Pantheon Of Vengeance
James Axler
The internecine struggle of planet Earth remains the only constant in a millennium of brutal transformation. Now, decades after the apocalypse, the war for domination rages on–human against alien usurper.Armed with secret knowledge of a powerful but ever-changing enemy, the Cerberus rebels go where the fight takes them, riding the shock waves of hellish history and uncertain future, to free humankind from darkest destiny.In his human skin, Baron Cobalt's quest for power nearly destroyed Cerberus. Now, evolved into his godly Annunaki form as Overlord Marduk, he's reconsolidating his power and claiming the Mediterranean. As Marduk's Nephilim-led forces challenge the ruling Hera Olympiad and her legion of cybernetic demigods to a death dance, Kane and the Cerberus warriors harness the power of a cyber army eager to bring retribution and justice to the real monsters of antiquity.
A lone Nephilhim sighted down its forearm…
Grant’s Sin Eater launched into his grasp, his finger hooking the trigger on the draw. The lightning reflex movement enabled the former Magistrate to pump a 240-grain bullet into the Annunaki’s skull, an explosion of released pressure blossoming its head, leathery hide peeled back to resemble grisly flower petals. The dying drone’s ASP blast missed Are5 by yards, destructive energy dissipating into the night sky.
“Great shot!” Are5 complimented.
“Nice improvisation,” Grant returned.
Two Nephilhim sought to avenge their decapitated ally, their ASPs vomiting writhing tendrils of yellowish lightning at Grant and the robot, the blasters tearing into the earth around Grant’s improvised foxhole and driving Are5 deeper behind his ever-shrinking boulder. Grant winced as a spark sizzling off the main bolt singed his biceps.
“This shit did not happen when the bad guys just had fucking guns like the rest of us!”
Pantheon of Vengeance
James Axler
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Special thanks to Doug Wojtowicz for his contribution to this work.
I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.
—J. R. R. Tolkien
The Road to Outlands—
From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Chapter 1
Artem15’s flat treaded, semiclawed metal foot sank into the hillside with all the ponderous weight of her three-thousand-pound, clockwork-geared frame. The robot’s pace seemed to be leisurely as she topped the small swell in the terrain, but it was just the illusion cast by her towering fifteen-foot height. Each swing of her long, mechanized legs was accompanied by the soft, melodic whistle of polished joints grinding against each other.
Artem15 was a decidedly female construct. There was no disguising her feminine breastplate, contrasting with the masculine-sculpted copper torsos of her fellow mechanically suited warriors. Her head, a camera-laden module with ruby-red optics placed where the eyes would be in a bronze-forged representation of a woman’s face, was hunched between shoulder-mounted guns. A mane of glimmering golden ribbons of polished and colored steel wool hung like real hair.
Diana Pantopoulos, who piloted the one-and-a-half-ton mobile war suit, was one of the elite. Thus she had been rewarded with the identity Artem15. A mere combat drone bore a singular red ID number painted onto a coppery simulation of a pectoral muscle. The rank-and-file drone pilots strode into battle with ID stencils, not names drawn from the gods of ancient Greece. The mane of Diana Pantopoulos’s suit glimmered like fire in the sunset, two fat, braided ropes of gold-polished cable falling forward to provide her metallic breasts a modicum of modesty, keeping the Artem15 armor from flashing naked breasts on the battlefield. Though the war suit pilot called the metals that made up the armor copper and bronze, they weren’t. They were far older materials, crafted by beings whom Hera Olympiad had identified as the gods themselves. The specifics really didn’t matter to Diana, because inside the robot walker, she was not just another subject of the New Olympian nation state; she was Artem15, the Artemis of the third millennium.
She swiveled her camera head to the left, spying Are5, with his green copper Mohawk jutting from forehead to the back of his neck, as sharp and aggressive as a circular-saw blade. A glance to the right showed Apo110, his burnished yellow locks a more masculine rendition of her own red-gold wig.
The three of them were Hera’s representatives of the pantheon known as Strike Force Olympus. The three towered twice as tall as a man, and they bristled with cannons and wielded massive manipulator claws that could fold into fists easily capable of crushing a boulder. The god-themed robot warriors had their own weapons, based on their larger-than-life inspirations, while the robot drones that they led were styled after helmeted Spartan warriors; one forearm was concealed under a buckler five feet in diameter, while the other arm ended in a spike-knuckled claw that could fold into a two-foot-wide monster fist.
Artem15 looked down into the valley. The commander units and their squadron of Spartan troopers were standing as a copper-colored wall, overseeing a writhing mass that she knew could be nothing but the opposition. The dark one, Thanatos, did not possess the industrial means to match the mechanized might that shielded New Olympus, but the Hydrae hordes below, the warriors of Tartarus, had been produced in clone farms. Despite their primitive technology, they still posed a deadly threat to the Greeks who had striven to rise from postapocalyptic barbarism in the shattered island nation. Thanatos’s legion of black, scale-skinned Hydrae snarled, glaring up as one, creating the image of a thousand-handed, thousand-eyed organism of astonishing size. Artem15 knew that the clone horde did indeed act as if it were under the command of a hive mind. Though armed only with muskets and bayonets, the simplest weapons that Thanatos could produce, they were a fearsome force that threatened to overwhelm the town Strike Force Olympus had sworn to protect.
Artem15’s pilot clicked on the loudspeaker built into her head unit. “You have only one chance. Turn back, and you all shall live.”
As one, the Hydrae horde surged up the hill, their bare, claw-toed feet digging into the grassy slope. The front line opened up with their muskets, and Artem15’s copper-colored breastplate shuddered under a sheet of lead balls. The smooth, polished surface sported dozens of pockmarks, creating a terrain of dimples, dents and craters on the lovingly sculpted torso plate.
Artem15 triggered her shoulder-mounted guns. The built-in weapons were belt-fed blasters that fired cartridge ammunition, faster and more powerful rounds than the musket balls, but required more craftsmanship to make.
The other mechanized units matched her actions except for Are5, who deployed his twin thermal axes. The Mohawked war machine leaped across the gulf of fifty yards between the formation of robots and the churning throng of clones, clawed feet crashing into the writhing enemy force. Are5 would engage in conflict his way, which had carried battles to success on a hundred occasions.
Three thousand pounds of machinery easily crushed a dozen Hydrae under the huge, four taloned feet. The force of Are5’s impact jarred the hillside loose. A small landslide rushed down the slope, tripping up scores more Hydrae as the wave of freed soil cascaded into shins and thighs. While the other war suits relied on their shoulder-mounted machine guns, Are5 preferred a more hands-on approach. His twin double-headed ax blades, heated to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit by internal thermal elements, carved through flesh in wide, sweeping strokes that separated torsos and severed limbs all around him. The axes had been folded and stored in customized housings, and Are5 used the axes to clear a fifteen-foot-wide swath in two body-shredding swings of the robot’s long arms. The clone horde had taken the war god avatar’s bait and swarmed toward him, rising to the challenge of bayonet versus red-hot ax blade.
Artem15 let her shoulder guns fall silent, drawing one of her javelins. Like the goddess of the hunt she emulated, the war armor she piloted favored the slender, accurate, explosive spears. A powerful throw launched the warhead-tipped javelin at more than a thousand feet per second, and though Artem15 could easily and accurately toss the spear two miles, at the spitting-range distance between her and the savage Hydrae, it was like shooting a bullet into an anthill. The custom-tipped spear burst through relatively fragile humanoid forms, tearing them to pieces before the internal fuse was finally armed with the right amount of kinetic energy and impacted on the mass of one reptilian. The deceleration-based fuse enabled the gore-spattered missile to explode and scythe out a deadly storm of shrapnel, clearing out a crowd of mutants who rushed to overtake Are5.
To her left, Apo110 unleashed the heat of the sun itself. Greek fire consumed a flank of irate clones who had swept around in an attempt to outmaneuver the guardian war machines. Powdered, aerosol-based orichalcum reacted on contact with sunlight and flashed brilliantly, long tongues licking through the scale-skinned Hydrae and leaving behind only blackened bones. Robot drone troopers lashed out with spike-adorned, two-foot-wide metal fists even as their shoulder guns blazed incessantly. The Spartan suits featured massive arms able to deliver nearly seventy tons of kinetic force with each punch. Even without the lethal spikes, the massive paws of the clockwork warrior robots would have turned any smaller humanoid into a pulped mass of gore. The spikes were there to keep a glancing punch from merely tossing a stunned opponent to the ground.
“Dammit! Get off!” a Spartan pilot yelled.
Artem15 turned her head and spotted a swarm of scaled flesh piled into a mound twenty feet high. She watched as a clockwork fist burst through the surface before being swallowed again by the writhing melee. She triggered the shoulder weaponry, but for every two she knocked aside, four more rose. The Hydrae were indeed like their namesake Hydra as they swarmed over the cleared body.
“Artie! There’s more heading to the town!” another Spartan called. “A second formation is in motion!”
Artem15 whirled away from her beleagured ally. “Airy, Pollie! Hold the line here! You two, with me!”
Hydraulic leg pistons hurled Diana into the air with enough force to shove her deep into her pilot’s couch. The twenty-yard bound took her to the top of the hill. Those same hydraulics compressed on landing, cushioning the impact. The two drone infantry she’d directed to follow her were close on her heels, and together they shoved off down the far slope of the hill, riding their front and hind toes like skis as they utilized gravity and forward momentum to rocket down the hillside. Moving at more than one hundred miles per hour, they closed the distance to intercept the maddened clones charging toward the town.
The town’s militia, armed with pikes and crude muzzle loaders, were braced for the enemy assault. Artem15 admired the courage of those she was sworn to protect, but she knew that the Hydrae were bred for ruthlessness, great strength and endurance. The picket line of human defenders was outnumbered by the savage attackers whose aplomb for killing made them more than a match for simple citizens defending their homes.
Artem15 opened fire with her shoulder guns, perforating the flank of Hydrae as they bypassed the mechanized hilltop force. Three pairs of machine guns, however, were not enough to counter the Tartarus hordes. Artem15 drew another of her javelins and hurled it into the heart of the group. The detonation of the 70 mm warhead devastated the back half of the column of Hydrae mutants. Bodies stumbled and tripped over downed brethren.
The town’s militia opened fire with its own primitive muskets and bolt-action rifles, joining the fight. As the Hydrae at the head of the charging remnants fell with bullets puncturing their organs, the remaining attackers renewed their charge, leaping over black-scaled corpses twisted in the dirt.
The New Olympian pilot reached for another javelin, but the horde was suddenly too close to the skirmish line defending the town. They would be caught in the spear’s blast radius. Artem15 leaped, soaring over the space between herself and the Hydrae as the first bayonet sank into a citizen’s chest. Anger stirred inside the metal-wrapped warrior’s heart. With a feral rage that Are5 would have been proud of, she landed on the necks of a half-dozen clones, her four-toed hydraulic leg squashing them into the soil with the force that only a ton and a half of metal propelled at 150 miles per hour could produce. As she landed, Diana bellowed through her suit’s loudspeakers, an inarticulate, amplified war cry that froze a score more of the deadly clones.
Her backup opened fire, slicing through the stunned and distracted Hydrae, ending their vat-born lives in a hail of bullets. Artem15’s throat filled with bile, however, as she saw Greek men and women twist and fall alongside the Hydrae.
“Fall back!” Artem15 ordered. “I’ll hold the line!”
The horde of attackers twisted, eyeing Artem15 as she drew her javelin from its hip quiver. They lunged forward, snarling, swinging, stabbing their bayonet-tipped muskets, determined to down an elite clockwork warrior. Pike-sharp points penetrated her armor, razor-sharp steel coming far too close to Diana’s all too vulnerable human body in the pilot’s compartment. She didn’t dare sweep the enemy away, not if she wanted to protect the New Olympians who raced back to shelter. Diana had vowed to defend the citizens with her blood.
A clawing bayonet opened a gash on her cheek. Another needled into her thigh. The strength and fury of the Hydrae horde were more than the metal skin of her war suit could fend off.
Artem15 stabbed the earth with her javelin, and the warhead belched out a sheet of flaming death and flying metal. The concussive shock wave and heat were dampened by the cushioned tub of armor that cradled her pilot’s seat, and the mobile suit’s armor deflected the notched razor wire that had wrapped the explosive core of the javelin’s point. Hydrae corpses were hurled off the armored battle suit’s massive frame.
Dazed by the nearby detonation, Artem15 looked down to her hydraulic right arm. The metal sleeve that protected the skeleton’s carpal manipulators and ulna framework had peeled back like the petals of a steel flower. The clockwork gears and pistons, composed of secondary orichalcum, had withstood the powerful detonation as if it were nothing more than a stiff breeze.
The attacking Hydrae, however, were retreating, fearing another lethal javelin strike.
“Artie!” Are5 called out. “Artie, report!”
She took a tentative step, noting that the right leg’s mechanisms had been knocked out of alignment. The metal components of her legs were vulnerable to explosive displacement. She’d need realignment back at the base.
“I’m still standing, Airy. So is the town,” she stated. “But it’ll take some extra time to walk home.”
“Thank Hera,” Are5 answered.
Artem15 glared silently at the two backup units as they stood between the fleeing Hydrae and the besieged townspeople. Diana pulled aside her microphone and opened the window on her cockpit. “You two!”
The pair took a step closer and their own cockpit windows opened. They both knew what was coming.
“You fired on your fellow citizens,” she hissed.
“They were overwhelmed,” one offered. “We couldn’t rescue them. They were dead anyway.”
“That is not your call to make,” Diana said. She looked at the tangle of human and mutant bodies. Six Greek men and women lay among the scores of Hydrae mutants. Bite marks and bayonet wounds marred faces and chests, but she also saw the ugly puckers of gunshot wounds on the humans. “They trusted us to die for them. Instead, they died because I was too slow and you were too hasty.”
The warrior drone heads lowered.
“Remember this in the future,” she snarled. She turned away from the drones. “Airy, Pollie, how goes it?”
“The Hydrae are pulling back,” Apo110 answered. “They no longer have any stomach for battle.”
“Airy?” Diana called.
“Broke one of my axes again,” Are5 complained. “But I found something in the mix. You have to come see this.”
“Bring it back to base, “Artem15 replied. “I’m too slow as it is to make the walk worth it. If it’s that important, then we have to show Zoo and Her Highness, as well.”
Are5 transmitted his camera image to her screen. “Just look, Artie.”
It appeared to be another reptilian variant, similar to the basic Hydrae clone. However, where the scaled hordes of Thanatos were naked, bony-limbed and distorted abominations, this reptilian was tall, strong and of perfect build. He also wore a second skin that conformed to his muscular frame, glinting in the sunlight like metal.
“What the hell is that?” Artem15 asked.
“Beats me, but we’re bringing the remains back,” Are5 confirmed.
Artem15 turned to glare at her Spartan units. “Go back with the rest of the main force. I’ve got some thinking to do.”
As the war robot limped back to Strike Force Olympus headquarters alone, Diana looked at the stored image of the lifeless, metal-skinned newcomer, trying to cope with the mystery.
IT TOOK AN EXTRA half hour for Artem15 to return to base. When she arrived, she backed the war suit into its storage berth. Mechanics swarmed around, looking at punctured and blood-caked steel skin.
“Lord, Artie, you fucked this suit up again,” Ted “Fast” Euphastus noted. He was the head of maintenance for the magnificent clockwork machines that had been discovered by the goddess-queen of New Olympus.
“Shut up and just fix it,” Diana grumbled. “Where’s my chair?”
“We’re bringing it,” Carmine, another repairman, said. He looked at the dented, distorted chest plate. “Damn shame those mutants had to mess up a nice pair of boobs. We’ll get right to work on—”
Diana crawled out of her couch, glaring at the metal-breast-obsessed mechanic. Carmine froze as angry blue eyes gleamed from the half-fused mask of a burned, ruined face. “Do whatever the hell you want. Do I really look like I give a damn about a pair of robot tits?”
Carmine shook his head as Diana unplugged the cybernetic trunk cable from its port at the base of her spine. She swung the metal capped stumps of her half thighs out and into the seat of her wheelchair. Slender, ropy arms braced themselves on the wheelchair’s armrests, and she lowered herself down. Her gymnast-tight arm muscles stood out as they flexed under the weight of her torso and half legs.
“You’re bleeding,” Fast noted.
Diana looked down at the blood that soaked through the bandage she’d placed on a bayonet injury. “I took care of it while Artie was walking on autopilot.”
She peeled off her leather flight helmet and thin, strawlike hair fell in a wet tangle over her eyes. “It’s just a scratch, Fast.”
Fast’s lips quivered with concern, but something drew his attention from the red splotch on her thigh. A silence had fallen over the hangar, and Diana spun her chair to see what was going on.
Hera Olympiad would have been impressive just with her six-foot-tall, voluptuous body and piercing green eyes. However, clad in a shimmering silver skin that conformed to her athletic body, making her appear like a naked silver statue, she truly was unmistakable as the goddess-queen of New Olympus. Only her finely featured face was visible through a window in the otherwise seamless gleaming metal skin. She strode with focus toward Diana in her chair.
“My apologies, Queen,” Diana began, dipping her head in a bow to the woman who had come to Greece in search of mythic technology.
Hera had come from a place called Cobaltville, but had chosen to remain in Greece, utilizing the wonders she’d unearthed to become the defender of the inhabitants of the shattered islands. Before Hera’s arrival, their problems with barbarian pirate raiders had grown worse with the rise of the Hydrae under the command of a madman named Thanatos. With the discovery of the Hephaestian mobile suits, Hera had single-handedly ensured peace and tranquility under the protection of the New Olympians.
“No, my child,” Hera said. She gestured toward the battered frame of Artem15. “Metal can be reforged, but our villages cannot be so readily repopulated. Once more, your heroism honors me, Diana.”
Smooth metallic fingertips grazed tenderly down the scar tissue that made up the left side of young Diana’s face. The goddess-queen’s touch was cool and soothing to her numbed skin.
“Then what, milady?” Diana asked.
“Airy has shown me what he showed you,” Hera said. Her emerald eyes shimmered, as if pebbles had been tossed into green ponds. “We are facing a demon from my past. I will brief you all, but the creature you discovered was not born in the vats of Tartarus.”
“From where, then, my queen?” Diana asked.
Hera looked out of the slowly closing hangar doors, her silvery skin burning bright in the reflected sunset bleeding over the distant line of hills. “The creature was sent from my old home, Cobaltville. My baron had sent me, seeking an advantage over his fellow barons. Now he no longer needs that advantage.”
The hangar doors clamped shut, and Hera’s chrome flesh no longer shone bright. The shadows of the hangar were reflected in black hollows and voids on her mirrored skin. It seemed as if a light had been doused.
“The New Olympians must now face a real god, my child,” Hera said with a sigh.
Diana followed her queen, forcefully propelling her wheelchair to match the goddess’s long strides.
Chapter 2
“Anything…for…you, dear Domi,” Mohandas Lakesh Singh mocked himself in a pitched, nasal tone. He would have said it softer, smoother had he not been forced to grunt from the effort it took his 250-year-old body to crawl over the boulder-strewed hillside in the Bitterroot Mountains. Born before the nukecaust in 2001, Lakesh had maintained his lifespan initially through cryogenic stasis. The gifts of new, blue eyes and the more important vital organs were due to his involvement in the Totality Concept, a supersecret program of scientific research that enabled the revival of nine godlike beings to dominate the more manageable, surviving human populace.
Lakesh’s brilliance made him irreplaceable in constructing the technology behind the matter-transfer system that linked the many redoubts spanning the apocalypse-ravaged globe. He had been so important that the old barons kept him as young and healthy as their science could allow. Those medical efforts paled in comparison, though, to Sam’s nano technology. Sam’s mere touch had transferred an armada of microscopic nanites to Lakesh, and the miniature rebuilders had repaired the ravages of age on a molecular level. He currently appeared to be in his mid-to-late-forties.
Lakesh was pushing his physical limits on this odd little hike led by Domi, who moved with pantherlike surefootedness ahead of him. Originally a child of the Outlands, Domi had survived the sexual servitude of Guana Teague in the hellish underworld of Cobaltville known as the Tartarus Pits. Though she was often described as an albino, with porcelain-white skin, hair the color of bone and pink eyes, she was scarcely as frail and as delicate as the albinos that Lakesh had known of in the twentieth century.
Feral, not fragile, was the term most often associated with Domi, from her lapses into simple, broken English when under stress to her fury in battle when it came to defending those she cared for. When Domi became his devoted lover, Lakesh was at first concerned that he was merely the man she had chosen because the original object of her affection, Grant, had developed a relationship with Shizuka, the leader of the Tigers of Heaven. Lakesh had feared that he was either her rebound from rejection, or just a means to make Grant jealous.
That wasn’t the case. Their mutual affection was real and strong. Domi remained fiercely loyal friends with Grant, the man who had stood up for her to the cruel Guana Teague, but Lakesh could see that the love the two felt for each other was not sexual at all. Grant had become the surrogate big brother that Domi had always wanted, and the little albino had filled the same surrogate sibling role for the former Magistrate.
Domi looked back to the exhausted Lakesh. Her face broke into an impish grin. “Need a rest?”
At just a hair over five feet, Domi looked as if she had been carved out of ivory. Her muscles were tight and firm, and if she were older than twenty-five years, her smooth, unlined face and near perfect physical conditioning didn’t betray it. She wore cutoff jean shorts and one of Lakesh’s khaki safari shirts, which billowed down from her shoulders like a tent. She tied off the tails under her breasts, leaving her toned stomach exposed. Aside from her scant clothing, she also had a small gun belt with her equally small Detonics Combat Master and a waist-level quiver for the lightweight crossbow slung across her slender shoulders.
“Not at all,” Lakesh lied, restraining his desire to gulp down air like a landed fish. “Though, Domi dearest, it would have just been easier to tell me where you like to go hunting.”
Domi raised a white-blond eyebrow. She then looked at the small sheath of quarrels bouncing against her upper thigh. “Oh. This.”
“I understand the feral needs—” Lakesh began, but before he could finish, she bounded down off the boulder she stood on and planted a kiss on his lips.
“You are smart about a lot of things,” she replied. “But my trips aren’t just about getting fresh squirrel meat.”
Lakesh felt his cheeks redden. “Then what is this about?”
“Some really neat things,” Domi answered cryptically. “It’s not far now.”
Lakesh mopped his brow, then took a swig of water from his canteen. “Mystery soon to be solved.”
“Making fun of the way I used to talk?” Domi asked, but her smile and tone belied any challenge in her words.
“No, just out of breath.” Lakesh sighed.
She gave him a soft pat on the cheek, then tapped his stomach with the back of her hand. “This is the other reason. You need some exercise.”
Lakesh blew out a breath that fluttered through his lips in a rude response to Domi’s implication. That only made the albino girl grin even more widely, and she gave his abdomen a playful pinch.
“Come on,” Domi said, taking his hand in hers. They moved a little more slowly now, letting Lakesh regain his wind as they followed a narrow trail that wound to the mouth of a cave.
“Welcome to my version of an archive,” Domi announced.
Lakesh’s eyes tried to adapt to the dimmer illumination inside the cavern when a growl filled the air. The Cerberus scientist whirled at the sound, wishing he’d brought a firearm for himself when a small gray bolt of fur lunged at him.
“Moe! No!” Domi shouted. She intercepted the flying little fur ball inches from Lakesh’s face. “Bad Moe! That’s the man you’re named after. Be nice.”
She held up a small creature with the familiar bandit mask of a raccoon in front of Lakesh’s face. A pointed, little brown nose wrinkled. “Sniff him. He’s friendly. He’s our friend.”
Lakesh’s eyes finally adjusted and he could see the little gray-and-black creature, far less menacing in appearance than in growl. Blue eyes met blue eyes as Moe touched noses with Lakesh. A moment later, a tiny pink tongue began lapping at Lakesh’s cheeks.
“Hold him for a moment,” Domi said, handing the animal to Lakesh. The raccoon continued to sniff and nuzzle Lakesh as the albino girl walked to where she’d stored a small battery-operated lantern. She clicked it on, and Lakesh looked around the cave, seeing plastic storage shelves and containers, each laden with all forms of odd knickknacks and faded though once garish periodicals and paperbacks. Moe crawled up onto Lakesh’s shoulders, but aside from the odd feeling of tiny hands in his graying hair and the softness of fur on his nape, the little beast hadn’t so much as scratched him.
Lakesh’s eyes danced across cracked old figurines, timeworn stuffed animals and bald plastic dolls sitting at eye level on several shelves. “This looks like a teenage girl’s room.”
Domi nodded, as if doing mental math. “Maybe. That’s the first stuff I collected. I might have been a teenager back then.”
“You come here all the time?” Lakesh asked. His fingertips ran over a plastic crate filled with a mix of ancient comic books and ratty old magazines.
“Sometimes,” Domi said. She pulled a black cartoon mouse off one shelf, inspecting it. She pushed the stuffed animal’s eye back into its face, kissed its furred forehead and put it back on the shelf.
“A lot of old toys,” Lakesh noted. “The things that would be at a garage sale. Old puzzles, picture books, even old LPs and tapes.”
Lakesh wiped dust off an album cover, then his eyes widened. “The Blue Oyster Cult? Oh, that takes me way back.”
Domi grinned broadly.
“We have a lot of this in the computer archives. You don’t need to hunt all this down. Why?” Lakesh asked.
“At first, before I met Grant, I’d always wanted a room of my own. Full of stuff that I owned,” Domi explained. She picked up a doll that Lakesh had thought was bald, but it was just white skinned and white haired, dressed in what appeared to be a hand-sewn version of a shadow suit. Lakesh could see where Domi had trimmed its hair, arms and legs in proportion to foot-tall doll representations of Kane, Grant, Brigid Baptiste and even himself. “In the Outlands I didn’t own nothing more than the clothes I wore.”
“Own anything,” Lakesh unconsciously corrected. He walked to the familiar-looking dolls set on a rocky shelf. “What…what are these?”
“My family portrait,” Domi said. “The people I love.”
Lakesh felt his throat tighten for a moment. Domi was a fiery young woman, quick to anger and voracious as a lover, and Lakesh realized the depth of caring she possessed was evident in the loving detail applied to each of the tiny totems standing together. Each had been carefully sculpted and repainted and painstakingly dressed to be a perfect miniature doppelgänger.
Taking a step back, he felt the corner of a container scratch his calf. Lakesh looked down at the box. In large letters on top of the crate, the word Read was scrawled in marker. More boxes were beside it, but unmarked, except one with a strip of tape marked To Brigid.
“Those are ones I know she hasn’t read yet,” Domi said. “She gave me a list. When the box gets full, I bring ’em down for her.”
Domi put her miniature self back with the rest of its family. Lakesh saw two versions of himself, the old, withered self before Enlil-as-Sam had bestowed the gift of rejuvenation upon him, and one that more closely matched his appearance now. Lakesh admitted, though, that the hook-nosed little doll seemed to be considerably more handsome than he currently felt.
“Quite a library,” Lakesh said, fighting his narcissism over the miniature doppelgänger. “But why not use the archives?”
Domi shrugged. “Those aren’t my books. This is where I am. This is me and mine here. My people. The things I’ve learned. The shit I think is cute. And Moe.”
Lakesh scratched the butt of the fur ball on his shoulder. “Called Moe because he’s so smart?”
Domi’s eyes widened, lips parting for a moment as she was caught off guard. “Uh, yeah. Smart. Right.”
Lakesh mentally flashed back to all of the times that Domi had sat in his lap, his fingers giving her shoulder a squeeze, or scratching her back. He could easily imagine the situation reversed for Domi and the raccoon, the young albino sitting on the floor of the cavern, Moe curled in her lap as her fingertips absently scratched its back, mirroring her pose whenever Lakesh read to her, teaching her how to read. Domi winced as she noted the mental gears turning in her lover’s eyes as he figured out the equation.
Lakesh leaned in close to Domi and kissed her tenderly. He never had felt more in love with the feral girl who had grown so much since he’d first met her. “You are truly the sweetest, best thing ever to come into my life, precious, darlingest Domi.”
Her cheeks turned almost cartoonishly bright red at the statement.
With an inevitability that both Lakesh and Domi had grown used to, their Commtacts—subdermal transmitters that had been surgically embedded into their mastoid bones—buzzed to life.
Bry’s familiar twang sounded in their ears. “Lakesh, Domi, where are you?”
With a resigned sigh, Lakesh answered, the vibrations of his speech carrying along his jawbone to be transformed into an outgoing signal by the cybernetic implant. “We’re about a two hours’ hike from the redoubt.”
“Two hours at your speed? Or Domi’s?” the sarcastic technical wizard asked.
Lakesh rolled his eyes, eliciting a smirk from his companion and a chittering chuckle from Moe the raccoon. “What’s wrong, Bry?”
“I picked up something on satellite imagery from over the Mediterranean. The remains of Greece to be exact,” Bry responded. “Atmospheric disturbance indicative of—”
“Annunaki dropships,” Lakesh finished, worry tingeing his words. His mood soured instantly, and even resting his arm across Domi’s suddenly taut shoulders did little to help him. He looked down at the girl who was listening on her own bionic Commtact.
“Send out a Sandcat to meet us at Road 6,” Domi interjected. “Marker 12. We’ll be down there in fifteen minutes.”
Seemingly recognizing the urgency in his mistress’s voice, Moe bounded off Lakesh’s shoulder. Domi gave the raccoon a loving hug and a kiss on the end of its pointed nose. “Be good, Moe.”
The raccoon chittered a response, then darted out of the cave.
Regretting the hike’s abrupt end, Lakesh followed Domi out of her personal archive and down the rocky slope of the hill.
KANE STOOD, a silent sentinel at the Cerberus redoubt’s entrance as the Sandcat rolled up. His cold gray-blue eyes regarded the modified armored personnel carrier as it slowed to a halt, its side door swinging open to allow Lakesh and Domi out. The six-foot-tall former Magistrate was always an imposing figure, but the dour expression darkening his features gave Lakesh a momentary pause.
“They’re still alive,” he pronounced grimly.
“Perhaps,” Lakesh replied. “Just because Bry saw evidence of a dropship means nothing. Someone else might have come into possession of one of their craft. It could have been uncovered by the Millennial Consortium, or Erica could have traded for one before Tiamat’s destruction.”
Kane’s eye flickered momentarily at the scientist’s suggestions, but he didn’t relax. “Thanks for trying, Lakesh.”
Lakesh tilted his head in an unspoken question.
“Trying to make it seem less than it could be,” Kane muttered. He escorted Lakesh and Domi along the corridor toward the ops center. “But my job is to look for the worst-case scenario. Let’s simply assume that one of those snake-faced bastards survived Tiamat, and he’s making some moves.”
“It’s your job to be prepared for the worst. It’s my job to look at all possibilities equally,” Lakesh replied, trying to keep up with Kane’s long strides, spurred on by his tension. “Both are important, and let us do what we do best. This is part of the synergy that has kept us going all this time.”
Kane nodded grimly, slowing to accommodate his two companions, realizing the effort Lakesh expended to maintain his pace. “The only synergy I want is the blending of a bullet and an Annunaki face. I’d thought that we were done with the fucking overlords.”
“The only one who died for certain was Lilitu,” Lakesh said. “With our rogue’s gallery, unless you see the corpse, they truly cannot be discounted. And even then, some whose corpses we’ve beheld as forever stilled…Colonel Thrush, Enlil, Sindri…”
“Sindri was just beamed into a storage pattern, no corpse to ‘behold,’ as you put it,” Kane corrected, his voice taking on a derisive tone that usually accompanied any mention of the miniature transadapt genius. While Kane reserved a murderous rage for the overlords, the wolf-lean warrior harbored a deep-down annoyance for Sindri.
The three people entered the redoubt’s ops center, where Bry, Brigid Baptiste, Grant and Brewster Philboyd were waiting. Bry and Brigid were at one of the computer workstations. Philboyd and Grant were sitting at a desk, throwing cards down in a quick game of War. With Kane’s entry, Grant seemed relieved, obviously tired of the card game.
“Glad you finally showed up,” Grant grumbled. While Kane was an imposing figure, Grant was truly menacing. Taller than Kane, with a thick, powerful build, Grant was also a former Magistrate. Not only was the ex-Mag one of the finest combatants Lakesh had ever observed, but also his massive strength was coupled with an uncanny skill at piloting nearly any craft, air, land and sea.
“Not again,” Kane replied, looking over to Philboyd.
“Grant, the game’s called War. Do you fight fair?” Philboyd asked.
“It’s a card game. You’re not supposed to cheat,” Grant replied. “What’s the fun in that?”
“Now, this is hypothetical because I am not a cheater—” Philboyd began.
“Yes, you are,” Grant interjected.
“Let us know when you two are finished,” Brigid spoke up, a chilly disdain for Grant and Philboyd’s minor quarrel weighing on her words.
“Busted,” Kane said with a grin. He leaned in conspiratorially to his friend. “Besides, who else are you going to play cards with?”
“I dunno. I was thinking my partner,” Grant retorted.
“Maybe if I catch amnesia and forget how much of a hustler you are,” Kane said. He looked at the monitor where Bry and Brigid were busy. “That’s the contrail from the dropship.”
Brigid adjusted her spectacles on her nose. Years of constant reading as an archivist had left her vulnerable to eyestrain when going over fine imagery and small print. “We can’t tell who was piloting the dropship. It could be anyone who gained access to one of them. We spotted the transsonic atmospheric distortions in the island chain that used to be Greece.”
Lakesh frowned. “It has to be something important for the surviving overlords to risk exposure. As far as we knew, when Tiamat was destroyed, they all died.”
“Hard to believe that something as old and big as Tiamat could die,” Grant grumbled. “The big bitch might be down, but I don’t think it’s forever.”
“By the time she recovers from her injuries, we’ll hopefully be long dead,” Lakesh noted, referring to the living megalithic ship in which the Annunaki had ridden to Earth. “Preferably of old age.”
Brigid let loose a cleansing breath, pushing away the horrifying thought of Tiamat, the miles-long living chariot of the gods, reawakened to spread more destruction. The starship had more than enough power to scour all life from the surface of the planet. Its crippled and comatose state had accounted for lessened stress in her life, though the thought of an active Annunaki overlord was hardly reassuring. “Right now we are looking at some footage recorded from a recent conflict in that region.”
Bry’s fingers danced over the keyboard, and a bird’s-eye view flashed on the monitor. “The footage is about twenty minutes old, and we only caught the tail end of things.”
The monitor’s image sharpened until Kane and Lakesh could see the presence of massive sets of coppery metallic heads and shoulders, like living statues, leaving behind a morass of green-and-black corpses.
“I’ve double-checked the math, and the dead creatures are about a shade over five feet tall, and they are identical, at this magnification at least,” Bry explained. “They resemble the humanoid reptilian mutants that used to roam across the remnants of the United States.”
“Scalies,” Lakesh mused. “But they were exterminated.”
“Here on the North American continent, but you have to remember that these mutants could be artificially created,” Brigid said.
“If they’re about five feet tall, then how big are those constructs walking away?” Lakesh asked.
“Approximately twelve to fifteen feet, and almost half as wide,” Bry stated. “What did you call them, Brigid?”
“Mecha,” the archivist said. “A generic term for robotic combat vehicles.”
“Giant robots,” Lakesh murmured. “Larger than the ones we encountered in China. And heavily armed by the looks of them.”
“Close-ups of the shoulders correlate with late-twentieth-century machine-gun designs. Belt-fed rifle caliber,” Bry noted. “Grant recognized them, and utilizing the known dimensions of the weaponry, calculating the rest of the robot’s size was easy.”
Grant shuffled his deck of cards absently. “Brigid wants to go meet with the group that owns the robots. They seem fairly decent, according to this footage.”
“Decent?” Lakesh asked. “That’s a refreshing change. How did you determine that?”
“We caught a flash of an explosion while scanning the area. On image enhancement we saw that a trio of robots was assisting a line of local villagers against the mutants,” Brigid said.
Bry cued up the footage, and Lakesh watched the battle from above. He was surprised to see one of the mecha detonate an explosion at its own feet to stanch the tide of attackers. He was even more dazzled when the chest plate of the robot swung open. He couldn’t see inside the torso of the robot, but apparently there was someone inside.
“It looks like one robot is talking to the others about the friendly-fire incident at the start of the recording,” Kane noted.
“So they’re piloted craft,” Lakesh mused. “And they have rules of engagement to protect outlying communities.”
“You noticed the lack of industrial capability in the town, as well,” Brigid said.
“If they have only bolt-action rifles and pitchforks to deal with a mutant horde, I doubt that those people have a garage to tighten the nuts on a battle robot,” Kane interjected.
“Precisely. Indeed, there aren’t even any vehicles on the premises,” Lakesh added.
“I am fairly curious,” Brigid answered. “But Bry and I have been running comparisons between the one prone mecha being dragged back to base. Any pilot taller than five feet would be cramped inside even the most generous of compartments for the robots. Domi is well over the limit for riding in the chest, let alone operating the device.”
Domi tilted her head. “Maybe Sindri’s people?”
“The transadapts,” Kane agreed. “The tallest of them were just over four feet. And if you have a lab that can breed scalies, you can whip up a batch of transadapts, as well.”
“Trouble is, those strange little monkey men would be in conflict from the critters from the selfsame lab. And the transadapts we’ve encountered are hardly friendly and generous toward humans,” Grant said.
“You’re also talking about an abandoned people who had been slaves,” Brigid countered. “Not being oppressed and forced into submission to humans would have a good effect on them.”
“Rottenness isn’t a matter of genes,” Domi murmured. “Remember Quavell?”
The meeting room grew quiet as each of the Cerberus staff present remembered the Quad-Vee hybrid who had taken refuge along with them for several months while she was pregnant. The Cerberus explorers had initially believed that the infant had been sired by Kane when he had been captured and pressed into stud service to revitalize the frail, genetically stagnant hybrids. When it turned out that another had fathered the child, Kane and his allies continued to protect Quavell and her baby. Quavell died, however, due to complications of childbirth brought on by the genetic transformation from the slender, delicate hybrids to the larger, more powerful Nephilim, the servants of the Annunaki overlords who had also been awakened by Tiamat’s signal. Especially present in the minds of those around Domi was the albino girl’s shift from hatred and loathing of the panterrestrial humanoids to love and compassion for the hybrid woman.
It was a reminder that though they all had become open-minded, the nature of humanity was to harbor prejudices, something made very apparent by their encounters with the Quad-Vees and the transadapts.
“What’s powering the robots?” Domi asked. “Doesn’t look like it smokes like a Sandcat.”
Brigid looked back to the screen, and Bry, on cue, called up the image of the downed robot. “Kane, you remember the Atlantean outpost that Quayle had discovered?”
Kane nodded. “Yeah. You missed out on that. I’m sure you would have loved the place. All kinds of wall carvings, and a metal called orichalcum that blew up when sunlight touched it. Took out the whole joint.”
Brigid leaned past Bry and tapped a few keys, drawing up a subscreen. “Greek philosophers like Plato and Pliny discussed Atlantis at length. One of the things mentioned was the legendary gold-copper alloy that was the hallmark of Atlantean society. Seeing it as a staple of decorations and animatronic statues in city plazas seems at odds with the unstable explosive compound you described.”
“Fand told me what the stuff was called,” Kane responded. “Besides, the outpost was a couple thousand years old and under the ocean. Who can say that the seawater exposure didn’t rust it or cause some kind of other imbalance, like dynamite left sitting too long? Maybe kept away from rust-inducing salty humidity, it’s great.”
Brigid shrugged. “You stated that it was stored in a vault. Under excellent storage conditions. However, it could be akin to a high-energy metal like uranium. I wish you’d brought back a sample.”
“Quayle kept me kind of busy for that. Plus, that whole sunlight-making-it-go-off-like-a-grenade thing dissuaded me.”
Brigid locked eyes with Kane for a moment. Though the two shared an enormous affection for each other, it was commonplace for them to push each other’s buttons even in the most casual of conversations. “In its stable format, orichalcum could easily prove to be a reliable power source. Given Grecian familiarity with Atlantean mythology, it’s quite possible that these robots may be artifacts from an outpost placed in Greece. Or it could be a component of a highly durable alloy.”
“Given the artifacts we’ve found around the world, it’s very possible that Atlantis itself was the beneficiary of Annunaki and Tuatha de Danaan technology,” Lakesh added. “The orichalcum that Kane discovered could be a manufactured element, along the lines of plutonium. But the most important thing is that they have apparently mastered a lost form of technology. We had a glimpse of it in Wei Qiang’s at the Tomb of the Three Sovereigns.”
“Those suckers were strong, but still only man-size. Basically, semi-intelligent muscle. Double their size and give them a thinking person at the controls, you’ve got some considerable power on your side.” Grant nodded, for emphasis, at the image on the monitor of lifeless, scaled mutants and their shattered muskets being shoveled into a mass grave. “I wondered how those robots did what they did, I mean programming wise. They reacted to our actions with some reasonable responses.”
“Ancient forms of computers have been discovered. The most prominent of these is the Antikyteria Mechanism,” Philboyd answered. “The Antikyteria was an analog gear-style computer that was capable of charting star patterns. It’s a fairly simple looking design and more minute versions of that gear, working in concert, could form a non-circuit-board style computer.”
“Didn’t Archytas also mention that he possessed an automated, steam-powered, wooden robot pigeon?” Lakesh asked.
“Around 200 B.C.,” Brigid confirmed. One of the former archivist’s strongest interests was research into out-of-place artifacts, examples of modern technology originating in historical eras. Philboyd seemed slightly put out that she fielded the question regarding robotics, but was used to her need to provide an explanation. “It was capable of flight, if I recall correctly.”
“So they could have airborne mecha,” Kane said grimly.
“Potentially,” Brigid said. “But I’d presume that it would simply be more efficient to hang one off the bottom of a Deathbird. I’d consider a Manta, but the damaged armor appears ill suited for orbital use.”
Grant took a deep breath. “Fifteen feet tall. Plenty big, but not as big as some of the monstrosities in myths.”
“Like Talos or the Colossus of Rhodes,” Brigid mentioned.
“How big would those be?” Domi asked.
“Descriptions are inconsistent,” Brigid explained. “And they could have been highly embellished as mythology advanced. Talos could reasonably have been about forty to sixty feet tall, and the Colossus about twice that.”
Domi looked back to the robot laying on its back. “Well, it’s nice to know that we have friendly folks in control of that technology. I can see why we’d want to hook up with them right away.”
Philboyd nodded. “The Greek robot pilots can fight, and they have an advanced form of technology. It’d be like the Tigers of Heaven had our Mantas from the start.”
“And if the snake-faces are back and in action,” Grant began, “we can use that kind of fighting power.”
“Which explains the presence of a dropship in the region,” Kane grumbled. “The Greeks represent a possible enemy, and the overlords don’t want to have to deal with them.”
“You’re right. We’d better assemble an away team to meet them,” Lakesh urged. “Especially if they can be potential allies.”
“With a heads-up, we could make invaluable friends,” Brigid noted. “What could go wrong?”
Philboyd paled, remembering the conflict with Maccan, a Tuatha prince, that had been sparked when the Outlanders visited the Manitius Moon base for the first time. Grant and Kane looked at each other silently.
“Suit up,” the two partners said in harmony.
“I’m coming, too,” Domi added.
“We might need backup from CAT Beta,” Kane said.
“Then I’ll be on scene. If necessary, the rest of my team will pop in,” Domi said. “One of the ex-Mags can substitute for me.”
Brigid Baptiste sighed. In asking the rhetorical question, she’d thrown out temptation for fate. She groaned softly. “Time to break out the battle bra again.”
Chapter 3
Diana was just another wheelchair jockey in the meeting hall, sitting with the rest of the pantheon of hero-suit drivers. Zoo, Airy, Pollie and the rest were arranged around a bisected corpse illuminated by a searing white cone of light. The separated torso had been seared. Cauterized wounds from Airy’s thermal ax had sealed in the dead thing’s juices behind walls of charred flesh. The face had been cleaned up, and it was at once handsome and intimidating. Though finely sculpted, the face’s beauty was sheathed in fine-scaled, lizardlike armor. Diana tried to shake off her imaginings of this creature’s angelic magnetism, even in its sleep of oblivion.
She had to remind herself that this being had been fighting alongside the Tartarus mutants, joining them in a raid on a New Olympian settlement. The mutants were mass murderers, bred for attacking and exterminating humans. The wake of death and terror that Thanatos’s minions had left was something that Diana would never forget. She reminded herself of the scaled thugs’ horrific actions every time she touched her fused, fire-scarred cheek or forehead. The handsome snakelike humanoids that were related to the lifeless thing under the blazing light were allied with the monsters that inspired Diana to sacrifice her remaining leg so that she could fit into the cockpit of a hero suit.
The orichalcum-framed battle suits had been designed around slighter, smaller creatures. As such, even a small woman like Diana had been before the Tartarus raids had scarred and mutilated her, was too large for the cockpit. The metal caps on her thigh stumps and the cybernetic port adjacent to her lower spine were less a reminder of her wounds than they were badges of her empowerment. Her half-destroyed face was a brand of the evil that rose from the Tartarus vats.
No matter how beautiful the stranger was, the ugliness of his allegiance was unmistakable.
Z00s, the chief of the pantheon, looked at her. His furry features made his nickname of Zoo all too appropriate. “Recognize what the creature is wearing, or are you still caught up looking into his eyes?”
Diana bit back a response as she examined the burnished metal sheathing the corpse’s limbs and torso. “Secondary orichalcum. The color is a bit off, but he’s clothed in it.”
“It’s more than just that,” Zoo, the Zeus of the New Olympians, noted. “It’s woven, nearly clothlike, and far more flexible than anything we’ve ever seen except in one instance.”
Diana’s mind flashed to Hera’s skintight armor.
“Airy’s axe carved through it, but we’re talking about a blade swung by a one-and-a-half-ton war machine. You can see the discoloration there and there where our small arms struck it. Bullets penetrated its limbs on only straight hits. Anything less turned into a glancing blow.”
Hera looked at the bisected stranger, her silvery fingertips touching as her mind seemed to be caught in a storm. She rapped her metal-clad knuckle on the inert body’s thigh. “Someone not only knows how to mass-produce secondary orichalcum, but has enough to give it out like clothing.”
“How’d he get in that?” Ari “Airy” Marschene, the pilot of Are5, asked. “It’s not like that getup’s got a zipper.”
“In a way, there is,” Hera noted. She rolled over the top of the torso, revealing a knot-shaped mechanism high between the strange visitor’s shoulder blades. None of the eleven pilots of the pantheon needed to be reminded of the similarity between the device and the one that enabled their goddess-queen to enjoy the protection of impenetrable silver-and-gold skin. The same knotted base for ropes of molded smart armor was a cybernetic port that Hera had been able to reverse engineer in order to allow the pilots to control their robotic war suits. Hera fiddled with the device until ribbons of metal retracted, folding back into a capsule around the cybernetic hub. The metal had only peeled away from the torso and arms, the lower part of the corpse still clad in its glimmering armor.
Zoo wheeled over as Hera pried the mechanism from the back of the corpse. “An almost exact match.”
Zoo’s burly arm reached out and picked up the severed forelimb, still wearing its glove of secondary orichalcum armor. Around the wrist of the grisly trophy, three tendrils of mechanical cable ended in snakelike heads. “Though apparently it still maintains its shape without the proper command impulse.”
“Careful with that,” Ari said. “When I went after him, he fired a burst of energy from the device still on his wrist. It had enough power to smash one of my axes. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. It’s a lot more focused than Pollie’s Greek fire sprayers.”
Hera plucked the blaster-equipped wrist from Zoo’s grasp. She seemed to be weighing it against the cybermodule in her other hand.
“So what is all of this?” Diana asked. “What has you so nervous?”
Hera looked balefully toward Diana. “I want this technology. I want all of this. If we had this kind of weaponry, we could drive Thanatos and his mutants into the ocean. If these become common among the spawn of Tartarus, we’ll be swept from the Earth.”
“Give me a half-dozen Spartans, and I’ll run a reconnaissance,” Diana answered. “A quick raid, and we’ll see if this was the only one, or if there are more.”
Hera shook her head. “No.”
“But—” Diana began in protest.
“Do not make me repeat myself, girl,” Hera snapped.
The wheelchair-bound pilots all fell silent. They had never seen their goddess-queen this agitated in the years that they had known her. Most of all, they had never imagined that Hera would have growled a threat at any of them, let alone Diana, the girl who was Hera’s surrogate daughter. The menace hanging in the air, however, was unmistakable.
“Zoo, come on,” Hera barked, urgency speeding the words from her lips. “I’m taking this back to my lab.”
The queen and her amputee consort left the conference room without another word.
Diana watched silently, feeling a knot of nausea forming just under her sternum. The goddess who had raised her up from a useless cripple had delivered her a rebuke before her peers. After all she had done for the pantheon, earning herself a role as named pilot of a hero suit with blood and sacrifice, Diana stung as she was discarded, tossed aside like a petulant child. Ari wheeled over to her.
“Di, baby…” Ari began, affection purring under his words as his deep brown eyes studied her fused mask of a half face.
“Just leave me alone,” Diana answered curtly. “I’m too old to need sitting.”
Ari swallowed, regretting his choice of words. The high-tech war-avatar pilot made no secret of his love for the straw-haired girl who commanded the robotic huntress. He also was very clear and careful to always treat her with respect, even though Diana had cut herself off from interpersonal ties, feeling herself unworthy of romance. He reached out to take her delicate fingers in his grasp. “Di, something is worrying Hera. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be so on edge. I mean, there’s a fucking alien laying on the table, and he had a laser gun and bulletproof armor. Look at it.”
“I have been,” Diana answered. “It’s almost human, though. An alien should be…alien, shouldn’t it?”
Ari glanced at the angelic reptilian once more.
“Think about it,” Diana continued. “Two eyes. Two ears, vestigial as they are. Nose. Mouth. Arms. Legs. This could be something out of those cheesy old vids about the starship, where they distinguished aliens with bumps on their forehead or just some rubbery makeup.”
“This is a lot more convincing than latex,” Ari said. “It looks like the big brother of the Hydrae horde. The one that got all the good genes, while the others are just crappy copies.”
“That’s why Hera’s so scared?” Pollie interjected. He’d remained taciturn as his two friends, Ari and Diana, spoke. “Think this critter is the one who supplied the template for Thanatos’s clones?”
“It’s possible,” Diana murmured. Her friends could tell that she was in retreat, curling back into her shell. All she could think about was Hera’s bitter rebuke.
Diana wheeled her chair back to her quarters, alone. Hauling herself into her bunk, she finally allowed herself to give way to the sting of tears.
THE INTERPHASER’S HUM FADED in Kane’s ears, and mistlike energy plasma dissipated around him. His keen point man’s instincts kicked in, sweeping the area where they’d emerged. The interphaser’s design was a godsend after years of employing conventional mat-trans visits. The psychic and physical trauma that accompanied traditional gateway jumps was greatly minimized if they used the interphaser instead. The interphaser exploited naturally occurring vortices that were spread around the globe and even on other planets. The energy points had been mapped by the Parallax Points Program, which they had discovered on Thunder Isle and then input into the interphaser.
The sky blazed a burned orange marking the sunset, and the mountaintop ruin was silent, except for the baleful calls of terns that hovered on thermals, watching the strange appearance of Kane and his companions. Kane could smell the brine of the ocean—the Agean, he’d learned from Brigid.
He set down his war bag and jogged to the edge of the weathered and cracked stone floor. Behind him, Brigid, Grant and Domi set about stowing their own equipment bags. Grant made certain to secure his huge rifle case. The container was taller than Domi was, but there was a crack in the stone floor large enough to secure it. Brigid and Domi elected to leave behind their Copperhead submachine guns and the bandoliers of grenades in their war bags. Kane and Grant opted to keep their Copperheads with them. The four Cerberus exiles were on a first-contact mission, and the two men would be out of place without something heavier than the powerful Sin Eaters in their forearm holsters. However, if all four showed up packing enough guns to fight a war, it would send the wrong message.
Kane and the others had been around enough to balance shows of strength with diplomacy. Grenades and Grant’s monster-sized Barrett rifle were stashed away for contingency in the event of betrayal and disarmament. The extra weaponry disappeared under a camouflaging tarpaulin that Grant covered with dirt.
Kane pulled a pair of compact field glasses from a pouch on his equipment belt slung over his shadow suit. The high-tech polymers of the uniform conformed to his powerful muscles, providing nearly complete environmental protection from all but the most inhospitable climates. While not able to withstand rifle rounds like his old Magistrate polycarbonate armor, the shadow suit still offered minor protection against small arms and knives. In return, the suits granted greater ease of movement and offered protection against radiation and temperature fluctuation. Kane also noticed that the shadow suits were far less intimidating than the ominous black carapaces of their Mag battle armor.
“No movement,” Kane announced. He turned to see Brigid Baptiste tracing her fingers over the surface of weather-beaten column. “Any ideas what this was?”
“Considering that many of the vortices were recognized by ancient peoples as places of power, aided by the influence of the First Folk, this could have been an oracle. This isn’t Delphi, but it has a similar layout,” Brigid answered. “Sadly, nothing of archaeological significance remains.”
“So you won’t be distracted by shards of pottery,” Kane returned with a wink and a smile.
Brigid shook her head. “No. The only thing that could be found here would be in the form of resonant psychic energy.”
Kane raised an eyebrow. “Oh, right. Because the oracles were manned by ancient psi-muties. The nodes’ energy would increase their perceptions.”
“That’s a very good theory,” Brigid said. “You’ve been doing some reading?”
Kane shrugged. “Continuing education. With all the crap we’ve encountered, and all the telepathic trespassing that’s gone on in my head, it helps to be prepared. Granted, I’m going off of digital copies of the Fortean Times in the redoubt’s library.”
Brigid smiled. “I remember when you asked for that archive disk. I thought it was just to get more information on Atlantis.”
“That’s where it started,” Kane admitted. “A lot of the theories in those old rags sounded crazy. But after slugging it out with Quayle in the outpost, I had a feeling we’d eventually run across Atlantis itself. Along the way, other articles caught my eye, mainly from personal experience.”
“We know for a fact that the Annunaki took the roles of the Sumerian and Greek gods, among other identities,” Brigid noted. “With that knowledge, some of von Danniken’s alien-god theories come off much more plausibly…if you’re willing to ignore the obvious sloppy interpretation of an Aztec sacrifice’s guts being mistaken for the tube hookups on an ancient space suit.”
Kane shrugged. “Lazy speculators, or just plain gullible nuts.”
He sighed, getting back to the business at hand. “We seem to be on a peninsula. There’s a land bridge leading down from that cliff. So far, I don’t see any movement that would indicate the locals are aware of our presence.”
“Thank heaven for small favors,” Brigid replied.
Kane continued to scan the countryside when suddenly a column of blue-white electrical fire speared down into the land, creating huge clouds of debris and smoke from the earth. He recoiled from the power and the violence. At first, he thought it was a lightning bolt, but the searing slash of energy was too focused, too intense and lasted far too long to be a simple work of nature. Flames licked up from charred ground and, sprawled in the scarred landscape, burned corpses steamed. The dying sunset had been blotted out, overwhelmed by the brilliance of the sky fire. Cries of fear and suffering echoed in his ears, and he could smell the sickly scent of roasting human flesh.
Despair surged through him when he realized that he had been grasped firmly by Grant. Kane blinked away the flashes, and the sights, sounds and smells faded.
“Kane?” Grant asked, as if he were repeating himself. The big ex-Magistrate’s Sin Eater retracted back into its powered forearm holster, though Grant appeared confused at what had caused Kane to stagger and reel.
“No, of course you wouldn’t have seen that,” Kane muttered. “It wasn’t real.”
“See what?” Domi replied. She still hadn’t put her handgun away. “You froze for a moment, then started backing away from the edge.”
Kane looked around the ruins. “The oracle helped me experience a psi-mutie vision.”
“What did you see?” Brigid asked.
“Lightning,” Kane said. “But it wasn’t natural lightning. It was a weapon, and it tore the ground apart. And it was focused. It left swathes of charred corpses in its wake.”
“Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods, had a quiver of thunderbolts forged for him by Hephaesteus. Zeus’s thunderbolts were so powerful, they could destroy even the greatest monsters in the land,” Brigid said. “That myth could have its basis in an Annunaki weapon.”
Domi’s nose wrinkled. “This shit’s getting weird.”
“You asked to come along,” Grant chided. He glanced back at their hidden stash of weapons. “Monsters, other gods, cities, too, right?”
Brigid nodded. “Zeus obliterated anyone and anything with his thunderbolts.”
“So nothing in our bags is ever going to match that kind of firepower,” Grant announced. “Let’s just head down the bridge and meet the locals before Zeus drops the sky on us.”
Kane nodded in agreement, finally past the harrowing realism of his momentary psychic flash. “Good plan.”
The arcs of future lightning were still harshly inscribed on his mind’s eye, an ominous premonition of hell peeling back the sky and incinerating the earth below. He couldn’t dismiss his dread, and so he threw himself into his work. Maybe knowing the potential tragedy looming in the future gave Kane the power to prevent it.
It was as good a coping mechanism as any.
THE FARTHER THEY GOT from the oracle, across the ramp of stone and packed earth sloping down from the ancient temple’s remains, Kane’s senses grew clearer, returning to normal. As his senses sharpened, he realized that they were not alone. He shot a glance toward Domi, knowing that her own feral instincts were also preternaturally sharp. She was on edge.
Grant picked up on his two allies’ silent, brief exchange. “Where?”
“Feels like we’re surrounded, at least two flanks,” Kane explained.
Grant nodded. The hilly, rolling terrain was covered with sparse scrub, making it difficult for anyone to hide any closer than the hillcrests that bracketed them. Only the tops of the ridges provided sufficient concealment, as well as a good commanding view of the rut they passed through. Even with the deepening shadow of evening, their stalkers would be behind the ridges. The massive ex-Magistrate flipped down the faceplate on his black polycarbonate helmet, and vision-enhancing optics were engaged. While the shadow suits and mandibular implants had superseded most of Grant’s old armor’s protection and communication functions, the image-intensifying and night-vision capabilities of the black helmets were too valuable to surrender. The Mag helmet was also one of the few pieces of equipment that Grant was able to perform repairs on without compromising the fit of the Magistrate armor piece.
A heat source flared on a ridge, a head poking over the hilltop. Grant locked on to it, but the figure disappeared quickly. Still, he had enough for cursory identification. “Humanoid. Scrawny, hairless and naked according to the signature. Mammalian core heat.”
“Naked?” Kane asked. “Then it’s not the robots laying out this welcome mat.”
“More like the mutants we saw on satellite view,” Brigid said. “Strange that they have reptilian skin, but mammalian endothermic metabolisms.”
“Strongbow’s old crew were scaly faced, as well,” Grant said. “Though they had remnants of facial hair.”
“Makes you wonder about the so-called scalies often referenced in the Wyeth Codex,” Brigid said.
“Less ancient history, more current events,” Kane grumbled. His own faceplate was down, his point man’s instinct working together with the advanced electronics of the Magistrate helmet.
“There is some historical relevance. Zeus’s greatest enemy was the monster Tiamat, mother of a million tormenting beasts,” Brigid noted.
“Tiamat is dead,” Kane said coldly.
“Our Tiamat,” Brigid responded. “But look at places like the Archuleta Mesa, or the attempted use of Area 51 to produce Quad Vee hybrids—two locations that had the technological potential to create biological constructs. It stands to reason that if Greece is a location for Annunaki-designed robots, there might also be the technology for creating monsters. Literally the womb of Tiamat. The First Folk are a prime example of Annunaki genetic tampering.”
Kane’s brow furrowed under the polycarbonate visor. “So whoever played Zeus the first time, long ago, made his own rogue’s gallery?”
Brigid shrugged. “The towns in these islands are heavily fortified. That bespeaks of an ever present, hostile enemy in herdlike numbers. Especially considering the corpses shoved into the mass grave and the amount of damage those poorly armed humanoids were able to inflict on a single robot, we must be dealing with some sort of cloning facility.”
Kane hadn’t slowed his pace, and he could hear Brigid panting as she tried to keep up while applying her intellect to the problem at hand. “So they’d be akin to the mutant herds that roamed the American wasteland after the war. Bred specifically to be alien, of animalistic intelligence and a hostility toward nonaltered humans, they would be a perfect means of keeping the surviving population in check until the Program of Unification.”
“Can you think of a better way to isolate communities?” Grant asked.
The two ex-Mags scanned the hilltops with their light-amplification lenses. The ground was cast in an eerie green haze by the helmet units. Though Domi and Brigid didn’t have the high-tech headgear, Domi’s sensitive albino eyes were accustomed to the darkness, and Brigid was wearing a lightweight Moon base visor. Brigid’s eyewear was slightly bulkier than a pair of sunglasses, but the lenses were polarized to allow protection against intense light sources as well as having a built-in LED UV illuminator and lenses that filtered the tiny lamp into the visible spectrum, as well as amplifying ambient light. Still, the tall archivist envied the telescopic targeting option on Kane’s and Grant’s Mag helmets.
“So far, it only looks like we have one shadow,” Grant said.
“It feels like more,” Kane countered. He looked to Domi. She nodded, then strode off quietly.
“Be careful, girl,” Grant whispered over his Commtact. The admonition brought a smile to the albino’s face, a moment of cherubic warmth before her porcelain features hardened into a grim battle mask.
“You know they’re going to wonder where she went,” Brigid warned.
“Good,” Kane replied. “That will force them to divide their focus. I’m going up ahead to further disperse them. Stay close to Grant.”
Brigid looked as if she was going to protest, but held her tongue. There were times when the four Outlanders operated as a democracy, each applying individual skills and expertise to solving their mutual dilemmas. On the other hand, when being hunted by an unknown number of enemies in the countryside of a far-flung, shattered nation, Brigid would defer to Kane’s warrior knowledge and hard-contact experience. His combat abilities and finely honed instincts provided him with almost instantaneous strategies that would allow the explorers to remain safe and secure from hostile foes without dithering or debate.
Brigid was also irritated by the implication that she was a less capable combatant than the highly trained former Magistrates and the feral albino girl. Compared to most of the rest of the world, she was a formidable survivor of globe-spanning conflicts. But she realized that though she could handle herself in a dangerous situation, when surrounded by a small horde of snarling mutants, reason dictated that the lifetimes of combat endured by Kane, Grant and Domi gave them an edge. Kane’s warning to stay near the towering Grant was not an insult, just common sense. A lightning-quick assessment also provided her with the insight that she and Grant would form the hinge of the two-flanked counterattack by Kane and Domi. Grant needed Brigid’s backup as much as she needed him.
Grant simply nodded at his partner, and Kane advanced fifty yards ahead of the pair.
Kane wasn’t certain if the mysterious stalkers had access to the same optic technology that he and his allies possessed, but he doubted it. The massive warbots would be more likely to possess advanced cameras, but their stealth would be negligible compared to the scrawny mutants that Grant had spotted. From the satellite pictures, they seemed to be more proficient at using their muskets and bayonets as spears rather than rifles, which meant the complexities of electronically enhanced vision would be beyond their limited mental scope. However, if the mutants had sharp, animalistic senses, Domi’s transformation to shadowy midnight wraith would be insufficient camouflage. Even with her shadow suit already blended to the darkened terrain by fiber-optic technology and the addition of a blackened head rag covering her bone-white hair and a scarf wrapped around her nose and jaw, the acute night vision of predatory animals would allow her to be spotted easily. Kane recalled, however, that most reptilian hunters didn’t rely on vision when they stalked at night.
The girl would stand a chance, and even if the hunters did come at her, she’d hold them off long enough for Kane and Grant to even up the odds.
This far from the oracle’s influence, and minutes separating him from his jolting psychic flash, Kane trusted his instincts again, and he felt as if violence was about to break loose like a driving rain. He activated his Commtact. “Domi, eyes on targets?”
“Ten muties close to you,” Domi replied in her clipped, tense vocal cadence. When her adrenaline kicked in, she reverted to her old, primitive way of talking, dropping articles. “Dozen back by others. Haven’t seen me.”
Kane seized his Copperhead from its spot on his web belt. “Definitely muties.”
“Too hunched, scrawny,” Domi answered. “Bald and ugly, and think they can sneak up on me.”
Kane smirked in appreciation of the feral girl’s guts. Though Domi could, and had survived with nothing more than a knife and clad in a few rags in the wilderness, her years at Cerberus gave her an appreciation for more complex tools in concert with her sharp senses. “It feels like they’re ready to make a move.”
There was a grunt over the Commtact, and Kane froze. Before he could call out, something registered on his visor, an infrared trace in his peripheral vision. “Grant, on our left.”
“Just spotted that one,” Grant answered. “Looks like we’re being herded. So the numbers that Domi announced are probably double. This could get rough.”
“What else is new?” Domi grumbled.
“What happened?” Kane asked.
“Banged knee getting behind rock,” Domi responded. “Caught glimpse of muties across way.”
“We’re going to be boxed in, and that’s going to suck. Time for us to make some noise,” Kane responded. He transferred the Copperhead to his left hand and flexed his forearm tendons. The sensitive actuators in the holster for his Sin Eater launched the folding machine pistol into his grasp with a loud, intimidating snap. Back when he was a Magistrate, enforcing the law for Cobaltville, the lightning appearance of the deployed sidearm broke many a criminal’s will to fight. Now, the sudden appearance was the trigger for gibbering yammers of dismay from hilltop mutants.
“That got attention,” Domi announced before, off to Kane’s right, the throaty bellow of the albino’s Detonics .45 split the night.
Kane raced, broken-field pattern, toward the surge of infrared contacts on his left on the ridge across from her position. His charge was met by a half-dozen misshapen heads popping up in response to rapid movement. They peered over the spine of the hill, and a volley of musket balls rippled down from the group.
One of them smacked, wet and hot, against Kane’s chest, stopping his forward charge as if he’d slammed into a brick wall.
Chapter 4
Diana’s slumber was brief, as emotionally charged dreams tormented her. It was as if she were suffering from a sweat-drenched fever. She hadn’t been swamped by such stressful mental imagery since the amputation of her remaining leg. Staph infection had nearly claimed her life even as she was “upgrading” to her current existence.
The dream started out exactly as before. Instead of the sterile, pristine surgical studio where Hera Olympiad conducted the amputation, she was in a flame-lit cavern where the walls seemed carved from pulsating reptilian flesh. Shadows danced wildly behind the silver-clad goddess whose precision instruments had transformed into jagged, gore-encrusted saws and splinter-edged cleavers. Without administering an anesthetic, Hera hacked down violently. Her medical assistants had been replaced by hunch-backed, blue-scaled mutants from the Tartarus horde. Rather than handing her the tools she needed to remove Diana’s healthy leg in order to fit her inside the cockpit of the clockwork war suit, their gnarled claws raked obscenely over her silver-and-gold curves, gibbering in delight at splatters of blood and wriggling pieces of flying flesh. Blue-black tongues stretched from between scaled lips to lap the offal off Hera’s armored skin.
“So tasty is our daughter,” a voice whispered, harsh and raw, from the shadows. “So ugly, tasty and ours.”
Diana craned her neck, trying to get a look at the speaker, but her attention was seized by the metal cap crushing her thigh stump. A bolt was drilled through the bottom, grinding through bone to anchor the cap. The vibrations tore through Diana’s body, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out. A hammer whacked the steel stump cap, and the mutilated girl arched her back in agony.
“Roll over,” Hera demanded. Diana saw a pulsing, gel-filled black creature with barbed and hooked beetle limbs twitching in Hera’s grasp. “I need to put in your interface.”
Diana nodded. It was the sacrifice she had to make, to become powerful enough to fight off Thanatos’s hordes. A reptilian hand caressed her cheek, scales rubbing like sandpaper on her remaining facial skin.
“It’ll only hurt a moment, child,” the mutant grumbled.
Diana’s eyes widened with horror as she recognized the speaker, the one who called her his daughter. It was Thanatos himself, the scale-skinned lord of Tartarus, present at her conversion from fragile flesh to armored warrior goddess. She tried to pull away, but the beetle limbs speared into her back, tearing through skin and anchoring in her muscles. A stinger of venomous fire plunged into her spine, and Diana froze in feverish agony.
Thanatos let go of her face, freezing in his own horror. A hand wrapped around the monster-king’s throat, and with a savage, crackling twist, Thanatos collapsed in a jumble of useless limbs.
Diana relaxed on the table, panting, looking at the newcomer who had executed the demon lord of the Tartarus horde. It was a tall, magnificent creature, even larger in stature than the corpse in the briefing room. Incredibly, its face was even more of a mix of angelic beauty and devilish intensity. Dark eyes looked down on the amputee thrashing on the cracked stone that was the operating table, then dismissed her.
It strode regally around the abattoir table, meeting Hera as an equal, wearing even more splendid skin armor than hers. A long, elegant claw stroked the armored woman’s cheek.
“It has been too long, lover,” the magnificent reptilian angel whispered in a disturbing, resonant, multitonal voice.
“I didn’t know if you’d ever come for me,” Hera replied.
Diana looked in disgust and betrayal as goddess-queen and alien angel kissed passionately.
She was ejected from the dream with a breathless pant. Her strawlike hair was matted to her forehead in the wake of the traumatic nightmare. Almost on instinct, she crawled over to her wheelchair, cable-tight arm muscles maneuvering her truncated body into its seat with acrobatic ease. Even splashes of cool water from the simple metal basin of her sink did little to ease the psychic burns seared into her mind.
She rolled out of her quarters, making her way through the New Olympian complex. Diana needed the comfort of her cramped cockpit, the womb of steel that completed her being. Outside Artem15, Diana was only a husk, a leftover that wasn’t really alive. In the massive clockwork war suit, she became something much more; she was fully alive, not an animated piece of burned and fused meat. The hydraulic limbs, hooked into her central nervous system by the cyberport on her spine, felt as natural as if she had been born with them.
Ted Euphastus was in the hangar, gnawing on a cheroot cigar as he brought his mug over to a coffeemaker on the table. He looked at Diana as she entered. “Can’t sleep?”
“Is she ready to roll?” Diana asked curtly, ignoring Fast’s question. She steered her wheelchair toward the inert robotic figure standing in its coffinlike dock.
“A jolly fucking good evening to you, too,” Fast grumbled. “Yeah. You can see the chest plate’s been rearmored, and I realigned the leg hydraulics.”
Diana rolled up to the trapeze arm off to the side of the robot and hauled herself onto the rung, swinging around on the pivoting metal pole to deposit herself in the pilot’s couch. It took only a moment for her to snap the interface plug into her spine port. As the Charged Energy Modules that powered the mobile armor thrummed to life, imparting vitality into the inert robotic limbs, Diana’s body tingled from scalp to stump cap. She likened the sensation to when her arm fell asleep, cold and prickly, but as the blood rushed back into the arm, warmth dispelled the numb incompletion. She was whole as her nervous system completed the circuit that activated the ancient technology cradling her. Artem15 tapped the trapeze boom out of the way, locking it back over the wheelchair. Red camera lenses glared hatefully down at the conveyance for a cripple.
As the clockwork war suit needed no refuelling thanks to the CEM’s functions, Artem15 didn’t need to worry about wasting resources while on an unscheduled patrol. The other pilots felt the same, enjoying the comfort of the embracing armored tubs.
“Ari and Dion have patrols out,” Fast announced. “And Zoo’s on the prowl by himself.”
“Any particular operation, or just walkabouts?” Artem15 asked.
“No word on what Zoo is doing. He said it was private business. Are5 and D10nysus have Spartan units with them,” Fast said. “Want me to rouse a couple for you?”
“Nah. I’ve got the radio to bring in Ari or Dion,” Artem15 said. “I just need to clear my head and get some fresh air.”
Artem15 gave Fast some credit for mostly concealing the ironic smirk as he considered her remark that going for a stroll wrapped in three-thousand pounds of machinery was getting some fresh air.
“Well, Hera said that you’re not supposed to go on an end run into the Tartarus holdings,” Fast warned.
Diana was glad that Artem15 didn’t have the ability to convey facial expressions, even with the cybernetic hookup between her and the robot. “I said I was going for a walk, not out for a suicide. Speaking of which, I didn’t look. I’ve got replacement javelins?”
“You’ve got a full quiver, and nine yards of ammo per shoulder gun,” Fast explained.
Diana nodded, her golden-haired head bobbing between the gear-shaped shoulder gun mounts. “Thanks, Fast. Sorry about being such a whiny bitch.”
Fast glanced over to the wheelchair. “It’s that thing, kid. Being stuck in it would make me grumpy, too.”
Artem15 put her metal claw tips to where her lips would be if she were human, then bent them back, a robotic kiss blown. That brought a smile to the wrench monkey’s bearded face.
With a graceful pivot, the robotic huntress strode out into the countryside, a skip in her step as she passed through the massive hangar doors.
The gloom induced by fever dreams evaporated as Artem15 walked into the Greek sunset.
THE IMPACT OF THE MUSKET BALL was a shock to Kane. However, thanks to the high-tech polymers of the shadow suit, his remarkable reflexes and the relatively soft primitive lead musket ball, the gunshot only managed to raise a tiny bruise on his pectoral muscle. Kane’s sleek, wolflike frame darted through the peppering cloud of poorly aimed fire seeking him out. Dropping into a shoulder roll, the ex-Magistrate ducked the final volley of black-powder shots.
The ancient, simple weapons couldn’t be reloaded by the creatures who barely had the presence of mind to aim them. Unfortunately for Kane, the gleaming points of a dozen bayonets glared at him under pairs of feral yellow eyes. Their sharpness and the berserk strength of their wielders would overwhelm the protective qualities of Kane’s shadow suit. As each blade was eighteen inches in length, the former Magistrate knew that his organs would be speared through and through.
Kane fired the Copperhead submachine gun, the weapon snarling out small-caliber rounds into naked, scale-encrusted chests. Two of the mutants dropped their bladed muskets and tumbled into lifeless tangles of gnarled limbs. The suddenly inert hordelings formed a barrier to their brethren’s ferocious charge, turning two dead bodies into five more stumbling, disarmed mutants. The dozen growling creatures dropped in number to five active combatants, but their bayonets still thirsted for Kane’s blood.
Kane tracked the Copperhead, aiming at the deformed face of a reptilian attacker, then he pivoted and engaged his Sin Eater. Two thundering shots from the folding machine pistol launched a pair of 240-grain superheavy slugs that blew through mutated chests as if they were soggy slices of bread. One 9 mm round glanced off a dead mutant’s spine and careened at an angle into a second reptilian form, while the other Sin Eater round punctured the creature behind the first dying mutant.
The last mutant lashed out with his bayonet, but Kane batted the blade away with a sweep of the Copperhead’s barrel. With a sharp kick to the mutant’s knee, Kane dropped him on the rocky hillside. A kick to the temple put the mutant out just in time for Kane to address the group of sprawled hordelings that were getting back to their feet.
Their yellow eyes flashed angrily in the starlight, muskets held like spears and clubs. Kane whipped his Sin Eater around, knowing that even a moment of hesitation would allow the bayonet-armed monstrosities time to pinion him. The sidearm roared on full-auto, scything through the group with a salvo of thunderbolt rounds. The scaled half men writhed under the rain of smashing slugs, their bodies wrecked by Kane’s marksmanship.
It was ruthless, but Kane reminded himself of the Greek townsfolk, their corpses visible on satellite photos. The dead people were mute testimony to the murderous intent of the charging horde.
Right now, Kane turned his attention back toward Grant and Brigid. The pair was back to back, Brigid using Grant’s Copperhead while the massive ex-Magistrate attended to the charging swarm on his flank, utilizing his Sin Eater. The two full-auto weapons hammered out vicious volleys that sliced into the savage marauders charging down the slopes.
Domi was nowhere to be seen, and he didn’t hear her on his Commtact.
“Dammit,” Kane growled. Out in the open and heavily outnumbered, Grant and Brigid were hard-pressed by the surging reptilians. Domi at least had the advantage of broken terrain behind the hillcrest to give her an edge over her opponents.
Charging, Kane raced to bolster the defensive line held by his two companions, sending a good-luck wish to the feral albino girl.
AFTER DOMI BURNED OFF the first seven fat rounds in her compact Combat Master, she decided it was time to engage in a strategic retreat. Musket balls crackled through the air, briefly chasing after her before the mutants ran out of ammunition themselves. The hordelings expended the loads from their cheap, simple rifles and were reverting to their primal instincts of stab and smash. Fortunately for Domi, that meant that the gibbering rabble of scrawny reptilian creatures had to catch up with her first.
With a leap, Domi launched herself down the hillside, luring the mass of nine pursuing hordelings away from Grant and Brigid. She and Kane had broken off from the main group in order to thin out the overwhelming numbers of mutants, so if that meant that she had to play wounded bird to draw the cats from her nest, then so be it. She loved Grant and Brigid like family, and no risk would be too great for her.
With a speed belying her short legs, the albino girl opened up her lead over the bayonet-armed reptilians to thirty yards, far enough to give her some breathing room, yet close enough for her to be an enticing target for the misshapen lizard men. Domi paused to eject her empty magazine and shove another stick of seven slugs into the butt of the booming little Detonics .45. A particularly energetic and nimble mutant leaped to within fifteen yards of Domi, but she dumped his corpse onto the rocky hillside with the weight of a .45-caliber bullet. A cavernous chest wound further deformed his mutant body.
“Eight to go,” Domi whispered, racing along to keep the hordelings from surrounding and trapping her in a killing box. The hilly land, with its sparse brush, maze of boulders and jutting rock faces was not that much different from the inhospitable, craggy terrain of the Bitterroot Mountains. As such, the reptilians didn’t have the advantage of home turf, since she could navigate the sloped, uneven ground as quickly as they could.
Domi knew there was the possibility that the enemy would catch up with her, and she’d have to reload the Detonics because there were more pursuers than she had bullets. That didn’t worry her too much, as she still had her wicked, sheathed knife. The mutants might have been too ferocious for farmers and townsfolk hidden behind fortified walls, but against the wilderness-born albino, the savage lizard creatures would discover that had a match for their savagery. Though outnumbered, she had the added skill of countless sparring sessions with Kane and Grant, two highly trained fighting men. Domi wasn’t a martial artist, not by any stretch of the imagination, but she didn’t need to be. Her natural fighting prowess, forged in the Outlands and polished by battling alongside of some of the finest combatants on the planet, had refined her technique without tempering her instinctive brutality.
A mutant raced along a hilltop to her right, screeching unintelligibly to his brothers who were strung out behind them. Domi snapped a shot at the reptilian mutant, but being on the run and not having a stable firing stance, she missed the gnarled hordeling by yards. The half man yowled in indignation and with maniacal strength, threw the musket like a javelin. Domi realized the weight and force behind the foot-and-a-half-long bayonet would be far more dangerous than a soft musket ball. She swerved, barely avoiding the wood-and-steel missile, but the sudden change in direction caused her to lose her footing as she stomped down hard on loose shale. Her lead over the reptilians evaporated as she took a spinning crash into the gravel. Thankfully, she still held on to her .45 and she aimed it at the hilltop mutant who was running straight at her, obviously ready to rend her with his fangs and claws. Braced and stationary, Domi was equally ready to send the clone back to the hell that vomited him onto Earth.
Shockingly, the mutant seized up and exploded, detonating seven yards from Domi. One moment, the misshapen creature was charging; the next his internal organs were externalized as a cloud of red sticky mist. Domi registered the chatter of heavy blasters cutting loose behind her. The guns didn’t make the familiar sounds of her friends’ weapons. It took a moment for her to realize that she had to have stumbled onto one of the giant, coppery robots.
Before she could send a call over her Commtact, two screaming clones charged out from behind a boulder. Domi swung the Detonics toward them and pounded two powerful bullets into one of the mutants, stopping him cold. The other, however, had taken a flying leap, and at the apex of his path, Domi could see the lethal bayonet spearing through the air toward her face. She rolled to one side, hearing the deadly blade sink into the hard, barren soil with tremendous force.
The mutant screeched with insane frustration, trying to pry the weapon out of the ground. Domi scrambled to her feet and whipped the steel muzzle of her pistol across the mutant’s jaw, shattering it with a loud pop that signaled exploding bone. The mutant collapsed into a nerveless, unconscious puddle of bioengineered twitching flesh.
It might have been a consolation that Domi only had five more mutants to face, but the creatures lurched into view all at once, hopping atop boulders. They were spread out, so she couldn’t shoot them all, even if she had five bullets left in her gun. As they grinned maliciously, fangs shimmered in the starlight.
Panting, she curled her lip in defiance. Detonics in one hand, she slid her knife from its scabbard, her ruby-red eyes staring with the same rage as the pairs of soulless, yellow orbs that sized her up. “Want eats? Come and get ’em.”
A gibbering chuckle escaped five pairs of lips, and they lurched forward just before freezing, yellow slits widening with horror. Domi had heard the thunderous beat of ponderous footfalls shaking the earth behind her, but now there was only silence. She would be caught in the line of fire between the machine-gun-armed robot and the savage clones anyway, so she stood her ground, ready to make the mutants pay dearly for her life. The wind rose over her head, the breeze so strong that it flicked the head wrap off her bone-colored hair, the rag fluttering away uselessly. It was a sudden, unnatural breeze that set off her instincts. Reflexively, she rolled backward, away from the quintet of hordelings, but the golden-maned titan wouldn’t have landed on her. The crash of three thousand pounds of mechanized warrior shook Domi almost off her feet.
Even more stunning was the raw power emanating from the armored war machine standing in front of her.
It had landed on one mutant, and twisted limbs poked up between the giant’s metal toe claws. With a grace belying its enormous bulk, the robot lashed out with long, hydraulic-piston arms. It quickly snatched up two mutants from their perches atop boulders, eliciting screeches of horror. Powerful crushing fingers closed on their toylike little bodies, gore vomiting between gigantic metal fingers. The squeals ended moments before the creatures’ lower bodies plopped greasily onto the rocky ground, everything that their bellies and legs had been attached to pulverized into liquid mush. A fourth hordeling screeched in rage, lunging to attack the mechanized warrior.
Domi snapped up her pistol and blew it out of the air, .45-caliber slugs cutting it down in midflight.
Artem15 whirled at the sound of gunshots and watched the reptilian clone flop dead on the ground. Red camera lenses tightened in focus, examining the young woman she’d come to rescue.
“Lower the weapon,” she ordered the albino girl.
“Not on your life,” Domi said. She clenched her pistol and knife, ruby-red eyes glaring in defiance.
“Why not?” Artem15 challenged.
“Not wrapped in metal!” Domi spit. Her anger dissipated into alarm. “One’s getting away!”
Artem15 whirled in response to the warning, following the flash of movement as the last mutant fled with a speed born of pure terror. Her shoulder guns chattered to life, ripping out streams of bullets that sliced the misshapen horde clone to ribbons. “Thanks for that.”
“Not your enemy,” Domi returned. “Thanks for your help.”
Artem15 straightened and nodded.
“You speak English?” Domi asked.
“All robot pilots do,” the woman in the mobile armor replied. “But you…Where are you from? Where’d you get that gun? And what is that uniform you’re wearing?”
Domi looked down at her pistol, realizing that the flood of the pilot’s questions were more than she could easily explain. “My stuff’s from a lot of places. Me, I’m from America. I’m from a place called Cerberus.”
Artem15 tilted her head. “Cerberus?” she said with interest. “Did you come alone?”
“Three friends,” Domi answered, still nervous enough to speak in her clipped vocabulary. Her ruby-red eyes widened with shocked realization. “Back this way!”
Artem15’s robot cameras whirred, looking toward the direction that Domi was starting in. “Wait! I hear the fighting. Climb on!”
“Climb on?” Domi asked.
Artem15 extended a powerful, blood-slicked metal hand toward Domi. “My way’s faster. Trust me.”
Domi looked at the pulped remains of the mutants that had been crushed in the enormous digits. “You got to be kidding.”
“I won’t hurt you, and we need to get to your friends quickly,” Artem15 said.
Domi grabbed on to Artem15’s “thumb” with both hands and hauled herself up into the main joint that formed the robot’s palm. With ridiculous ease, Artem15 carried her up to the gigantic shoulder gear housing for the robot’s left gun.
“Name’s Domi,” she offered.
“Um…Diana,” Artem15 answered. An uncomfortable silence followed the pronunciation, as if the words had somehow caught in her throat.
“What’s wrong?” Domi asked.
Diana couldn’t explain—and honestly didn’t want to—the sudden identity trauma she’d caused herself. “Nothing. We have to reach your friends. I’ll try to explain later.”
“Okay,” Domi replied uncertainly.
“Hang on tight,” Artem15 warned.
Domi wrapped her arms around the steel gear-shaped shoulder armor without protest. Moments later, the albino understood why as massively powerful leg hydraulics flexed, then sprung, launching both robot and girl skyward.
Domi’s voice rose in a wail of dismay and shock as they accelerated into the starlit night, but the wail gave way to a crescendo of childlike glee as she realized that she was flying on the shoulder of a robotic giant.
For a moment, she allowed herself the windswept joy of sailing in flight as she’d never traveled before.
Chapter 5
He had named himself Z00s, a numerical phonetic for Zeus, when he had been remade as the first of the robot pilots of New Olympus. It was an identity he had folded himself completely into, a stark contrast to his cold and clinical title of Thurmond, Magistrate of Cobaltville. As a Magistrate, Thurmond had no given name, only his family title, an appellation that mentally conditioned him to surrender his individuality in the service of the Program of Unification. Identity subsumed behind the faceless black carapace helmet, the Magistrate was just another selfless drone, the latest edition in a lineage of protective knights who defended the villes’ status quo.
Renaming himself was one thing, but the affectionate nickname of Zoo, bestowed upon him by his subordinates, was a title he wore with loving pride. Ever since he was assigned, along with fellow Magistrate Danton, to Dr. Helena Garthwaite for the expedition to Greece, Zoo had lived a whole new lifetime he never imagined. Helena had been dispatched by Baron Cobalt, partially because the baron wanted to break in a new lover, and partially because Helena had promised him that she had discovered the clues to an amazing new technology that would grant Cobalt an advantage over his fellow barons. The expedition was a harrowing journey across the wastelands of postapocalyptic America, over the tumultuous Atlantic Ocean and finally a trek through the wreckage of southern Europe until they finally reached the Find.
Standing over it now, even in the immense fifteen-foot mobile armor, Zoo felt tiny. The Find was at the bottom of a mile-deep fissure that had been cracked open by an Earthshaker bomb. The Earthshaker was a buried hydrogen bomb designed to cause enormous seismic trauma to a countryside, detonating with enough force to break open massive canyons, flatten mountains or hurl flatlands into mile-high plateaus. Just another of humankind’s wonders created in the service of self-destruction, as opposed to the clockwork mobile armor Helena had discovered in the Find. The skeletons were designed as multiuse animatronic frames, as capable of being common workers as they were unstoppable fighting mechanisms. Helena figured out a way for them to house a human warrior, but only if the pilot was smaller than five feet in height, due to the construction of the torso framework.
The powerful Earthshaker had opened the crack down to the mile-deep, ancient Annunaki cavern, and rendered vast stretches of Greek countryside inland seas. Inside the Find, after three days of climbing and battling past territorial scaled mutants, Helena, Thurmond and Danton had discovered the prize she had been expecting, as well as hints of a secret world history that no one could have imagined. Helena, now titled Hera, had constructed the theory based on historical records uncovered among the ruins and remembered pillow talk from her time with Baron Cobalt. While it seemed incongruous to Zoo at first, there was no denying that he was now inside a man-machine interface that was far more than the sum of its parts.
With a single bound, he began his descent down into the crack in the world, hopping like a spider from cliff to cliff, secondary orichalcum claws securing him to a rocky ledge with more than enough strength to counter the downward momentum of three thousand pounds of mechanoid. He leaped and caught walls with a facility that no one would ever assume capable in a massive, clanking monstrosity. The zigzag hopscotch down the sheer walls of the crevasse turned the mile-deep descent into a gleeful ride that took only minutes rather than an arduous, life-threatening trek. Zoo whooped with delight as freefall rendered him weightless, and the hydraulic extension of his body danced through the air in showy somersaults.
Landing in a crouch, the secondary orichalcum skeleton and its Annunaki-designed hydraulics cushioned what would have been skeleton-shattering impacts. His heart felt light, the journey a cleansing experience that washed away the poisonous dread in his spirit. Zoo looked into the gaping black entrance of the Find, the cavern that was also the back door into the Tartarus clone vats. Feral yellow eyes blinked in the darkness, but the mutants didn’t dare make a move against the hated thunder god that strode through the cave. The bearded clockwork giant walked with strength and confidence that no scrawny little reptilian creature would be able to harm him even if he did summon up the courage to launch his minuscule frame against the king of the clockwork war suits. Zoo ignored them, walking into the domain of his goddess-queen’s publicly sworn enemy, Thanatos.
Helena Garthwaite and her two Magistrate bodyguards, Thurmond and Danton, had been raised up, with the wonders of the Find, from seekers of mythology to the very beings of legend. The technology that would have allowed Baron Cobalt an edge to sweep aside his hybrid brothers and assume the throne of Lord of the Earth, instead became the forge in which Hera Olympiad, Zeus and Thanatos were born, the core of a new pantheon that would be their first step on a ladder of continental expansion.
Zoo had remade himself the most, going under the carving saw and the spine-violating implant of the cyberport that left him legless, half a man, but only when he was away from the magnificent orichalcum skeleton and its steel armor. His mobile suit was the finest of the cache of fifty, and undeniably he was the mightiest and greatest of the robot god warriors. As a Magistrate, he was intimidating, but merely a drone. Now he was a magnificent copper-skinned exemplar of metallic godhood.
“Thanatos?” Zoo called over his loudspeaker.
The clones seemed confused, as if there was no one to give them focus or purpose. Normally, Thanatos would have strode out, greeting his brother. Something alerted Zoo’s instincts, informing him that there was danger in the air, a doubt that had started when the metal-armored reptilian was discovered among the mutant hordelings.
His light-amplification optics kicked in, minor illuminators giving the lenses something to target. They picked up a massive silvery disk, taller than the mechanized war suit and so wide that it had to have had entered the chasm sideways to land. Zoo couldn’t find a single aperture, no hatches or thrust nozzles on its smooth, mirror-polished surface. Something crunched under his clawed foot, and Zoo looked at the ground, seeing the charred husks of mutants ankle deep around him. The piles of dead had been incinerated by some form of high-energy weapon, and from the numbers of corpses, they had to have surged in violent, desperate defense of their cave.
“Than! Than, are you all right?” Zoo called out.
“Danton is well,” an unearthly voice boomed. Though it possessed an alien intonation, it was familiar. The address of Thanatos by his old name sent an urgent jolt of menace running up Zoo’s spine, but Zoo dismissed his panic, using his reason to decipher the mystery of the familiar yet alien voice.
The fifteen-foot robot genuflected, dropping to one knee in submission. It was an old reflex, stretching back to his days as a Magistrate. “Baron Cobalt, my lord!”
“Please, Thurmond.” The alien voice resonated across several frequencies. “Or shall I call you Zeus?”
Zoo looked around the darkness, unable to tell where the voice was coming from, despite the fact that it didn’t produce an echo due to its multitonal reverberation.
“I, too, have a new identity, my loyal subject.”
“Baron Cobalt?”
Zoo finally focused on movement in the darkness. It was a seven-foot-tall figure, a silhouette of physical perfection clad in cobalt-blue shimmering metal armor that was as finely wrought as Hera’s silver skin. The Baron Cobalt he remembered was only a shade over five feet and willowy, while this newcomer was carved from slabs of lean muscle and long, straight limbs. The rippling musculature under the metal, skin-conforming armor was a far cry from the frail leader he’d remembered. Finally, the stranger’s face came into view of his night optics, an angelic face sculpted in reptilian skin, beautiful and menacing in the same instant.
“Please, Zoo, call me Lord Marduk.”
Inside Z00s’s cockpit, Thurmond’s jaw went slack in awe.
MILES AWAY, another former Cobaltville Magistrate’s jaw dropped in surprise, but not at the appearance of an Annunaki overlord. Rather, Kane gaped at the sight of a gigantic mechanoid bounding over the crest of a hill, Domi clinging to its shoulder and hooting in excited delight.
The paltry remnants of the hordeling marauders, already in disarray from the concentrated firepower and fighting coordination of the Cerberus explorers, completely lost their nerves at the sight of a more familiar but no less implacable enemy. Against efficient human warriors and a towering mecha, with their overwhelming numbers depleted, the reptilian clones were helpless. A wild panic broke through the half-dozen remaining ambushers as they scurried toward the nearest bolt-holes.
Artem15 landed ten yards from the Cerberus explorers, then set her hand on the soil of the valley in order to give Domi a means to scramble down off her shoulder.
“Look what I found!” Domi exclaimed, unable to contain her glee, especially now that she had seen that her friends were safe.
Kane looked over the giant robot and simply had nothing to say. He fell back on his old standby sarcasm. “Well, if you promise to clean up after it and walk it every day…”
Domi’s nose wrinkled in mock admonition. “You know what I mean.”
Kane nodded, then looked up at the fifteen-foot titan. “Uh, hi. We saw your kind in a satellite photo, and we decided to drop on by.”
Artem15 straightened, even though she knelt to stay more or less level with the humans. “There are still satellites up there?”
Kane’s litany of surprises continued to roll, this time at the youth and femininity of the robot’s voice. “Yeah. Where we come from, we’re lucky to have access to satellite imagery.”
“Wow,” the voice said through the clockwork mechanoid’s loudspeaker in an awed whisper. She stared at the starry veldt above. Finally she pried her attention from the heavens and returned to the four companions. “Domi and I have already made our introductions. I am Artem15.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/james-axler/pantheon-of-vengeance/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.