Standing on the balcony that overlooked the main audience chamber, Lahmu had the best seat in the house to watch the battle below.
He saw Atum Khaos carve through the rebellious Mooks as a farmer cleaves wheat from a field. Khaos, the Tripods, and the Mukarian bowmen had turned the tide of the battle and had all but finished off the last fifty of the Mooks. However, casualties had been extensive. Centuries of breeding royal hybrids and Tripods had gone to waste.
The Mooks had been unaccountably vicious. He’d had no idea the docile, little servants could be so savage. As he watched, he saw another Tripod guard swarmed by several Mooks. He made a note to suggest breeding the Mooks for an army when all this ridiculous foolishness was all over, and he was confident it would be over soon.
The rebellion would only be a minor, although inconvenient, blip in the millennia of Atum Khaos’s great and peaceful reign. Atum-Khaos, after all, was the only being who had ever defied the one true Father and survived. Once the rebels were brutally tortured and systematically executed, Atum’s warships would demolish the insolent kingdoms of this wretched world, and the cratered remains would serve as warnings to others who dared oppose Atum. The warships would then traverse the wormhole, and the Adamah’s home world would be enslaved, just like the thousands of other planets in Khaos’s empire.
The Mukarian bowmen, who were entranced and controlled by Atum-Khaos, not only picked off the Mooks one by one but also filled the Awumpai with their arrows. Even from a distance, Lahmu saw that the mighty beasts were tiring. He smiled when he saw the Tripods closing ranks around the tiring Awumpai and the remaining Mooks.
Suddenly, Lahmu’s smile disappeared, and his jaw fell open in surprise. An Adamah airplane strafed the glass dome in the chamber’s ceiling. The dome shattered, and shards of glass and rubble the size of Awumpai fell from the heavily damaged ceiling, causing Atum and the other combatants to scatter.
Once the dust settled, Lahmu heard the whine of the craft’s engines and saw the plane line up as though the pilot intended to land right inside the main audience chamber.
Khaos saw this, too, and signaled for a Tripod to throw him its trident.
Lahmu knew that Atum was more than capable of spearing the Adamah pilot from this distance but that Atum would probably wait for a perfect shot.
The Adamah plane dropped over the chamber’s farthest wall and was mere feet from touching the ground when Khaos reared back his mighty arm and prepared to launch the trident. Lahmu knew in his heart that Atum would not miss; he was incapable of it. But then a sword suddenly appeared in the center of Atum’s chest.
The red-haired Awumpai, Hu-Nan, was still alive. Although bleeding severely from several arrows, he had managed to sneak up behind Khaos and ram a sword through his back. Hu-Nan put his head over Khaos’s right shoulder and growled ferociously to let the dark deity know who had stabbed him.
Khaos spun the giant Awumpai off his back. He stumbled around, the sword still sticking through his body, and turned to face Hu-Nan. In a fit of rage, Khaos hurled the trident, which had been intended for the Adamah pilot, at the Awumpai.
Hu-Nan yelped in pain when the trident slammed into his body. He skidded across the floor and landed in a heap. He struggled to get up but fell heavily back to the ground and moved no more.
Lahmu saw the older Awumpai, Fu-Mar, roar wildly when Hu-Nan was hit, but several Tripods used the distraction and swarmed him.
“FILTHY ANIMAL,” Khaos hissed as he removed the sword from his back. He spat at the dead Awumpai and turned to deal with the incoming plane.
But the plane was closer than expected. It had lined up right on Khaos and sped toward him with its guns blazing.
Lahmu watched in horror as Khaos’s body convulsed violently again and again from the plane’s projectiles that blew threw his body. The Adamah’s plane touched down and skidded across the palace floor, heading right for his Atum.
Khaos’s outstretched arms did little to protect him when the Adamah’s plane careened into him and, like a giant carpenter’s hammer, smashed his body into the wall.
Lahmu saw that the Mukarian bowmen’s eyes no longer glowed, and the Tripods, now leaderless, wandered about confusedly.
Captain Harry Reed quickly climbed out of his plane’s cockpit and drew his pistol. He needn’t have bothered.
The dark deity wasn’t even visible. His body was embedded in the wall behind the plane’s crumpled nose. The Tripods kept their distance from Harry, and none of the bowmen fired arrows at him.
He saw Hu-Nan’s impaled body on the floor and was about to run to his dead friend’s side when he suddenly glimpsed something descending from the ceiling at a gentle rate. It wasn’t glass or falling debris.
It was Mac.
Although her hands, face, and hair were scorched, she didn’t look the worse for wear. “I thought you were dead!” Harry exclaimed.
“Duh,” Mac replied and pointed to her back. “Parachute.” She had finally one-upped him in the quip department.
Harry ran over and embraced her in a bear hug that lifted her feet off the floor.
After the embrace, Mac asked him, “Leo and Tae?”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t know. I just got here myself.” His face turned solemn. “But Hu-Nan didn’t make it.”
Mac touched his cheeks, which he knew were damp with tears. Fu-Mar had moved to his fallen friend’s body and was removing the trident.
“Oh, how sweet,” Khaos said sarcastically from inside the wall.
Harry heard the loud sound of metal scraping and turned to see the twelve-foot demigod push the plane backward and free himself. Harry noted that Khaos’s massive wounds were healing but at an extremely slow rate. At least I managed to hurt him, Harry thought.
“DID YOU THINK YOU STOPPED ME?” the dark deity asked, stepping toward Harry. “YOU HAVE ONLY DELAYED THE INEVITABLE!” Khaos limped, but Harry knew that the dark god still had more than enough power to kill them. Harry decided that he would go down fighting just the same.
“DO YOU THINK I SURVIVED A BATTLE WITH THE ONE TRUE FATHER HIMSELF TO BE SLAIN BY THE LIKES OF YOU?”
Harry pulled Mac behind him, and Fu-Mar and the small handful of remaining Mooks encircled them protectively.
Atum-Khaos turned to his army of Tripods and Mukarian bowmen and commanded, “FINISH THEM!”
As the army closed in, Harry noted that the bowmen’s eyes were once again filled with black hate.
#
Back in the inner sanctum, Leo fought for his life, and he was losing.
Towering over him, Tripod-Stein smashed Leo and his tiny sword down again and again. Near exhaustion, Leo backed into an alcove that contained a large table and chairs. He threw the chairs in front of him, but this did little to slow down the menacing Stein. Ducking a swipe, Leo dodged out of the way of Stein’s descending trident, which smashed the heavy table into two parts.
Leo was trapped in the alcove. There was nowhere else to go. In a desperate move that surprised even him, he flipped the short sword around, so he was holding the blade, and flung the sword at Stein’s head.
The offensive move surprised Stein, too. He didn’t have time to dodge out of the way, and the blade caught his forearm, which he lifted to block his head.
Tripod-Stein dropped his trident and howled in pain. Grimacing, he stumbled backward and attempted to pull the sword out of his arm, but the wound bled too much. His back still to the wall, Leo dove toward Stein’s dropped trident. Stein stomped after him while throwing overturned chairs and pieces of broken table out of the way.
Leo started to lift the heavy trident from the floor, but before he could, Stein appeared above him. Stein reared back on his hind legs and lunged forward to trample the young astronaut with his mighty front hoof.
Leo abandoned the trident and rolled out of the way just as Tripod-Stein’s hoof slammed down on the weapon, pinning it to the floor. Leo backed away until he was against the wall once more.
Looking for a weapon and finding none, Leo tried to make a run for it. As he did so, Stein impaled him with the recovered trident. The blow lifted him off the floor and pinned him to the wall. While it hurt like hell, only one of the trident’s points had pierced Leo’s narrow waist. The point had gone through just beneath his ribs and to the right. In a daze, Leo marveled that hadn’t been a killing blow and that he wasn’t dead yet after all that he’d endured. Stein kept Leo pinned to the wall and moved closer, putting his face right next to Leo’s. “Déjà vu,” he said.
Leo felt Stein’s hot breath on his face.
“Now what does this remind me of?” Stein said, turning his head to the side. “Oh yeah, this was the exact same way your friend Tae looked — just before I sent him to hell.”
Although in excruciating pain, Leo noticed that the Mukarian short sword still stuck fast in Stein’s forearm. “Then tell Tae I said hello,” Leo said through clenched teeth. Ignoring the pain in his stomach, he ripped the blade from Stein’s arm and stabbed the Tripod in the throat.
Tripod-Stein dropped Leo and the trident. He stumbled backward, clutching the short sword in his throat, and finally fell over onto his side.
Leo slid down the wall and landed atop of a pile of rubble. With great effort, he removed the trident from his midsection and threw it aside, where it clanged to the floor.
Through slatted eyes, he watched Tripod-Stein in the throes of death. As the darkness began to form a tunnel around Leo’s vision, the little girl approached him once more. He blinked the slow blink of someone on the brink of consciousness and saw that she knelt in front of him.
“Wake up, Leo. It’s not time to die,” she said.
#
In the audience chamber, Harry, Mac, the Awumpai, and the remaining Mooks somehow still held their own. While Fu-Mar and Atum-Khaos battled it out in a clash of the titans, Harry and Mac kept the Tripods at bay using their .45’s and the Mooks.
However, Fu-Mar was tiring against Atum-Khaos, and the Mooks were rapidly falling beneath the archers’ arrows. Harry knew that it wouldn’t be long before he and Mac were on their own.
As he put another two rounds in a Tripod’s eye, Harry ducked behind a fallen pillar for cover and was surprised to see Asha there. “Asha!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here? I thought you were dead.”
Asha looked at him sadly and explained, “I am Harry.”
Mac, who reloaded her pistol nearby, asked, “Who are you talking to?” Before he could answer, she had already drawn another bead on a Tripod.
“Harry, you have to go inside the inner sanctum and help Leo,” Asha said.
Looking at the bowmen and Tripods around him, Harry said, “Are you kidding me? We’ll never make it back there.”
“Yes, you will.” Asha stood up in the line of fire. Harry was tempted to pull her back down, but he saw an arrow pass through her transparent form.
Asha’s spirit form raised high above the battle and became visible to all. Harry saw that the bowmen, though still possessed by Atum, halted their attack when they saw her. Harry didn’t speak Asha’s language fluently, but he thought he heard her say, “My brethren, Atum-Khaos has blinded you. But now you are free from his lies. Free to follow him or the SongBird Goddess. You are free to choose, as the one true Father intended all along.”
Just then, a Tripod leaped over the group’s crude stockade. Mac emptied one in its chest before she was mule-kicked in the ribs, which sent her sprawling. Harry fired his last two rounds at it only to be knocked to floor by the butt-end of a trident. The Tripod reared up to trample Harry underfoot, but twelve well-placed arrows suddenly hit its body.
It seemed that the Mukarian bowmen had made their choice.
Harry looked up and saw Khaos ready to behead a beaten Fu-Mar, execution style, but twenty arrows abruptly pierced the deity’s back. It was an annoyance to the demigod more than anything else, but it still gave Fu-Mar time to spring away.
Asha looked back down at Harry. “Free the SongBird Goddess!” she said.
Mac saw the bowmen suddenly change sides, and as Harry helped her to her feet, she asked, “What the hell is going on?”
“An old friend stopped by. C’mon. We’ve got to find Leo.” Harry led Mac and Fu-Mar toward the inner sanctum, and the Mukarian bowmen covered their retreat.
#
Leo successfully picked up Atum’s scepter. He pointed it at the pi-shaped wooden doorframe in the stone wall behind the throne but really didn’t expect anything to happen. To his surprise, a beam of light shot out of the scepter and formed a swirling vortex beneath the archway.
Leo heard a sound behind him and turned to see Harry, Mac, and Fu-Mar enter the inner sanctum. Atum-Khaos and an army of Tripods were hot on their heels.
Harry and Fu-Mar barred the heavy doors behind them, but Tripod pikes and axes immediately began hacking at the doors.
“Is there another way out of here?” Harry yelled to Mac.
“I don’t see one.”
Before Harry could come up with a plan, Fu-Mar ran to one of the pillars that framed the doorway and leaned into it as Samson did at the Coliseum. Within moments, the giant Awumpai had knocked over the massive pillar and caused the threshold’s ceiling to collapse, blocking the advance of Khaos and his army. But they knew it wouldn’t hold off the army forever.
Harry and Mac ran up the main aisle to Leo and saw Stein dead on the floor. “You okay, Leo?” Mac asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Where’s Tae?”
Leo shook his head. “He didn’t make it.”
“What?” The word was strangled and Leo swallowed beneath Mac’s stare. He could see her processing the information through her disbelief. He struggled to bury the thought of his friend and focus on the present crisis.
He turned to Harry and he said, “Your friend Asha told me that the SongBird Goddess is through there.” He pointed at the molecular whirlpool. “She wants us to free her.”
“Yeah, I know; I saw her, too,” Harry replied.
Loud crashing noises emanated from the sanctum’s entrance as Khaos and his followers worked their way through. Fu-Mar took his place just inside the doors and readied himself for combat.
Mac told Harry, “Go. We’ll hold off Khaos as long as we can.”
Harry checked to see that his pistols were loaded and took the heavy scepter from Leo. “Okay, I’ll be right back,” he said. After giving Mac a wink and a smile, and Leo a slap on the back, he dove through the portal.
Seconds later, there was a loud explosion near the doorway. Before the cloud of dust settled, Khaos and his army of Tripods were walking briskly toward them.