When the Gods Aren't Gods: Book Two of The Theogony (25 page)

In Front of the Great Pyramid of Cholula, Keppler-22 ‘b’, August 12, 2020

Petty Officer Levine
led the Ground Force up the steps toward the main entrance of the pyramid. As Night started up the stairs, he looked up above him at the giant structure and paused.

“
Hey, Petty Officer Levine,” Night said. “You mentioned that the other squad was a long way up in the pyramid, right?”

“Yeah,” said the Israeli, “they’re a long way up, so we’ll have to hurry to get up there.”

“Maybe not,” Night answered, pointing up at the pyramid. “What about that?”

Petty Officer Levine looked up and could see
a ceremonial altar high above them in an open area on top of the pyramid.

“
If that is the ceremonial altar,
” Night said over the implant network and his speakers, “
then the main temple area must be behind it. I can’t see a door from here, but there must be a way into the pyramid from up there. That would save us a lot of time.
” Night thought a few seconds and nodded his head. “
We’ll go in that way,
” he said, making up his mind. “Go back to the shuttle,” he told Levine. “We’ve got it from here.”

With time running out, the Ground Force began
pounding up the front of the pyramid.

Inside the
Great Pyramid of Cholula, Keppler-22 ‘b’, August 12, 2020

Both efreet paused in their attacks. Reaching back behind them like major league pitchers
, they both made throwing motions, and balls of fire arced toward their targets. The one on the right threw at Master Chief, who had hurled the spear at him. Master Chief was in his suit and put up both arms to block the fireball. It hit him and burst, throwing burning embers in a 10 foot radius in all directions. Protected from the worst of it by the suit, Master Chief patted out the remaining ember on his head and ran toward the efreeti, drawing his SEAL knife as he went. Sergeant Andrews and Petty Officer Sherkov both joined him in attacking the efreeti.

The other efreeti threw
his fireball at Vice Sergeant Ismail Al-Sabani, who had chosen not to wear his suit and had no protection from it. He dove out of the way as the fireball hurtled at him. The fireball flew through the space where he had been, exploding 20 feet behind him. Mr. Jones and Father Zuhlsdorf stepped in to attack the efreeti, allowing Al-Sabani to get back onto his feet.

Seeing those troopers fighting the efreeti,
and Wraith, Bob, Doug and Sergeant Tagliabue facing off against the four coatls, Calvin charged Quetzalcoatl with his SEAL knife. Before he could get there, Steropes stepped in front of him, placing a hand on his chest to stop him. “Quetzalcoatl is mine,” he said. “I’ve got this.”

Having seen Steropes in action, Calvin stepped back, motioning for Steropes to continue. “Be my guest,” he said,
before going around him to pick up the spear that Master Chief had thrown earlier. That would at least give him some reach, he thought.

The Terrans fighting
the efreet quickly found that it was a losing proposition. They would swing their weapons at the jinn, only to have them go non-corporeal. As the weapon moved out of the space where the efreeti was, it would turn corporeal again and would slash its attacker. In a matter of seconds, most of the Terrans were bleeding from deep gashes. The heat of the efreet also took its toll, making them sweat. Weapons quickly became slick and hard to hold. Even when they were able to hit the efreet while corporeal, their weapons seemed to do very little damage to them. In Master Chief’s 25 years of military service he had fought many people and creatures and had never run up against something he couldn’t hurt. He had scored two hits so far on his efreeti; on the second one, it had laughed at him as it went non-corporeal to avoid a slash by Witch’s kris.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Father Zuhlsdorf stagger back as his efreeti slashed him across the face. As he fell backward, the efreeti reached out and grabbed his falcata. Laughing, it took the sword in both hands and snapped it in two. Mr. Jones attacked the efreeti
, and it turned non-corporeal, giving the priest time to recover. As the priest stood up and drew Durandal, Mr. Jones was knocked backwards to the floor in turn. Both efreet looked stronger than ever as they slowly wore down their opponents, just waiting for one of them to make a fatal mistake. With a sick feeling, Master Chief realized that this was a fight they probably weren’t going to win. The efreet were just toying with them.

The soldiers fighting the coatls were doing better. Wraith had squared off with one of the six foot long ones and was using her
short sword to hold it at bay. She quickly saw that the creature had two attacks. The first was to fly up and try to strike with the stinger in its tail. She had blocked this particular attack on several occasions already and had figured out the rhythm of that attack. The other attack was a bite from the snake’s mouth. Wraith didn’t know if its bite was poisonous, but didn’t want to find out. If it bit her, it would also have better leverage to sting her. Drawing a dagger with her other hand, she focused on maintaining qigong, like she had seen Steropes do earlier in his fight with the spearmen. She relaxed, calmed her breathing, and focused on guiding her life energy throughout her body.

When the coatl came in for its next strike, she was ready. Seeing that
it intended to try to sting her again, she blocked the strike with her dagger. Pushing the tail out of the way, she spun on the balls of her feet, allowing the short sword to extend and pick up the velocity of the spin. She completed the spin, and the snake’s head was where she had envisioned. Her sword struck just behind the head where scale turned to fur, severing it with one stroke. The head and body of the coatl fell to the floor in two pieces.

Doug was fighting one of the eight f
eet long monsters. Although he was able to hold the monster off with his tomahawk and had blocked a couple of attacks with the razor edge on the top of it, he found that he needed something else to follow up with. The coatl would try to sting him, and he would block, but before he could go on the offensive, the coatl would spring back. The scaly part of the tail protected it from most of his damage, and he realized that it was only a matter of time until the coatl got lucky, and one of its attacks hit him. He didn’t have his suit on, so when it hit him he wouldn’t have any protection; he’d be dead.

On the coatl’s next attack, he changed his strategy. Instead of simply trying to block the stinger, he reversed the tomahawk and struck at the tail with the heavy pointed end. It was a gamble
; if he missed, it would leave him open to the coatl’s attack. His aim was true, though, and he hit the tail about a foot up from the end. The point of his tomahawk sank in all the way to the haft, pinning the coatl to it. He began swinging the axe in a circular motion, spinning the coatl in a loop over his head, before finally slamming it into the ground. Like kids playing ‘crack the whip,’ the coatl’s head hit the ground at the end of the whipping motion, and the creature was momentarily stunned. Doug lowered the axe so that he could step on the coatl’s tail and pull out the tomahawk. Freeing the weapon, he took two quick steps toward the front of the beast and chopped the coatl just behind its head. The razor-edged blade easily went through the coatl with so much force that he dented the tomahawk on the stone floor. The coatl’s head went flying off toward the dais, the beast dead.

T
he other six foot coatl had chosen Bob as its target, and it quickly saw that it was faster than the therapod. Feigning a bite, the creature whipped its tail at the tomahawk and knocked it from Bob’s hand. Seeing that Bob was weaponless, it dove on him, intending to drive its stinger into him. Bob saw the attack coming, and he was able to grab hold of the snake’s tail in both hands and prevent it from hitting him. The coatl used the hold to its advantage, and it quickly wrapped around him a couple of times in a constricting attack. Bob could feel the coatl crushing the life from him and wasn’t built with the upper body strength required to push it off. He did have one arm free of the coatl’s coils and let go of the tail with that hand.

Remembering the snakes from the swamps of his Epsilon Eridani home
world, he grabbed the coatl’s head and brought it toward his oversize jaws. The coatl saw what he intended and tried to pull away, but was too late. Bob thrust the coatl’s entire head into his mouth and bit down as hard as he could. He took a second bite and severed the head from the rest of its body. Spitting it out, he took another bite from its body. “Mmm,” he said, as he worked his way out of its coils. “Tasty!”

Things were not going as well for Sergeant Tagliabue, who was fighting
the other eight foot coatl. He was not armed as well as the others, with two thin 13” switchblade stiletto knives and no natural defenses. The knives were too short and too thin to block effectively with, and he had already been hit a couple of times. The suit had stopped the first two strikes that had gotten past his guard, but it didn’t stop the third one that hit him in the neck. The poison quickly entered his system; all he got out was a weak, “Shit,” before falling on the ground unconscious. Before the coatl could reorient on one of the other Terrans and attack, Wraith struck it from behind with her sword, decapitating it.

Master Chief knew he was looking death in the face. The Terrans
’ attacks were coming slower and slower as the heat from the efreet and their own loss of blood took its toll. Master Chief had been hit three times; most of the other soldiers had been hit more. They got a small boost as the troops that had been fighting the coatls joined the fight, but that didn’t last long as the efreet began landing hits on them, too.

Master Chief had finally seen one attack that hurt the efreeti he was fighting. Witch had landed a blow with her kris that had seemed to stagger the demon, but it had hit her in the head immediately thereafter
, and her attacks were no longer crisp or on target. He saw that the knife was glowing slightly and thought about trying to take it from her, but couldn’t leave himself unprotected for the length of time it would take to make the switch. He knew he’d be dead.

Not that it mattered
a great deal, he thought. The fight couldn’t go on much longer. The Terrans were spent. They were all going to die in a Mayan temple, hundreds of light years from home.

Not if he had anything to say about it.

Gathering his strength, he waited for his opportunity and then swung as hard as he could. Laughing, the efreeti went immaterial again and he missed, and the efreeti solidified in time to knock him to the ground with a blow to the temple. He knew the next blow would kill him, and he couldn’t see well enough through the blood in his eyes to know which way to dodge to avoid it.

The blow didn’t come.
Momentarily disoriented, he wiped the blood from his eyes and looked up at the efreeti in time to see it solidify with one of the local women on its back. “Hit it now, while I’ve got it!” Trella screamed.

“This one, too!”
Sella screamed from the back of the other. The Terrans paused, too surprised to move.

Petty Officer Sherkov
and Mr. Jones were the first to recover, and both of them stabbed their efreet with their spears. Their weapons met no resistance going through the efreet, and they continued through into the women on their backs. Although there was no effect on the efreet, the women did not have the same immunity. “Magic...weapon...” Trella gasped with the spear through her stomach. Both Trella and the efreeti went immaterial, and the spear fell to the ground, but both solidified again almost immediately. “Must kill it with a magic weapon,” she urged, “Hurry...can’t...hold it...much longer.”

The glow around Sergeant Andrew’s kris seemed to intensify, with the glow spreading up her arm. Stepping forward, she drove it into the
chest of the efreeti she was fighting. With a blast of steam like the whistle on a locomotive, the efreeti seem to lose focus and turned to mist, which lost its form and dissipated. Trella fell to the floor gasping.

Having seen the effect of the kris on the other efreeti, Vice Sergeant
Al-Sabani knew that his weapon might be able to hurt the one he was fighting, as well. It went solid in front of him, and he drew his arm back to stab it, noticing a faint glow from the weapon. Before he could strike, the efreeti slashed him with its powerful claw across his face, knocking him to the ground. His janbiya skittered off across the room. As the efreeti turned to attack Mr. Jones, suddenly the point of a sword burst through its side, as Father Zuhlsdorf stabbed it from the other side with Durandal. The sword glowed a cherry red as it passed through the efreeti. “This day will the Lord deliver thee into mine hand, and I will smite thee and take thine head from thee!” yelled Father Zuhlsdorf as he pulled the glowing sword back out of the creature.

Whatever relics were in the s
word had the desired effect, and the efreeti emitted the same steam whistle noise that the first one had and disintegrated, leaving Sella to fall on the floor. Before they could see to the women, the soldiers were distracted by a telepathic, “
DIE!
” from where Steropes and Quetzalcoatl were still fighting. The soldiers looked over and could see that the fight wasn’t going well for Steropes, as the coatl had him almost completely wrapped up in its coils and was constricting him about three feet above the ground.