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  Even as she did so, she was only resting some of her brilliant brain. The other part was still working, separating and attempting to translate the individual syllables of the ancient song. Brigid imagined herself sitting in an empty room, the object of her translation separated onto different note cards that she could arrange appropriately.

  There were great segments of this blasphemous-feeling chant that had grammatical syntax that made German seem blunt and straightforward. Merely moving words and syllables seemed to alter the chant dramatically. All the while, she kept herself on guard against any hidden message that could manifest itself as an “information virus” that would threaten her.

  In her barren, mentally constructed study, she held one of the cards, and thought back to Zaragoza. There, too, had been a hellish song, which had stolen lives, literally. This had been done mathematically, and as soon as she thought of that, she mentally summoned a chalkboard with Ereshkigal’s song upon it.

  That had been an easier translation simply due to the fact that it had been spoken in a living language, not one dead, without the option of a still-extant speaker providing a verbal context. Brigid had thought about speaking the song that Smaragda had heard and allowing the Commtact and its built-in translation matrix to take care of any understanding.

  This one was different, though. Ereshkigal sang her call of suicide in Spanish.

  This language was a dead and gone variant of Italian, much more primitive, and seeded with words originating on lips not too different than those of the Annunaki overlords who had been the origin of far too many threats to the world.

  Brigid turned to the shadowy tune of Ereshkigal, then back to the song of Vanth and Charun. The ancient goddess who tormented Zaragoza ferried her tune of reanimation on temple bells, urging life to the townspeople who had taken her song to heart and killed themselves. The shambling walkers were of a different flavor than the Olympian troops who carried a lifeless, dead-eyed pallor. Those were actual revenants, horrors that should have been buried or returned to the cycle of death and life being eaten by scavengers.

  This instance was the theft of some form of energy, rendering them as operatives for the two winged horrors. Brigid didn’t want to speculate on the potential of a human soul as that kind of power source, but as she ticked down through the possibilities, eliminating all the possibles, no matter how improbable, she found herself coming to the conclusion that it was the theft of just such a higher mental function that was at fault. And why preserve the bodies?

  Charun and Vanth both showed the capability to overwhelm even the armed Mantas, as well as other phenomenal feats. The very act of using her torch as a kind of threshold/interphaser proved to be more than sufficient as a weapon, to the point where she’d been capable of transporting a dozen humans and two giant humanoid robots.

  Brigid looked closer at the monitor, studying how the Gear Skeletons were not summoned back to the torch; they were too busy carrying the Manta overland, back toward the west. This momentarily confused her, when she realized that the Manta wasn’t connected to a living being, much like the piloted oversize battle suits. The amputee pilots were literally plugged into the powerful robots by means of a cybernetic access point on their spine. As much as the Olympian soldiers were able to be transported along with their weapons and armor, there must have been some form of “life prerequisite.”

  Or, simply, it could have been that there was an actual limit to how much the torch could pick up and deposit. Occam’s razor. Vanth had come to retrieve Charun’s hammer, and possibly take the human pilot who’d disarmed her partner. That was why there was a limit of how many soldiers and Gear Skeletons were transported in.

  “So you do have limits,” Brigid mused, quickly adding up the combined weight of the deposited Olympian troops, the two skeletons and the Manta. “And on closer examination, she decided that she couldn’t ferry the weight of the Manta. However, rather than destroy the ship, she’s using it as bait for the pilot and his companions…namely us.”

  Brigid rubbed her chin as she watched the two beings. They weren’t moving their lips and neither of them had spoken aloud to be heard on the audio pickups in the shadow suit hoods. And yet they did seem to have a shorthand; gestures and facial expressions that told each other as much as any conversation could. Brigid had seen similar relationships, between Kane and Grant, primarily, and it was slowly growing among the members of CAT Beta.

  It was also an element of her friendship with Kane. These two had been together, seemingly forever. And yet, if they had been around for so long, what would have been the impetus for their suddenly expanding their influence?

  Of course, there had been the war with the Hydrae and Danton that kept New Olympus from hearing about the winged “soul thieves.” With that kind of distraction, there could have been endless wars going on on the Italian peninsula, and the besieged Olympians wouldn’t have heard a clue. Only recent expansion of trade and exploration allowed them the luxury of exploring further than their doorstep.

  Brigid went back and played the testimony she received from Diana and Aristotle. In her memory construct, she put down a small room, the conference table where the Olympian regents spoke with her.

  She knelt to look into the room, to play back the scene…and something gave her pause. She looked around at the note cards strewed across her work area. Even as she was multitasking mentally, there was an anomaly, an oddity that was itching in her mind.

  Brigid cleared the distractions, returning her white room to its clean state. It was a symbolic means of cleansing her mind of everything competing for her attention, and it usually worked.

  Not now.

  The mental note cards, for all their existence at the whim of her will, had not disappeared.

  “Dammit,” Brigid murmured. “There is much more psycho in these psychopomps than I anticipated. Even Smaragda’s testimony has a dangerous weight to them.”

  The note cards began to swirl around, building into a twisting dust devil. Though this was all occurring in Brigid’s mind’s eye, she felt the pressure of the winds building. She pursed her lips tightly and immediately summoned a brick wall between herself and the rising storm.

  “You’re in my mind, whoever you are,” Brigid announced. “And you walk here at your peril, intruder!”

  The note cards rattled against the wall she’d constructed out of her will and she then heard a hiss she wasn’t quite certain of. Within moments, however, she saw sharp corners slicing through the wall, trying to dig deeper, to penetrate the barrier of her mental defenses.

  Brigid slammed another wall against the other, buying herself a moment more. In the same instance she armored up, summoning a variant of Kane’s and Grant’s old Magistrate armor, a carapace that in the real world was composed of black polycarbonate materials and Kevlar, rendering her two partners immune to all small arms. This one, however, was cast in the same shade of emerald as her eyes, a small amount of narcissistic affectation on her part.

  Within a few moments the second wall was sliced to ribbons by the active, dangerous song of Vanth and Charun.

  Brigid held her ground, summoning her own version of a Sin Eater.

  This one, however, was not a mere gun. This was a focus of her personal will, a twin-barreled beast that bracketed her right hand like the claws of a crab.

  The notes stopped swirling, the tornado of force that made them up fading and settling into a shape. It was a winged woman, tall and beautiful, with flowing hair.

  It was Vanth, and she did not have her torch. But she did possess her bow.

  “Pitiful human.” Vanth spoke. “You have let me in, and that is your doom.”

  Brigid smirked. “I’ve had worse between my ears, lady.”

  In a flicker of motion Vanth raised her bow and opened fire with it, arrows spitting out as if she was firing a machine gun. Had Brigid not steeled herself behind the armor of her will, it would have proved impressive, but even as she stood her ground, she felt the
pricks of dozens of impacts. The archivist swept the ends of the arrows, snapping shafts off her armor. A moment of concentration and the winged huntress’s arrowheads popped from her shell, clattering to the ground.

  “You resist,” Vanth mused.

  “Because I know what you are. I know what these attacks are. And having looked behind your curtain…”

  Brigid swept up her double-barreled Sin Eater, spitting out molten yellow spears of flame that lashed toward Vanth. The goddess let out a wail of surprise, folding her wings around herself as Brigid’s mental counterattack splashed against her feathered shields.

  Brigid could feel the blazing heat of her own onslaught and watched as feathers fluttered away, burning and flickering out of existence on the battleground of her mind.

  Brigid opened fire again, slashing another searing swath of destruction. Vanth spread her wings and flew at the last moment before the Cerberus warrior’s beams struck. Vanth shot up like a rocket, accelerating away from Brigid.

  “No. This is not how we play this game,” Brigid growled. She gave a moment of concentration and then in the next instant she was parallel to Vanth, who hurtled through the white void.

  Vanth’s face flashed from grinning victory to shock and surprise. “What?”

  “I’ve spent a lot of time alone in my mind. I know everything inside it. It is large enough to encompass a universe, but there is nowhere that any intruding program, no mathematical trick of thought, can escape my focus,” Brigid told the envoy of the goddess. “You are inside my brain and I am everywhere!”

  With that, Brigid cut loose once more. This time Vanth was unable to bring her wings up to shield herself, nor could she swerve. The twin-barreled burst of energy slammed into Vanth’s near-naked chest, the heat of the Earth’s own blood searing and charring flesh. Instead of the stench of human flesh, however, it was odd, twisted, alien. It did not matter, for Brigid’s take on the Sin Eater held a bottomless supply of the blazing energy of her will. She held down the trigger, blocking out the huntress’s screams of pain and the snap-pop of roasting flesh and fatty tissues.

  A charred wing swept around, slamming into Brigid hard enough to break her concentration, ending the fountain of lavalike fury that she’d unleashed. The blow sent the archivist into a whirl and she took every ounce of willpower to stop her dizzying spin.

  “I am a song that has swallowed hearts and minds across two universes,” Vanth’s avatar said as Brigid “landed,” lying prone from the dizzying impact. “Girl, you have no concept of how in over your head you truly are.”

  Brigid looked up. “I’m in my own head. Not in over it.”

  Vanth fluttered down closer to the prone Brigid Baptiste. It had replaced its bow with a spear. “I will peel you out of your defenses, and then I will add you to…”

  Brigid narrowed her eyes and Vanth paused as she felt changes around her.

  “…add you to the…power…”

  Figures began to appear around the winged huntress as she floated over Brigid. First dozens, then scores, then by the hundreds until the two of them were surrounded by a sphere composed of women who looked exactly like Brigid Baptiste, complete in her armor of will.

  “The power of what?” Brigid demanded.

  “Who…what?” Vanth asked, turning, looking up and down. “Thousands of you. How?”

  “You’re the one who is in over your head. And under mine,” Brigid returned. She rose from the “ground,” floating up to the avatar of Vanth unleashed in her mind.

  “You want my intellect, for what?” Brigid asked.

  “The torch,” Vanth answered. “To open the portal for the bodies to pass through.”

  “To go home?” Brigid continued, getting closer to her. The goddess was now sufficiently cowed. Vanth’s sharp senses picked up that every one of the other Brigids held a Sin Eater similar to the one that had hit her so hard, caused her so much pain.

  Vanth’s attention locked onto Brigid. “Your world will become my race’s new home, human.”

  Brigid nodded. Her lips curled with anger at this entity inside her mind, being proud and cheerful over such a blasphemous ideal.

  “And when we come, it will be as a plague,” Vanth warned. “An endless horde…”

  Brigid floated backward from the armed huntress. “It sounds fascinating, but I’ll keep my brain here…and your plague on the other side of our dimension.”

  With that, Brigid willed herself into all of the copies she’d placed around the intruder in her mind. To Vanth, it looked as if she’d dissipated like a windblown fog. In actuality, Brigid now looked at the mathematical virus input into her mind from thousands of points of view…over the sights of her will weapon.

  “Goodbye,” the millions of Brigids told the Vanth avatar, and she pulled the trigger. The universe of Brigid’s mind’s eye turned to the color of raw, blazing lava, the roar and heat manifesting into actual sweat on her brow where she rested on the cot.

  “Brigid?”

  It was Domi’s voice, from the real world. Brigid could feel the slender but rough fingers of the girl pressing on her shadow-suited shoulder, hear the notes of concern in her little friend’s voice. Her million guns opened up, working to crush the Vanth avatar, and even as they attacked her, she watched and felt as slashes of sickly light carved through her duplicates.

  That hurt. The torch’s searing light felt as painful, as horrible, as her own counterattack seemed when she damaged Vanth.

  “Brigid!” This time there was panic in Domi’s voice. “Wake up!”

  “One moment,” Brigid called out.

  The Vanth entity continued to crumple under myriad relentless counterattacks from Brigid’s will. The intruding… virus. The intruding virus wasn’t letting go, firing back with everything she could summon. In addition to the torch’s flame, arrows flew, darting out, and Brigid felt her chest tighten, stung by those phantom shafts. Inside the Magistrate armor of her will, she was soaking wet, trying hard to breathe while the spike of agony stuck in her breastbone.

  “Go away. Die now!” Brigid growled. She realized that she was in such a mental struggle she’d reverted to how Domi would speak in this situation.

  Domi, help.

  And with that summons, a simulacra of the feral albino girl appeared, clad merely in her black suit, bare-handed and barefoot, but drawing twin daggers from sheaths on her hips. Like a snowy owl, she swooped down upon Vanth, those black talons of hers carving deep into the burned and battered goddess. The creature sang out a wail of pain as diseased blue pus erupted from each of Vanth’s wounds. The once soft and supple-looking torso of the woman was in places blackened, charred, and where the shell of its skin split, the milky blue gunk seeped, blackening like oil when it lit against the surrounding flames.

  Somewhere in a part of Brigid’s mind, she realized that the tint of Vanth’s blood resembled the sickly pallor of Charun. Perhaps a sign of ancient injuries incurred in the deep past.

  In the meantime Brigid summoned up Kane and Grant, as well as Sinclair and Edwards. If Vanth wanted to take her over, then Brigid would take strength from her friendship, the very reason she was fighting so hard to prevent the winged huntress’s takeover of her mind. For should the alien goddess take Brigid over, turn her against the others, then there would be very little to stand between the two winged invaders and the rest of the world. They’d already showed their deadly adeptness at taking over the Gear Skeletons and Olympian soldiers. They were giving her a struggle to the point where she was suffering psychic and physical exhaustion.

  And with her five friends leaping into action, hammering at the Vanth virus, Brigid had a breather. Her chest no longer felt as if it were pinioned by an arrow when she breathed. The sweat was cooling from her brow. Her strength grew.

  No more cockiness. She left up her friends and dove in herself.

  For it was through teamwork that Brigid was at her ultimate strength. Too many incidents had reinforced that it was the combined talents,
skills and attributes of the Cerberus explorers that provided the best results. Together, they had dared the gods themselves, and this fragmentary essence was now crumbling, pieces shattering off of her charred form, bursting into puffs of ash, thanks to that knowledge.

  Her summons of friendly thoughts gave her all she needed.

  And as soon as the virus attack had begun, it was over.

  Brigid knelt, her friends fading back to where they’d come from, the images dissipating as quickly as the charred embers of Vanth’s intrusion. Merely getting back to her feet took as much will as it had taken to battle the virus. Her legs felt like rubber and when she was fully stood, she gulped down deep lungfuls of air, trying to recharge and replenish what little remained in her reserves.

  She spent more of her mental energy, taking inventory of herself, scanning for signs or remnants of the Vanth entity that had invaded her mind via the song. All that was left were the actual words and notes of the transmission that tormented Smaragda so. Finally, during the battle, her translation of the enemy message had been completed. It was assembled on a board, giving the archivist all she required for understanding the ancient rhyme.

  It also felt hollow, again like the song of Ereshkigal when she’d read it in English from the Spanish. Whatever information virus, whatever hypnotic energy, was in those words was gone, stripped away. Its remnants were also expunged from her mind.

  She hoped.

  “Brigid!”

  With that she opened her eyes and was back in “the world.” Both Sela Sinclair and Domi were standing over her on the cot. Domi had a towel in her hand and was blotting away sweat on her brow.

  “I’m fine,” she muttered, mouth dry and gummy.

  “You didn’t sound it,” Domi returned. “You were drenched with sweat and muttering in your sleep.”