Desert Kings. James Axler

As the light vanished, a scream from the other side of the group told of another chilling.

      “The eyes!” Delphi shouted. “Aim for the eyes or the ears! Those are the only weak points!”

      Kicking spent brass out of their way, the troopers shuffled closer together for protection.

      “You heard the man!” Cotton shouted at the top of her lungs. “Eyes and ears, boys! Send it to hell!”

      Dropping back, Delphi sprayed an entire clip of rounds at the hellhounds, then dropped the exhausted weapon and pulled a pistol from his gunbelt. At the grasp of his hand, the weapon audibly charged and an indicator light on top registered in the red. The battery inside the H&K needler was fully charged.

      “Everybody out!” Delphi commanded, leveling the Kalashnikov and his pistol. “I can handle this alone!”

      “No nuking way. We stand together!” Bellany snarled, snapping off shots with the Webley. Then the hammer clicked on a spent shell. Ducking, the bald trooper cracked the weapon to drop the empties and hastily thumb in fresh rounds. One live cartridge fell and rolled away under a wooden desk—and a hellhound jumped over the desk to land on top of Bellany.

      Shrieking obscenities, the man went down, firing the handcannon point-blank into the chest of the thing. A single swipe of the powerful claws removed his throat, while the tentacles lanced outward, spearing two other troopers, scoring minor wounds. Their rapid-fires dropped with a clatter, firing off a few rounds before stopping.

      Recoiling, Delphi paused for only a second, then aimed both of his weapons and fired them simultaneously. The chattering of the assault rifle completely masked the soft hiss of the H&K coil gun. The 7.62 mm bullets bounced off the body of the beast, but the 2.5 mm depleted uranium slivers punched clean through the sleek, muscular body.

      Pumping out piss-yellow blood, the hellhound snarled over a shoulder, and all of its tentacles stabbed for the cyborg. He ducked, and they missed by less than an inch. Staying in a crouch, he fired again and again, scoring hits both times.

      Now the others trained their blasters on the wounded beast, hammering it with lead and steel.

      Gushing sticky golden fluids, the creature sprang for the cyborg and missed, but knocked the Kalashnikov out of his hands, the rapid-fire taking the needler along with it. But as the animal landed on the desk, Davenport shoved her Ruger .357 into one of its ears and fired. The backblast threw the woman down, but the head of the beast cracked open, yellow blood erupting from the mouth and exploding the eyes. Weaving drunkenly on its legs for a long moment, the beast went still and gently laid down as if it was merely going to sleep. As the head listed sideways, the life fluids ceased to flow from the ghastly wounds and the big hellhound went still.

      Taking heart from the chill, the few remaining troopers cheered wildly, now able to concentrate on the last man-killer. Trying for the nimble creature, they succeeded only in finishing the destruction of the predark lab.

      Recovering his needler, Delphi cursed when he saw another trooper fall and made a command decision. The resources of the lab were already lost. Time to save what he could.

      “Use the grens!” the cyborg bellowed, pulling the crystal wand from his shoulder holster.

      Taking defensive positions behind the toppled comps, the troopers readied the explosive charges, ripping off the safety tape holding the arming level in place.

      As if understanding the danger, the hellhound turned and looped for the door. Already facing that direction, Delphi waited until it was directly in sight, then squeezed the wand.

      A scintillating laser beam stabbed out from the tip, hitting the big cat in the neck. Yellow blood formed a geyser from the punctured artery and as it turned, Delphi increased the power to maximum and burned a long burst straight down its throat. The beast went stock-still as the mauling power ray burned down its gullet. Now the grens arrived, raining down around the beast and thunderously detonating, ripping the body apart into bloody gobbets.

      As the smoky blasts dissipated, Cotton walked over to inspect the corpse.

      “Yeah, that’s aced proper,” she said with grim satisfaction. Then the woman hawked and spit on the tattered remains. “All right, gather the blasters and boots! Leave the bodies. They’d only be dug up during the night by animals.”

      Moving slow, as if they were drunk, the exhausted men moved among their fallen comrades, taking what was necessary and ignoring the rest. Death was part of their job. Later they would mourn for lost friends, but right now there was still work to be done as quietly and efficiently as possible.

      Realizing this was his best chance, Delphi holstered the laser, then took it out again, just in case there was another of the creatures hiding somewhere. Bio-weapons! Somebody was going to pay for that dearly. There was no doubt in his mind that this had been a trap set just for him. How else could animals have gotten inside a room supposedly sealed for a hundred years? Clearly, they had been placed there recently, the doors resealed. And the people in charge of all biological weapons worked for TITAN. This was bad, Delphi acknowledged.

      Going to the smashed comp, Delphi looked over the wreckage and sighed. He had hoped that something might have survived the battle, but the IBM Blue/Gene supercomputer was utterly destroyed. The huge comp was the finest and fastest of its kind in the predark world, and used some of the prototype for the circuits inside his body. The cyborg had fervently hoped to find something he could use here, but that was impossible now. The circuit cubes were broken, the digital wafers shattered, and the plasma chips warped from a series of massive short circuits. Gone, all gone.

      With diminishing hope, Delphi went from one server to the next, finding only trash. The last two servers had bullet holes in them, yet were still serviceable and capable of working. Good news indeed. Except that they contained none of the experimental microprocessors that he required.

      Then inspiration hit and Delphi walked to the control board for the supercomputer and raised the service panel to palm over the complex wiring. Incredibly, he received an answering tingle and dug among the morass of shielded circuits to retrieve a lumpy section of a slim piece of ribbon cable. It was a Thinking Wire, and almost as advanced as the version that he carried. Even more important, the microchips embedded in the cable seemed completely undamaged!

      Keeping out of sight behind the raised lid of the console, Delphi opened a port in his chest and fed in the wire. It took a few moments for his systems to initiate the new hardware, and there was a moment of disorientation. Then whole sections of deactivated programs and hardware became active in his mind. His autorepair systems were back online! Scrolling through the command menu, he held out a palm and there appeared a barely visible sheen in the air. Frowning slightly, Delphi rerouted some power and the translucent distortion expanded to a full yard, then it turned transparent.

      I have a force field again! Now he was safe from bullets, lasers, anything. Everything! Even a focused EMP beam designed to burn out his internal circuitry and render him powerless, paralyzed, a prisoner inside his own augmented body. Helpless prey for the agents of TITAN. If they were actively hunting for him, then it was time to turn and take a stand. No, he’d attack them! The balance of power had been redressed. Now the war began in earnest.

      “Sir?”

      Quickly dissolving the immaterial force field, Delphi looked up and saw Davenport standing nearby. How much had she just seen? Did she know the truth? “Yes, what is it, Cotton?” the cyborg asked in forced casualness.

      That made the sec woman pause. This was the first time he had ever called her by her first name. Guess I’ve just stepped into an aced man’s boots and am the new sec boss for the convoy.

      “We’re ready to leave, Chief,” she replied, resting the still-warm barrel of her Kalashnikov on a shoulder. Bellany’s gunbelt and Webley .44 hung over the other arm. “Unless there’s something else you want to look for around here.”

      “No, I’ve found what was needed,” Delphi stated, lowering the service panel and locking it closed once more. “Let’s go.”

      “Where,