeletons spread out, forming a perimeter in which Grant could set the Manta down. Even as they did so, they extended their arms upward to cushion the descent of the craft in case it had suffered more damage and couldn’t extend its landing gear.
Grant kept up his vigilance upon landing. The last thing he needed was to get sloppy, no matter what kind of help he had available to him. Even so, when he felt the powerful robotic hands latch on to the hull of his Manta, Grant was relieved.
Unfortunately the big man realized that such relief was only temporary. This was only his first encounter with a winged monstrosity powerful enough to engage an armed Manta. Another godlike being, different in some ways from their usual Annunaki opponents, but still formidable, still extremely dangerous.
He hoped that Charun was alone, but even as he did so, he realized that things were never that easy.
* * *
EDWARDS DIDN’T HAVE to search too hard for where the hammer went down. It had produced so much energy in its shield against the twin machine guns on his Manta that it left a smoke trail and its landing produced a highly visible scar on the countryside. So far, his systems were continuing uninterrupted, but that didn’t mean the winged enemy wasn’t trying to slip back into Greek airspace after being driven off.
However, he didn’t want to waste any more of the Manta’s endurance than necessary, so he swung the aircraft low over the crater. As he did so, sensors in the Manta’s cockpit measured the width and depth of the dent the hammer had made in the ground. It was only two feet in depth, and little more than two and a half feet wide, but it was a crater carved into solid rock.
Edwards was no expert at mathematics, but he’d seen large bombs go off before and placed the power of the hammer’s impact equal to about twenty-five kilograms of plas-ex. That was merely from falling from a great height, not being thrown.
Now he could see why even a glancing blow had almost crushed Grant’s Manta.
Edwards landed the ship and used the shadow suit on his forearm as a keyboard and monitor to gather the crater’s information and transmit it to the others. If anything, Brigid Baptiste would want to see the physical environmental effects of the artifact. It might be only pure trivia, but it could also give the brilliant archivist some form of scale from which to determine just what they were up against.
Edwards got out of the cockpit and jogged closer to the hammer, letting the optics in his shadow suit faceplate continue to record information about the hammer. As he closed with it, he could see that the handle was fully two meters in length, and it was not made from any material he recognized. It was dull, not resembling the polished brass of secondary orichalcum or any other natural alloy the Cerberus explorers had encountered.
No, that was wrong, Edwards thought. There was a woodlike grain to the handle, but the shadow suit’s analytical optics were not registering it as anything carved from a tree that he’d ever seen. He frowned. He’d seen something made of wood but not wooden before, and he wished he’d had a hint of Brigid Baptiste’s photographic memory at times such as this.
“Brigid,” Edwards called.
“Thank you for the camera footage of the artifact,” she answered. “What are you going to ask about?”
“The handle. It looks like some kind of material I’ve seen before, but I can’t place it. I’m hoping…”
“The Cedar Doors we encountered underground in Iraq,” Brigid responded. “In mythology, they were the gates to an entire Cedar Forest, whose fruit, when eaten, would provide immortality. Unfortunately said eternal existence came in the form of zombie-like reanimation and was not full of cedar trees as we understood them.”
Edwards took a deep breath of relief. “That’s what was bugging me. So, this is fake cedar? Or a petrified tree material?”
“It is possible,” Brigid answered. “But I would prefer a closer look.”
Edwards grunted. “I’ll babysit this thing until we can get a recovery team here.”
“Do not attempt to move it yourself,” Brigid admonished. “Who knows—”
“Yeah, I wasn’t going to get zapped by any security systems built into a hammer that can punch a hole in rock like fifty-five pounds’ worth of TNT,” Edwards murmured. “And while I don’t know the kind of heat that could incinerate two ounces of armor-piercing shell, let alone a whole volley…” Edwards trailed off, hoping for her to give him a bone of information.
“Even that calculation is beyond my current knowledge,” Brigid interjected. “But the melting point of lead is 328 degrees Celsius.”
“That’d be nice if I were shooting a handgun, but the Fifties fire tungsten-cored bullets.”
“Three thousand, four hundred and twenty-two degrees Celsius,” Brigid offered. “Oh, my.”
“Ten times hotter than you thought?” Edwards asked.
“Ten point four-three-three rounded to the nearest hundredth, but, yes,” Brigid said.
Edwards could hear the smile in her voice as he demonstrated at least a semblance of mathematical skill, so that the big brawler showed that he wasn’t a complete drain on the brains of the assembled Cerberus Away Teams. “This is very disconcerting.”
Edwards nodded, even though he knew the head-bob wouldn’t translate over the Commtact. But if he gave voice to his personal fears, he would lose more than a little of his appearance as a tough guy. Even so, he couldn’t disagree with Brigid’s own outwardly calm evaluation. The hammer’s powers were formidable, easily as dangerous as the glove that Maccan utilized in his attack on Cerberus, maybe even worse, since it was a larger item.
Edwards’s curiosity led him nearer to the deadly hammer, examining the crater even more closely. For all the force of its impact, it stood flatly on its head and had not penetrated the bottom of the bowl. This set the hairs on his neck on edge, because that was not how it should have been naturally. He recorded this, and transmitted it to Brigid.
“Edwards, do not approach any closer,” she warned.
“It fired off something like a braking rocket, didn’t it?” Edwards asked.
“Yes,” she told him. “Which means that the artifact, indeed, has some manner of autonomy.”
Edwards took a couple of strides backward, but even as he did so, he recalled the shape of the head. It was not the normal shape for a sledgehammer, nor was it a stylized T shape with Celtic carvings enmeshed on the sides, as the holy symbol for Thor that Edwards had seen before. This was a more crystalline structure, semitransparent, flat-sided but held in place by webbing forged from molten metal. It was a hexagonal prism, with a pair of hexagonal pyramids forming the caps on each end, as if it were a gigantic piece of quartz.
Except this quartz was bloodred and glowed from within as if possessed by a hellish flame at its core. The whole thing had an eerie electricity that made Edwards’s skin crawl, even behind the protection of his shadow suit. As he was fully environmentally enclosed within the high-tech garment, his instincts were on maximum alert simply due to the crackle of energy he felt in the air.
Brigid Baptiste, as usual, had been correct in her assessment. He’d gotten too close to an entity that could protect itself with the same facility it had protected its wielder from the heaviest “small arms” that had ever been developed. Edwards flexed his forearm and the Sin Eater automatically launched into the palm