Angel Of Doom. James Axler

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      Smaragda took the receiver. The only sound on the other end was…unnatural.

      A knocked-out radio should only receive static, white noise, the pop and crackle of random frequencies and the hiss of electromagnetic radiation pouring off the sun onto the surface of the Earth.

      A jammed radio should not be singing in unholy but beautiful tones. She couldn’t bear to listen to the blasphemous signal for more than a few seconds before handing the radio back to Tan. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to put it back to his ear, either.

      She tried the helmet comm. “Niklo, come back.”

      As soon as she stopped transmitting, there was that song; a high, melodic tone, singing verses in a long-forgotten tongue. But even without understanding the words, Smaragda knew it spoke to something that did not belong on Earth. It was a prayer. What was worse, she knew something was listening and somewhere, beyond the veil of her senses, it was struggling to respond.

      “Karlo, Rosa, go grab Niklo and Herc and bring them back. We’re heading back to the boat. If you see anyone or anything that’s not Niklo or Herc, open fire,” Smaragda said.

      So much for a mission of peace and mercy. Smaragda didn’t like the idea of sending off her soldiers to retrieve their teammates under orders to kill any strangers. However the singing and the odd behavior of the wildlife around them added up to this road being nothing less than a murder trap.

      And she’d led her platoon right into it.

      Karlo and Rosa jogged up the road to where Herc, the scout, had called back about movement. Niklo had only been out of radio contact for a minute, but it felt like a lifetime. The only heartening thing was that there had been no sound of gunfire. After all, if Niklo didn’t cut loose with the SAW, that meant there was no enemy force rising to engulf them. The Olympian sergeant would have made any ambush pay for their surprise, and the light machine gun would have been heard for miles.

      The silence around them, the damned silence smothering the platoon, ate at her. Smaragda upped the magnification on her helmet optics, scanning the road ahead. It had been midday when they’d stopped, clouds moving in. The day had been growing steadily grayer and dimmer, but now the light was fading even faster, when the sun should be highest in the sky.

      Her blood seemed to thicken in her veins as even the high-tech optics in her Praetorian helmet, the same advanced night-vision and telescopic lenses that Kane and Grant had as part of their Magistrate armor suits, showed nothing.

      “Captain?” A voice spoke up.

      “Movement?” Smaragda asked.

      “No. Just…smoke,” Tan said.

      Smaragda flipped up the visor on her helmet. There, invisible to the infrared scanners, was a roiling, spreading cloud that billowed out onto the road. She glanced through on infrared again. No one seemed to be inside the cloud, utilizing it as cover or concealment. Who knew if the smoke had some properties that could be filtering out even the body heat of her fellow Praetorians?

      “Should we open fire?” another soldier asked, nerves jangling in his voice.

      “On what?” Smaragda asked. “We might just end up cutting Niklo and the others apart.”

      “But they’re not on the infrared,” Tan noted.

      “Retreat,” Smaragda ordered.

      “Smoke’s closing in on the road behind us,” announced the Spartan at the back of their formation. “I’m going to…”

      “Stay put!” Smaragda commanded. “Don’t enter the smoke.”

      Every instinct told her to open fire into the infection of black ink spilling onto the road on either end, bracketing them in.

      Smaragda wouldn’t risk the lives of her men in a friendly fire incident.

      “GS 26, knock us a road through the trees, now!” Smaragda ordered.

      The suit in the center of the formation reacted quickly, plunging into the woods. Large, brassy arms wielding unimaginable strength pushed against trunks, shoving trees out of the ground, roots snapping. Branches shattered against the suit’s broad shoulders and Smaragda waved her men into the gap being created by the bulldozer-like robot. She stayed at the back of the group, watching as the walls of inky, foreboding smoke began to close in on where they used to be. It was as if the clouds were only following the road, forming perfect columns, not spreading out into the forest and upon the path that Skeleton 26 pushed through. Smaragda continued stepping backward, minding the exposed roots and splinters left in the robot’s wake.

      She kept the muzzle of her rifle aimed at the wall of darkness and turned sideways, skipping back after her men.

      “Niklo, I’ll be back,” she whispered. “If you’re alive.”

      Silently she repeated that thought. Leaving soldiers under her command behind, in a lurch, was as bad a defeat as seeing them fall in bloody heaps.

      “Everyone comes home.” Smaragda repeated the motto of the Praetorians. “Sooner or later, we’ll be back for you.”

      A scream split the air. She whirled and looked down the trough cut through the woods. Of the three Spartans in the unit, she could only see one, the other two having disappeared behind a wall of darkness that intercepted them. Of the fifteen soldiers she’d pushed into retreat in the wake of the Spartans, she saw only six, and they were in full retreat.

      The mighty robot’s shoulder guns opened up onto the shadowy smoke as it lunged for the brass giant. The flash and flicker of muzzle-blasts did little to dent or illuminate the choking, inky fog that seemed to grow tentacles with which to entrap the robot.

      Smaragda shouldered her rifle, but realized that opening fire into the fog would mean that she could be blindly gunning down fellow soldiers taken captive by the cloud. She wanted to yell for a cease-fire from the robot but, watching the giant fight for its life, she noted that tracer rounds struck the smoke, then bounced off the cloud.

      GS 26 lashed out with its battle-ax, the edges heated to steamy white by elements inside the gigantic weapon. The ax seemed to fare better, lopping off solid hunks of the darkness, but only if they were slender tendrils. Anything thicker than a human torso caught the ax, forcing the Spartan to struggle and wrench the blade free.

      Tendrils whipped out, snatching up another of her men.

      Smaragda lunged, drawing her falcata and slashing at the tentacle of living night. Blade met alien smoke and it was as if she tried to chop a tree branch. The solidness of the tendril of cloud rattled her arm, tendons popping as she put enough force into the swing for a follow-through.

      The soldier in the fog’s grasp turned ashen, eyes wide with horror. He breathed out, wisps of frosting moisture escaping from his lips.

      “Run!” he rasped. “Get away! Live to…”

      Another whip of darkness wrapped around the Praetorian’s head and, within moments, he was wrenched off of his feet and into the smoke as if he was never there.

      Lashing smoke fingered out toward her, but she swatted the pseudopods aside, scrambling into retreat.

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