Angel of Doom Read Free

across hundreds of miles. It’s predark technology, solid-state and can cut through any interference like a knife through mud.”
    Tan shook his head. “Listen to this.”
    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.
    â€œKarlo, 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. Smaragdadidn’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.
    â€œCaptain?” A voice spoke up.
    â€œMovement?” Smaragda asked.
    â€œNo. 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 ifthe smoke had some properties that could be filtering out even the body heat of her fellow Praetorians?
    â€œShould we open fire?” another soldier asked, nerves jangling in his voice.
    â€œOn what?” Smaragda asked. “We might just end up cutting Niklo and the others apart.”
    â€œBut they’re not on the infrared,” Tan noted.
    â€œRetreat,” Smaragda ordered.
    â€œSmoke’s closing in on the road behind us,” announced the Spartan at the back of their formation. “I’m going to…”
    â€œStay 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