Cole smiles at his former subordinate. “The BlackGuard command is yours if you want it, Specter. You’ve proven yourself more than a match for our best, and Silhouette...” The man looks up toward the ceiling, which shakes as if on cue. “His fate is uncertain.”
Endo considers the offer, but then shakes his head. “My fate lies elsewhere.”
Cole shrugs and turns his attention to me. His arrogant body language sets me off, and I take a swing, desiring to put him in his place before letting him continue his diatribe. My fist is on target, but it strikes nothing. My follow-through pulls me forward, and I stumble to the floor. No way the fat man could have moved so fast. I turn around in time to see the amused Cole flicker.
A hologram.
“You’re not even here anymore, are you?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Long gone.” He motions to the specimens. “Now, if you’re ready to hear me out...” I pick myself up without a word and wait for him to continue.
“What you see before you is the reason GOD exists.” He motions to the gray creature and the floating head. “While we’ve only known about these creatures for ten years, these brutes—” He points to the blond man. “—have been on our radar since World War II. The Nazis fancied themselves the descendants of these giants, and to a degree they were right. These men joined the human population thousands of years ago, their blood commingling with ours over millennia the same way ours did with Neanderthals, but their bloodline has been severely diluted by time.”
“Who are they?” Collins asks.
“That’s where it gets complicated,” Cole says. “While they are not human, or even from this planet, we all know about the fabled Atlanteans. But they weren’t an advanced civilization of humans. They simply lived among us, and we think, were sent here to strengthen us.”
I step up to the tank containing the blond man, my guard still up, but curiosity officially piqued. “Sent here?”
He points at the gray creature, “By them.”
“The Atlantean looks like the smarter of the two,” Collins points out.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Cole says and nods at me, like he knows me, like he’s earned the right to rib me. I really don’t like this guy. “But this is where our knowledge takes a sharp uptick.”
“There was an encounter,” Endo concludes. “Contact made.”
Cole nods. “Like I said, ten years ago. In the Arctic. A team of scientists, funded by Brian Norwood’s Global Exploration Corporation, in the northernmost part of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, in Northern Canada, raised a complete mammoth from the tundra. From the mammoth came a woman. And in her arms, a beacon. It led them to an ancient citadel buried in the ice. They were pursued by these—” He motions to the gray corpse. “—creatures. The Ferox. The research team lost most of their crew, but a few of them survived and relayed their story to me, after we tracked them down and recovered what remained of their conflict, including this specimen. In a way, the Ferox made us who we are today: warring people capable of great violence and the ability to create weapons of unbelievable destructive capability.”
Collins glares at Cole. “That’s your defense for monsters like the Tsuchi? For experimenting on human beings? For warping nature?”
As much as I abhor the idea, I can see where Cole’s logic is leading. Fight monsters with monsters. But that doesn’t make it right.
“It is the nature instilled in us by the Ferox, who have taken human form, and over thousands of years, molded us—trained us—into a true fighting force. They strengthened us by interbreeding humanity with the Atlanteans. They also rebelled strongly against the idea of being enslaved. Freedom is everything to humanity today, because it is everything to the Ferox and the Atlanteans.”
“And why would these Ferox do this to us?” I ask and turn my attention to the floating head. “It doesn’t seem that dissimilar to what these guys did to Nemesis.”
“In the long run, it’s not,” Cole admits. “And that’s probably because they’re cut from the same cloth, so to speak. There was a time when the Ferox and this race of giants, the Aeros, were one species.”
“They look a little like Cthulhu,” I point out.
Cole chuckled. “Brice theorized that Lovecraft was influenced by a Ferox, in an attempt to train the human race to fear creatures of Cthulhuean appearance. And you’ll note they have almost nothing in common with the Ferox, despite their shared genetic history. As they spread through the cosmos, two distinct races emerged, and a race war began with the more intelligent and cunning Aeros driving the Ferox back. In a bid to turn the tide, the Ferox found developing worlds and molded their higher life forms into warriors willing to aid their cause. It’s a war that’s been waged since before homo sapiens were the dominant species on Earth.”