Pierce charged, too, leaping over the steaming cracks in the Earth, acutely aware of what the consequences would be if the ground beneath him gave way. Tyndareus’s head swiveled in Pierce’s direction, but then looked away just as quickly. Lazarus may have posed a bit of a challenge, but Pierce was hardly worth the bother.
Big mistake, Pierce thought. Brains beat brawn.
He circled behind Tyndareus, searching for and finding the chink in the smooth metal armor. He peeked around Tyndareus, trying to telegraph to Lazarus what he was doing.
Keep him busy, he wanted to shout. I just need a couple seconds.
Lazarus must have understood, because Pierce got all the time he needed. He darted in close, much too close for comfort, and fought with the clamps that held a square metal plate in place. When he failed to move the clamps with his hands, he pried at them with a knife, using leverage to move what his fingers couldn’t. He put all his strength into the effort, until the tight clamps snapped free. The plate fell away to reveal a metal box from which sprouted three thick cables. Pierce plunged a hand in, gripped one of the cables, and just as Dourado had instructed him, gave it a hard twist.
The cable popped loose, and the TALOS suit froze in place.
In Greek mythology, Talos, a gigantic living bronze statue, was defeated by the guile of the sorceress Medea, who had discovered his fatal weakness. Talos’s lifeblood — a molten metallic liquid called ichor—had been poured into his body through an opening in his ankle, the hole stoppered by a single bronze nail. The TALOS suit was powered by electricity, not ichor, but it had the same exploitable weakness. To shut it down, Pierce merely had to pull the plug.
Pierce backed away, half-expecting the suit to begin moving again, reactivated by an auxiliary power source or some other measure designed to prevent an enemy from doing what he had just done, but the armored figure remained statue-still, a seven-foot tall gray mannequin.
Lazarus arrived a moment later, his face contorted with pain. “Are you all right?”
“I should be asking you.”
“I’ll live,” Lazarus said, making it sound almost like a regret. “But you’re wounded.”
As if in response to the question, Pierce felt an ache across his chest. He looked down and saw the damage that Rohn’s blade had caused. His body armor had taken the brunt of the attack and no doubt saved his life, but the skin underneath was a bloody perforated line. It could wait.
“I’m going after Augustina and Fiona. Take care of her.” He nodded his head in Carter’s direction.
Lazarus stared at the woman for several seconds then he shook his head. “You need me.”
“She needs you more.”
A different kind of pain twisted Lazarus’s features, one that had nothing to do with his injuries. “I don’t know what to do for her.”
Pierce extended a hand and gripped Lazarus’s shoulder. He sensed that this admission of helplessness was a harder thing than any battle the man had ever fought. “You’ll figure it out.”
“What about you? You can’t do this alone.”
Pierce reached out with his other hand and patted the stationary TALOS suit. “Actually, I think I can.”
55
The worst part was the smell. After breathing sulfuric acid fumes for more than an hour, Pierce thought the suit’s oxygen supply would be a welcome relief, but as soon as the seals were clamped down and the O2 began to flow, he realized that there were worse smells in the world. It was the TALOS suit itself he realized, or more likely, its former occupant. A foul odor, like antiseptic ointment and cleaning fluid mixed with the smell of illness and decay, clung to the interior surfaces like a fungus growing on the inside of the helmet.
Probably just my imagination, he told himself.
The controls were surprisingly intuitive. Once he was strapped in, he needed only to move his arms and legs as he normally would, and the suit responded. The first few steps reminded him of walking in ski boots. After that, he could almost forget that he was encased in titanium armor.
A heads-up display projected on the inside of the visor showed battery charge, oxygen pressure and a few other status indicators that were probably important to know, but there had not been time for Dourado to go over the operator’s manual with him. The meters were all in the yellow. “You have half an hour of battery life remaining,” Dourado told him.
“Augustina and Fiona probably don’t have that long,” he replied. “It’s more than enough.”
A fingertip sensor in the suit’s gauntlets allowed him to toggle on the weapons systems. The grenade launcher on the right arm, and a plasma torch on the left. Pierce doubted he would need them. The suit itself was his best weapon.
He approached the wall cautiously, unsure what he would encounter when he touched its surface, but there was no resistance, no sense of making contact.
He turned and glanced back at Lazarus. The big man was cautiously approaching the still motionless form of Carter. Pierce regretted that there was nothing he could do to help either of them, but time was running out.
He also spotted Tyndareus. The old man hadn’t gone far from the spot where Pierce had dropped him after manually disengaging the clamps that held the TALOS suit together. With his gnarled limbs and liver-spotted bald head, he looked like Gollum from The Hobbit. Gollum in a business suit, crawling across the scorching hot earth.
It was a better fate than Auschwitz’s ‘Angel of Death’ deserved.
“Cintia, I’ll probably lose radio contact in a second or two. If you don’t hear from me in half an hour…” He realized he didn’t have a contingency.
“You’ll make it, Dr. Pierce.”
“Thanks. And from now on, you can just call me George.”
“I’ll start doing that when you get back. Good luck.”
He took a step forward and was plunged into darkness. The high-intensity spotlights mounted to either side of the visor might as well have been covered with mud for all the good they did. The intangible wall through which he was passing was not like fog or dust. It didn’t reflect light. Instead it seemed to absorb it. He took another step and another, and then he could see again. He found himself in a wide passage, like an immense wormhole bored in the blazing hot rock, sloping away into the depths of the Earth.
The light revealed other details. A litter of what looked like bone fragments, globs of matted hair or fur and black nodules the size of softballs were scattered everywhere.
Droppings, Pierce realized. Bear-elk scat.
That stopped him. The creature was here, somewhere. It had retreated to its lair, maybe to lick its wounds, maybe to die in the darkness, but it was between Pierce and the people he loved. Maybe he would need the weapons after all.
He tried to creep down the passage, but stealth was not one of the suit’s selling points. No matter how carefully he lowered his feet, his steps sounded like an anvil dropping on concrete.
Abandoning the sneaky approach, he set out at a jog, pounding down the passage, each footfall ringing through the suit like a pile-driver impact. He kicked through more litter, pulverizing fragments of bone and discarded antlers.
The part of him that was both a scientist and a scholar of mythology, regretted that there was not time to make a more thorough examination. Hercules had walked here once, fought another guardian of the Underworld gates. Not a mythological monster with supernatural abilities living in some kind of netherworld, where the laws of physics did not apply, but a hybrid animal living in a strange closed ecosystem. The bear-elk was evidently the latest creature to occupy that niche, but how did it survive? What did it eat? Were there others like it down here?