She inspected her troops, now lurking among the sword-shaped pandanus leaves and coconut-laden palm trees. Zenobia, Shirin, Rani, and Nina. All were superwomen, born of Chrysalis, and veterans of dozens of daring raids and rescue missions waged against the oppressive forces of patriarchy and misogyny. “Remember,” she softly reminded them all. “We must not be overconfident. Our foes tonight, Khan’s Exon warriors, are as superhuman as we. They will not be conquered as easily as most men.”
She nodded at the lighted complex atop the hill, once the nerve center of France’s blasphemous nuclear assaults on Mother Earth and now host to an even more heinous obscenity. “There is our target, just as the American described.” She tugged on the straps of her backpack, making sure her special cargo was resting snugly against her back, then conducted a quick inventory of her weapons: a 9mm Beretta pistol (with silencer), a K-Bar fighting knife, multiple grenades and smoke bombs, flare gun, and, last but not least, her trained, conditioned, and genetically perfect body.
“Go!” she whispered.
Zenobia, who years before had served as Chen’s bodyguard at Khan’s disastrous superhuman summit in Chandigarh, took point, leading them uphill, zigzagging here and there to take full advantage of the scattered stands of palms. Her bright red hair had been dyed raven-black in the interests of stealth. The others followed closely, with Shirin watching their rear. She was an Afghan refugee who had traded her stifling burqa for a Kevlar vest and combat gear.
It was a steep climb that only became more so as they went on, reminding Chen of some of the more arduous obstacle courses back on Penthesilea. The abundant foliage, although providing valuable cover, was also a chore to force their way through. Thorns and twigs, branches and brambles, tugged at their uniforms and skin, scratching against their faces. Lizards and caterpillars scurried across their path, sometimes dropping onto the backs of their necks.
They had been lucky so far. Chen knew that they couldn’t avoid detection forever. At some point they would need to fight their way into the fetid bowels of the Centre. She glanced back over her shoulder. From this height, she could easily see the towering rocket gantry rising from the forest on the other side of the lagoon. An Ariane 5 rocket, intended to deliver Goddess knows what unholy payload into the pristine heavens, rested upon the launch pad, held securely by the gantry’s mechanical embrace. A sly smirk appeared upon Chen’s face, knowing what was to come.
A sudden explosion rocked the ground beneath her, and she threw herself face-first onto the leafy hillside. A blast of heat scorched her shoulders and the acrid smell of smoke and burning flesh assaulted her nostrils. Risking a peek, she raised her head slightly to look for the source of the explosion; to her dismay, she saw a billowing column of black smoke rising from farther up on the hillside, where Zenobia had crept only seconds before.
A mine? A hidden tripwire? Chen offered a brief prayer for her sister’s departed spirit, knowing that the formerly flame-haired amazon had somehow fallen victim to the island’s defenses. Orange flames licked the leaves of a nearby pandanus shrub, threatening to set the surrounding underbrush afire.
Besides claiming the life of their comrade, the detonation also cost them the advantages of surprise and subterfuge. Within seconds, alarms sounded from the building above. Lights flicked on in every window of the Centre, and Chen heard excited voices and the sound of boots pounding on pavement. Their cover, she concluded, had well and truly been blown.
“Amazons, attack!” she cried out, rising rapidly to her feet. Her surviving sisters-in-arms rose from the jungle brush like mythical soldiers sprung from the strewn teeth of an unequivocally female dragon. They held their weapons at the ready, charging up the smoking hillside at superhuman speed. Before drawing her own Beretta, Chen first took hold of the flare gun hanging from her belt. Without hesitation, she pointed the gun at the sky above the lagoon and fired a single flare that exploded phosphorescently above the shimmering waters, signaling the second wave of the invasion. “Now, my sisters,” she whispered to the all-female army waiting offshore. “Now!”
Team Hecuba struck first, as proven by the gigantic fireball that suddenly roared from the base of the rocket gantry, across the lagoon. The colossal explosion, caused by a 60mm mortar fired from the surrounding jungle, ignited the Ariane itself, turning the gigantic launch vehicle into an inverted Roman candle, consuming itself from the bottom up.
The Ariane’s fiery demise marked the beginning of the amazons’ full-scale assault on Chrysalis Island. Hang-gliding warriors, launched from speedboats hidden behind the neighboring islands, came soaring over the island in droves, their pitch-black nylon wings all but invisible against the vacant sky. They strafed the ground with machine-gun fire while hurling grenades at the antiaircraft emplacements below. Fireballs blossomed amongst the tropical greenery, all intended to draw Khan’s soldiers away from the Centre.
Its moorings melted by the ferocious heat of the self-destructing Ariane rocket, the massive gantry toppled to earth with a thunderous crash that could be heard all the way across the island. Savoring the apocalyptic destruction, Chen followed the remainder of her team toward their ultimate destination: Phoolan Dhasal’s biological shop of horrors. Masculine voices, barking orders in Punjabi, sounded from the top of the hill and she yanked a grenade from the bandolier across her chest. “Heads down!” she shouted to her comrades as she lobbed the grenade at the willing guardians of Khan’s vile contagion.
An ear-pounding blast of fire and smoke cleared her way, all but knocking at Dhasal’s door.
A dynamic computer model charted the spread of the flesh-eating bacteria, based on its estimated communicability, available vectors, geographic deployment, resistance to antibiotics, etc. According to the most recent projections, it would take approximately 79.32 days to infect the entire human race, excepting those conceived at Chrysalis, of course.
Phoolan Dhasal looked up from the full-color computer display, giving her tired eyes a break. She had been putting in long hours the last several weeks, as the launch date for the epidemic drew near. Khan wanted daily updates on the status of their preparations, and she had endeavored not to disappoint him.
She sat alone before the computer. A double layer of transparent glass and plastic separated her from the isolation chamber on the other side of the window, where industrial-size fermentation vats capable of holding several hundred kilograms of cultured streptococcus-A rested safely within an airtight environment. Mechanical arms, currently at rest, gave her the option of extracting and manipulating minute samples from each vat, for the purpose of testing virulence and communicability. Idle waldoes are the devil’s playthings, she thought wryly, although it was hard to imagine how the articulated metal arms could cook up anything more diabolical than what they had already helped to concoct.
Dhasal rubbed her eyes. A bowl of half-eaten curry sat on the gleaming white counter next to her keyboard. Frankly, she was getting bored with necrotizing fasciitis and was looking forward to the advent of the plague just so she could get back to work on some other promising lines of inquiry. She had been making significant progress, as she recalled, in cloning transgenic organisms before Khan ordered that the entire resources of the Centre be devoted to the refinement and mass production of strep-A.
Soon, she promised herself. Once the epidemic began, thinning the planet’s excess population as Khan desired, she would have all the time in the world to pursue more interesting experiments. There had been some intriguing work done recently with regards to synthetic glands and enzymes. . . .
The computer model blinked once, demanding her attention. With a sigh, she forced herself to examine the revised epidemiological projections, looking for ways to tweak the program to produce an even more efficient result. There was very little that could be done with the pathogen itself at this late date, so she concentrated on the probable dissemination patterns, trying to figure out the ideal targets for each of their available bio-warheads. Perhaps we’re concentra
ting too much on North America, she speculated, and neglecting Africa and the Middle East?
Downing a spoonful of lukewarm curry, she adjusted the distribution parameters, then leaned back in her chair to observe the results. Before the model finished its work, however, a tremendous roar penetrated the walls of the bio-laboratory, sounding like a bomb going off somewhere outside. Dhasal looked up in alarm as warning klaxons went off suddenly, hurting her ears.
Sabotage? An accident? Against her will, memories of Bhopal descended upon her and she recalled the sirens blaring as the toxic white fumes, released from the ramshackle pesticide factory on the outskirts of the city, chased her down the midnight streets, burning her lungs, scarring her eyes. . . .
Enough! she thought, forcibly squashing an attack of post-traumatic jitters. Bhopal was over a decade ago; she had a far more immediate crisis to cope with. She stabbed at the intercom button next to her computer console. “Dhasal to Security,” she snapped insistently, feeling a desperate need for more information. “What was that noise? What is happening?”
“We are under attack, Doctor!” an agitated voice announced shrilly. She barely recognized the heavily accented tones of Geir Jonsson, the Centre’s deputy chief of security. “Madwomen with guns and grenades, they’re attacking the entire island!”
Explosions and gunfire crackled noisily in the background, along with angry curses and screams. It sounded as though hell itself had broken loose on Muroroa. Dhasal rolled her chair back from the intercom speaker instinctively, repelled by the unmistakable din of warfare. Her heart, still trapped in Bhopal, pounded wildly in her chest, but, through sheer concentration and force of will, she somehow managed to keep from trembling.
Think! she commanded her powerful mind. She had learned all she needed to know. The first explosion had been no accident; they were definitely under attack, although she was unsure by whom. It all seemed so unreal; Dhasal had attended, as required, periodic security briefings, but she’d never truly expected to face an armed invasion of her laboratories. I am a scientist, she thought angrily. Not a soldier. Why can’t I be left alone to do my work?
An Exon soldier, recognizable by his silver sash and beret, leaped from behind the trunk of an ancient palm tree, an M60 machine-gun in hand. A burst of gunfire, flaring red in the nocturnal shadows, winged Shirin, who dropped from sight even as Chen’s Beretta put a bullet between the eyes of her attacker. Crouching low to present a smaller target, the Chinese superwoman raced to the side of her fallen comrade, whom she found sprawled on her back atop a bed of crushed green leaves. A spreading puddle of blood looked black in the dim light.
Kevlar had protected the Afghan woman’s chest and mid-section, but her right arm and thigh had been blasted apart. She was bleeding so profusely that Chen would have rated Shirin’s chances for survival low even if they weren’t in the middle of a firefight.
She glanced up at the sky. Through intersecting branches, she saw dive-bombing amazons being cut down by antiaircraft fire from below. Although the high-flying female warriors had initially seized the offensive, Muroroa’s defenders had soon gone into action as well, belatedly attempting to even the score. Now murdered amazons crashed like falling stars into the leafy trees and waiting lagoon. Chen could only hope that a significant proportion of her forces made it to earth intact, to engage in further combat with Khan’s ground forces.
The busier they keep them, she recognized pragmatically, the better the odds for our mission. Still, it wounded her to see the spirits of so many sisters extinguished in a single night. Khan must pay for making this necessary, she vowed, the weight of her laden backpack suddenly feeling all the heavier.
“Go,” Shirin urged her through gritted teeth. Chen knew she had no choice; more lives than theirs depended on the success of their mission. She pressed the hilt of her K-Bar knife into the palm of Shirin’s working left arm, so that the injured woman could defend herself—or take her own life if need be.
“Be brave and strong as a lioness.” With an unsoldierly lump in her throat, Chen tore herself away from the dying amazon’s side, catching up with Rani and Nina, who were in the process of cutting through the razor-wire fence around the Centre. Dead Exon soldiers, or pieces thereof, littered the earth around them. Rani, a former cat burglar with a talent for breaking and entering, efficiently sliced away at the metal links with a diamond-edged wire cutter while Nina, a Polish body-builder with tight black braids, provided cover with continuous fire from her M4 carbine.
“Almost through,” Rani grunted, snapping apart one last link of razor-wire. She kicked out a triangular section big enough to duck through by bending low enough. “Watch your head,” she warned, sliding past the severed links without a snag. In theory, there was a locked back entrance to the Centre approximately fifty paces from this section of the fence; Rani hurried ahead to prepare the way.
The hellish cacophony of war filled the warm night air: bombs, bullets, shouts, crashes, and screams. Heavy artillery rocked the island, perhaps directed at the fleet of speedboats attacking Khan’s gunships beyond the barrier reef. Flocks of terns and petrels took to the skies in panic, adding to the confusion, while flying foxes glided madly from tree to tree, seeking refuge from the noise, fire, and general chaos. Chen smelled cordite and napalm on the breeze, overpowering the perfumed fragrance of the jungle, and longed for the peace and quiet of her own island, thousands of kilometers to the west. She wondered if she would ever see Penthesilea again.
“After you!” Nina shouted over the din, nodding toward the gap in the fence. A heartbeat later, a burst of automatic weapons fire threw the muscular amazon back against the fence, where the barbed razor-wire held her bullet-riddled body erect even after her spirit was driven from her flesh. Chen spotted a flash of silver in the wilderness below and fired back with her Beretta, never knowing if she had avenged her sister’s death.
Diving through the hole in the fence, she rolled back onto her feet and sprinted for that promised back entrance. A whiff of plastic explosive, smelling strangely like marzipan, told her that Rani was already preparing to blow the door off its hinges. Despite the grievous losses they had already sustained, Chen grinned savagely as she closed in on her objective. I’m coming for you, Dhasal, she thought triumphantly. For you and your Goddess-cursed bug!
A red light went off above the entrance of the control room. Dhasal knew what that meant. The invaders had penetrated the Centre itself and were now at large somewhere in this very building. Fortunately, Dhasal recalled, there was a contingency for such a scenario. Conquering her nerves, she methodically keyed in the necessary instructions, then nodded in approval as air vents opened in the isolation chamber beyond the glass. Powerful pumps, built into the walls, thrummed to life even as the valves on the pressurized fermentation vats all opened automatically, allowing the airborne bacteria within to escape, not only into the isolation chamber but into the Centre’s main ventilation system.
I may not be a soldier, she thought, but I’m not without a weapon of my own. . . .
A cool draft, accompanied by the hiss of air being forcibly expelled into the corridor, elicited a mirthless laugh from Chen Tiejun. Just as the American woman predicted: Dhasal or one of her lab-jacketed minions was pumping the killer germ into the building’s air supply in a last-ditch attempt to slay any invaders in their tracks.
A clever idea, Chen admitted, against almost any other foe. She and Rani, however, sprinted down the infected hallways with impunity; unlike every other commando force on Earth, Chen and her amazons were immune to the voracious bacteria, as required by Khan’s own genocidal design. It is well that the American woman did not join us after all, she reflected grimly. Her merely human skin would already be rotting on her bones.
With Khan’s security forces engaged elsewhere on the island, at the ruined rocket base and in the murky jungle, the two surviving members of Team Artemis encountered little resistance as they stalked through the multistory research complex. Terrified sc
ientists and technicians cowered in their labs and cubicles, hoping to avoid the invaders long enough to come through the attack alive. Chen let them hide; she was after bigger game.
“Help me!” a male voice called out to her as they took a shortcut through a storeroom packed full of wire cages containing experimental test animals of various sizes and species. Pausing momentarily, Chen was amused to see Brother Arcturus, late of the Panspermic Church of First Contact, locked in a cage of his own, alongside the squawking chimpanzees and squeaking lab rats. She felt a sudden stab of sympathy—for the chimps and rats. “Please,” he begged her, grasping the bars of his cage. Straw carpeted the floor of his cell, and his hairless, revoltingly masculine body looked pale and undernourished. Only the astronomical tattoo upon his forehead retained any color or vitality. “You ha ve t o help me!”
“I’m busy,” she snapped curtly. “Ask your starfathers instead.” Picking up her pace once more, she left the caged superman behind. Bestial barks and growls drowned out his plaintive cries as she exited the storeroom. I might have heeded his pleas more seriously, she thought, gaining on the racing amazon ahead of her, if he had paid more homage to his star mothers instead.
Rani quickly located the stairwell their American partner had informed them of; if Butler was correct, Dhasal’s main laboratories were two levels below the ground floor. The door to the stairway had shut automatically when the building went into emergency lockdown mode, but this presented little challenge to Rani, who enthusiastically blew the lock apart with her high-caliber Desert Eagle pistol. Both women wore rubber-soled boots to protect them from the sort of high-voltage booby traps Butler said had tripped her up before, on a spying mission three years ago.