He was just about to race back to the wall under the balcony and make the climb himself, with some assistance from Asya, when the door to the room exploded off its hinges and into the room, knocking him to the ground.
THIRTY-FIVE
Queen paused by the door. She was getting no connection to Deep Blue back home and she couldn’t raise Rook either. Something was scrambling communications.
Two things, she thought in something like a prayer. That’s all I want. Active coms and Richard Ridley’s head back in a bird cage.
They were fools to have freed the man. Now with Alexander dead and no longer a threat, Ridley would go after the most powerful weapon he could find. She didn’t know what his long game was, but as soon as she saw Seth’s smile when he activated the gas, she knew it had been his plan all along. Not the duplicates’, Ridley’s. He had somehow planned the whole thing out himself.
A burst of gunfire in the corridor had her crouched by the door, ready to add her own bullets to the fray.
“Ready, Knight?”
The small man was deadly in a fight and as hardy as the rest of the team, but the loss of King seemed to have demoralized him worse than the rest. He didn’t respond to her.
“You want me to—” Bishop began.
Queen whirled on Knight, who was slumped against a wall. His face was paler than usual, and she knew it was the gas they had breathed. She moved over to the man and saw his eyes were glazed and unfocussed. “Knight?”
No response.
She shook him by the collar of his battle suit.
Knight didn’t respond to the shaking.
“Shin!” Queen shouted and slapped the man across his face.
His eyes startled and fluttered. Then he focused in on Queen and she saw an angry glare creep across his face.
“You awake? You with us? We need you, man.”
“I’m good,” Knight said. “Fucking gas. I’m a little guy, you know.”
Queen grinned. He was, in fact, a few pounds lighter than she was, though that was their little secret. “Good, I’ll open the door and cover you. You try to find the jamming device and disable it. I want Deep Blue’s support, and I want to put Ridley back in his grave. Can you handle that?”
Knight nodded.
She turned to look at Bishop. No longer looking like his normal serene and placid self, Bishop appeared to be dealing with King’s demise and their betrayal by the duplicates in his typical fashion. Rage. The kind she hadn’t seen on Bishop’s face since the days when he’d been infected with Ridley’s regenerative serum.
“You okay, big guy?”
His eyes darted to her, sharp, focused and burning. He didn’t need to say a word. He was ready to tear someone apart.
She moved back to the door, and cracked it open. She heard shouting in the hall and peered around the door frame, her MP-5 up and ready. At the end of the hall, she saw Rook’s armored form leaping into a doorway. Men were at the stairwell door at the end. Down on the floor, a grenade skittered to a stop.
Knight crouched next to her, about to leap out into the hall and run like hell toward the far end of the corridor, in search of the jamming device.
“No!” she shouted.
She threw her weight backward, blocking Knight from leaving the room, when the grenade detonated, spraying the hallway with steel fragments. Her left arm, although covered from shoulder to wrist in the impact absorbing battle armor suit, was perforated with projectiles. She pulled the numb limb back and saw blood trickling from several spots on the appendage.
“Motherfu—” she cut herself off, as she took in a deep breath when the pain kicked in.
Knight leaned in with an auto injector syringe and showed it to her. “You want this?”
Queen recognized the cocktail they each carried. It contained a mix of caffeine and 1000mg of Ibuprofen. The drug wouldn’t make her tired, but it would dull some of the pain.
Queen just nodded.
Knight placed the device against the side of her exposed neck and activated it. Queen inhaled sharply again, as the injector rammed the drug into her body.
“What now?” Knight asked.
Queen didn’t have an answer.
“I say we blow through the wall to the next room. If need be, to the one after that. We can’t fight them all in close quarters, and we need to not be where they think we are.” Bishop held up a small wad of C4 in his hand.
Queen nodded, then struggled to her feet. “Everyone back in the cell when it goes off.”
Bishop affixed the explosive to the wall just above a computer monitor on a desk, and the others fell back toward the cell. He placed a timed detonator for ten seconds, then rushed to the door to the cell, swung around it and hid behind it, while keeping a steel toed boot in the jamb.
Queen nodded at the move. The last thing they needed was to get locked in the hellish cell again.
The blast went off. Several chunks of rubble pelted the wall, filling the room with the scent of hot plaster dust.
Bishop moved into the room and coughed from the dust and smoke. Queen followed him and saw a nightmare of architecture. The wall behind the computer stations had been shattered, but the next room must have been a bathroom, because they had broken through into a crawlspace with water pipes that were now a tangled mess of jagged metal and spraying water. The far side of the space was another wall, still mostly intact. Water erupted across the exposed electrical wiring and damaged security stations, spraying arcs of spitting sparks across the whole side of the security suite. The hole they had blasted was probably large enough for them to get through — even with the bulky impact armor suits — but the tangle of jagged metal, spraying water and electricity made it a deathtrap.
“Gonna have to use more C4,” Bishop said.
Then Queen saw the door to the security room open just a crack at the end of the blasted room, a large piece of rubble stopping the door after just an inch.
“Quickly,” she whispered, and raised her weapon.
THIRTY-SIX
“Ostentatious much?” King asked.
Alexander frowned. “I admit I was a bit full of myself in those days.”
The men were looking across the lake to a villa built up on a hill that would come to be called the Mountain of Roman Rock, but which at present was unnamed. The villa resembled the medieval castles that wouldn’t come to the region for centuries yet. A round stone tower attached to the villa’s side rose up two stories. Other homes nearby were much smaller, and most were made low to the ground and from wood. The landscape was dotted with trees — absent in King’s own time — and he once again marveled at how different the landscape of Italy looked millennia before he would be born.
The building was their final target after almost twenty years of living in the past. They had fought countless battles, and even spent years as farmers and shepherds, living quietly, and waiting for the perfect time to save Acca from death at the hands of Alexander’s Forgotten wraiths. By this point, Alexander had practiced with the mother tongue so much that he had gotten the body perfect, including the withered nature of the corpse after the Forgotten had sucked her dry of blood. But he still needed the face. They had stayed away from the woman for fear of creating problems with the timeline, or from running into Alexander’s younger self. Now they needed to glimpse the woman, so Alexander could practice the face as well, before they needed to exchange her for a duplicate desiccated corpse, while the younger Alexander was away.