Chapter 6 chapter Five

Colonel Fedman Kassad followed Braun Lamia and Father Hoyt closely, and rushed towards the Emerald Tomb against the sandstorm.He wasn't telling Lamia the truth; his night-vision goggles and heat sensors were still functioning, despite the flickering charge around them.Following the two of them seemed like a perfect chance to find the Shrike.Kassad remembered the rock lion hunt in Hebron—baiting a tethered goat, then guarding the goat for the lion. Kassad had left indicators all over the bivouac, and data from them flashed on his tactical display and whispered in his ear through his implants.Leaving Winterberg and his daughter, Martin Silenus, and the Consul, sleeping soundly in camp, with no protection but automatics and alarms, was nothing but an entirely anticipated risk.But then Kassad had a second thought. He wondered if he could stop the Shrike at all.They were all goats, all chained and waiting.It was the woman, the phantom called Moneta, that Kassad decided to find before he died.

The wind picked up slowly, sweeping and screaming around Kassad, reducing normal visibility to zero and battering against his tight armor.The dunes glowed with electric charge, and he strode forward to make sure Lamia's heat trail was clearly in view, microscopic lightning crackling around his boots and legs.Messages streamed in from her open comlog.Hoyt switched off the channel, only to learn that he was alive and moving. Kassad passed under the outstretched wings of the sphinx, feeling the invisible weight of the 10,000-ton overhead, which hung like a giant boot heel.Then he turned and walked down the valley, and the Emerald Tomb in the infrared vision was a building without heat traces, with a cold outline.Hoyt entered the opening of the semicircle; Lamia was twenty meters behind him.There is nothing else active in the valley.The signal from the tent was heavily blocked by the night and sandstorm behind Kassad, but it still showed that Saul and the baby were fast asleep, and the consul was lying awake, but there was no movement, and no foreign enemies had invaded the camp.

Kassad slid off the safety catch of his weapon and stepped forward quickly, his long legs striding forward.At that moment, he would rather give up everything about himself, as long as he can connect to a reconnaissance satellite, as long as his tactical channel can be completed, he must never deal with such a one-sided scene in such a messy situation.He shrugged his shoulders in the tight armor and moved on. Braun Lamia could barely cover the last fifteen meters to the Emerald Tomb on his own.The wind has accumulated, it has become a strong wind, and it is gradually increasing, pushing her forward all the way, and twice she slipped and fell into the sand.Now, the real lightning and thunder began to strike, and a huge light burst suddenly, splitting the sky and illuminating the glowing tombs ahead.Convinced that there was no way anyone in the camp could sleep under the circumstances, she tried twice to call Hoyt, Kassad, or someone else, but all her comlogs and implants returned to her were static, They're also just garbled and indistinct on broadband.After the second fall, Lamia knelt and looked ahead; Hoyt hadn't been seen since the occasional glimpse of someone moving toward the entrance.

Lamia clutched his father's automatic pistol and stood up, determined to walk the last few meters amidst the jostling wind.She paused for a moment before the semicircle at the entrance. Whether due to sandstorms, static electricity, or something else, the Emerald Tomb now glowed a bright bile-like green, and the sand dunes were also slightly tinted with this color, making her wrists and hands look like they had come from the tomb. stuff dug out.Lamia tried one last time, trying to get in touch with someone on the comlog, to no avail.So she went into the tomb. Father Rainer Hoyt, a 1,200-year-old Jesuit, resident of the New Vatican in Payson, and loyal servant of His Majesty Pope Urban XVI, was uttering obscenities.

Hoyt was lost, and he was in pain all over his body.The wide room near the entrance of the Emerald Tomb has become rather narrow, and the corridor always winds and turns back to where it started.Now Father Hoyt was lost among a series of catacombs, wandering among glowing green walls.They had explored this tomb before, and he had a map of his own, but he had forgotten to bring it, but he did not recall discovering or mentioning such a maze.The pain - the pain that has been with him for years, since the Bikura tribe implanted two cruciforms in him - his own plus Paul Duray's, has been with him now like never before The intensity threatened him, and he was almost driven crazy.

The corridor became narrow again.Rainer Hoyt screamed loudly, without realizing that he was screaming, and without realizing the words he was screaming—words he hadn't used since he said goodbye to his childhood.He wants to be free.Freedom from pain.Freed from the burden of Father Du Lei's DNA, personality... Du Lei's soul... from the cruciform nematode on his back.Release from the dreadful curse of the evil rebirth borne in the cross on one's own breast. But even as Hoyt screamed, he knew that the dead Bikura was not to blame for his pain; the lost tribes of the colonists, reborn from their own crucifixion, generation after generation, all at last Being fools, pure vehicles for their own DNA and the DNA of the nematodes on them, they're all priests... priests of the Shrike.

Father Hoyt of the Society of Jesuits carried a vial of holy water blessed by His Majesty the Pope, a communion consecrated at solemn High Mass, and an ancient Christian scripture on exorcism.These are all now forgotten, sealed in a round plexiglass bottle in the pocket of his cloak. Hoyt stumbled against a wall and screamed again.The pain was an indescribable force now, and not even the full dose of supermorphine he had injected fifteen minutes ago would do anything now.Father Hoyt screamed and scratched at his clothes, tearing open his heavy cloak, black jacket and clerical collar, shorts, shirt, then underclothes, until he was naked, shivering in pain and cold.The corridors of the Emerald Tomb were shining brightly, and he yelled obscenities against the night.

Stumbling forward again, he found the entrance, and climbed into a room larger than any he could remember exploring.Bare, translucent walls rose on all sides of the empty room, each thirty meters high.Hoyt's feet softened and he lay on the ground. He looked down and found that the floor had become almost transparent.He was looking at a deep vertical well beneath the floor membrane; the well hung straight down and was burning about a kilometer above the ground.The room was filled with the orange rhythm of the distant firelight below him. Hoyt rolled over on his side, laughing loudly.If this was a picture of hell someone had conjured up for him, he was dead wrong.Hoyt's vision of hell is tactile; it's a migrating pain inside him, like jagged wires running through his veins and guts.Hell is about the memories of starving children in the slums of Armaghast, and the smiles on the faces of politicians who want to send boys to die on colonial battlefields.Hell is thinking that in his life, or in Durre's life, when the Church of Jesus died, its last believers were only a few old men and women, and all of them sitting together could only fill Rows of pews in Payson Cathedral.Hell is the warm crucifix with a repulsive throbbing of the heart, with this evil, the hypocrisy of saying morning mass.

There was a sudden rush of hot air, and Hoyt saw part of the floor slide back, revealing a trapdoor through which to reach the deep well below.The room reeked of sulfur.Hoyt couldn't help laughing at such a banal tactic, but in a matter of seconds, the laughing turned to sobbing.He was on his knees now, digging his bloodstained nails into the two crosses on his chest and back.The cross-shaped scars seemed to glow slightly under the red.Hoyt heard the sound of a flame blazing beneath him. "Hoyt!" He turned around, sobbing, and saw the figure of a woman appearing at the door.Lamia!She looked past him and behind him, an ancient pistol raised in her hand.Eyes wide open.

Father Hoyt felt the heat behind him and heard a rumbling roar like a distant furnace, but above that sound he suddenly heard the sliding and grinding of metal on stone.footsteps.Still clutching the bloody bruise on his chest, Hoyt turned, his knee scraping the floor. The first thing he saw was the shadow: sharp angles ten meters high, thorns, blades... legs like iron pipes, with curved sword blades rounded at the knees and ankles.Then, in a pulsation of heat and shadow, Hoyt saw eyes.A thousand faces... a thousand faces... A blindingly red laser shot from between the double spheres of ruby, beneath a collar of steel thorns and a chest of quicksilver, reflecting fire and shadows...

Braun Lamia was firing his father's pistol.The clear and loud sound echoed continuously, appearing weak against the roar of the stove. Father Rainer Hoyt turned to face her, and he held up a hand. "No, don't!" he screamed. "It will grant a wish! I have to ask it..." The Shrike, who had been there just now - five meters away - suddenly appeared here, within an arm's length of Hoyt.Lamia stopped firing.Hoyt looked up and saw his own shadow reflected in the monster's fire-polished chrome armor...for a moment he saw something else in the Shrike's eyes...but then Gone, and at the same time, the Shrike was gone.Hoyt slowly raised his hand and touched his throat, almost dizzy, he glanced at the bright red liquid flowing like a waterfall, covering his palm, his chest, the cross, his abdomen... He turned to face the door and saw that Lamia was still staring, eyes still full of fear and fright, but not because of the Shrike, but because of him, Father Rainer Hoyt of the Jesuit Order.At that moment, he realized that the pain had subsided, and he opened his mouth to speak, but what came out was only more bright red liquid, like a red geyser.Hoyt looked down again, noticing for the first time that he was naked, he watched the blood drip from his chin and chest, rained down on the now dark ground, he watched the blood It gushes out, like someone knocked over a bucket of red paint, and then he can't see anything anymore, and falls face-first to the far...unreachable...ground below.