Dark Goddess

“That’s what I thought,” Reichert said. “So, here goes—”

Grin widening, he drew back his combat-booted right foot, then kicked it forward. The thickly treaded sole skimmed over the prone man’s face as Joe Weaver caught Reichert by the collar and pulled him off balance.

“That’s enough, you bloodthirsty moron,” Weaver snapped, dragging the younger man across the room. He slammed him hard against the slab of rough-hewed pine that served as the bar.

Reichert struggled, but Weaver applied a wrist lock to the youth’s right arm and kept him in place. Reichert strained to get free for only a few seconds. “I showed the son of a bitch,” he shouted jubilantly. “I put him in his place, by God. Nobody disses us—Team Phoenix for America, fuck yeah!”

Despite his Germanic surname, Sean Reichert was Latino, with straight black hair, a dark complexion and a carefully maintained mustache. Although only of medium height, his athletic body carried tightly packed muscle.

Joe Weaver was considerably taller, heavier and older, his square-chinned face framed by a bronze- hued beard. A pair of round-lensed spectacles covered his slightly slanted eyes. Wearily, he said, “The poor bastard didn’t dis you. I think he’s hard of hearing.”

Reichert paused, glanced at Weaver, then at the unconscious man whose blood filled the cracks between the floorboards. “Well, he’s fuckin’ hard of breathing now, too.”

He laughed uproariously at his own joke and with a disgusted head shake, Joe Weaver released him. Larry Robison joined in with the younger man’s laughter. Tall, with a deep chest and wide shoulders, Robison had a big head covered by a mop of dark brown hair. Like Weaver, he affected a beard, but trimmed closer to the jawline. The nude woman caressed his beard with trembling fingers, then she slid sideways, draping herself over his lap.

The Tosspot Tumor tavern was fairly typical of most such establishments in the Tartarus Pits of any barony—one big common room redolent with the reek of home-brewed liquor and unwashed bodies. A makeshift bar coursed along the rear wall, a row of wooden barrels with rough planks nailed atop them to serve as a buffet. A scattering of tables and chairs completed the furnishings.

The tavern did double duty as a brothel, so a single doorway behind the bar led to a small, dark bedroom. From the room came a hoarse cough and then a gravelly male voice snarled, “For fuck’s sake, can’t a man get a decent night’s sleep anywhere in this shithole world?”

Reichert and Weaver glanced toward the shadows shifting beyond the open door, hearing the squeak of bedsprings and the thump of booted feet on the floor. “Sorry, boss,” Reichert called. “We didn’t know you were supposed to be sleeping.”

“Besides,” Robison said, “it’s near the middle of the afternoon.”

A teenage girl stepped through the door, brushing a strand of brown hair away from her eyes. She clutched a frayed sheet around her thin frame, leaving one knobby shoulder bare. Robison was reminded of a sorority girl returning from a particularly boisterous toga party, but he doubted she was old enough to attend even the most liberal-arts college. He never was quite sure what a liberal-arts college was supposed to be, but he presumed it was a place that liberals sent their kids to learn how to be artists, so he hated them as a matter of course.

Mike Hays lumbered out of the room, absently smoothing his shaggy silver mustache with a scarred thumb. His burly body was clad only in olive-green boxer shorts with the words Hays, Maj. stenciled onto the elastic waistband. A pair of unlaced combat boots flipped and flopped on his feet. From his right hand dangled his Belgian Fabrique Nationale Mag-58 subgun. He didn’t even visit the outhouse, much less sleep, without it.

“Fighting with the locals again?” the gray-haired commander of Team Phoenix demanded.

Reichert leaned against the bar, propping his elbows up on the edge. “What the fuck else is there to do here, Major? This is the only ville we’ve found that ain’t controlled by Magistrates, so there’s nobody to fight but the locals.”

Hays hawked up from deep in his throat and spit on the litter-strewed floor. Pushing between Reichert and Weaver, he asked, “What’ve you been taught about winning hearts and minds, Sergeant?”

Robison brayed out a short, scornful laugh. His female companion laughed, too, but very querulously. “Whoever came up with that shit never tried to make a life for themselves in fuckin’ twenty-third-century Tennessee…in the fuckin’ Tartarus Pits, no less.”

Hays rapped his knuckles autocratically on the bar top, and the man behind it sullenly placed a bottle half-filled with amber fluid in front of the ex-Marine. He also put down a glass tumbler, which Hays contemptuously slapped aside.

Picking up the bottle by the neck, he said flatly, “Maybe we can all go back into the fuckin’deep freeze. Sleep long enough, we’ll wake up where we started.”

“That’s assuming the nature of time is circular, instead of linear,” Weaver said. “So far, it seems pretty much like a straight line. And speaking of circular…do all of you guys have to use ‘fuck’ every other word?”

“It’s part of our mission statement,” Reichert replied. “‘Team Phoenix for America, fuck yeah!’ I thought you knew that.”

“I knew it,” Weaver said. “I guess I’ve been trying to forget it.”

“Me, too,” Hays agreed gloomily. “So we’re stuck here, in this place, in this century, with nobody to fight.”

“The eternal lament of mercenaries during peacetime,” Weaver commented.

“Fuck, there are definitely wars out there,” Robison snapped, pushing back his chair and rising from the table. His female companion fell onto the floor and appeared to go instantly to sleep. “There’s a big-ass fuckin’ war going on.”

“Yeah, but those Cerberus pricks won’t let us fight it,” Reichert said.

“Won’t let us fight it with them,” Joe Weaver corrected. “Guess we shouldn’t have killed all those friends of theirs, huh?”

Hays shrugged, not responding to Weaver’s sarcasm. “Bunch a’ ersatz injuns with feathers in their hair and paint on their faces. Good old collateral damage. No loss.”

“Not to us, mebbe,” Robison agreed. “But Kane sure seemed to set big store by them.”

At the mention of the man’s name, an image of Kane’s pale, cold eyes flashed into the mind of Major Mike Hays and he repressed a shiver. He involuntarily glanced over his shoulder, made uneasy by mere utterance of the name.

Although he and his subordinates had promised to never speak of what actually happened when they had been lured into the trap laid by the Cerberus warriors, Hays still shuddered at the most oblique reminder of the encounter.

Mike Hays gusted out a sigh, then tilted the bottle to his lips and drained it in several noisy swallows. Reichert watched him with slitted eyes. “Fuck, this is worse than that Rwanda mission…didn’t do nothing there but drink and fuck.”

Hays dropped the bottle to the floor and made swooping and rising gestures with his hands, intoning a prolonged, “Smoo-o-oth.”

Weaver pinched the bridge of his nose and whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

“Oy,” the bartender said angrily, “don’t drop your shit on my floor.”

Hays speared him with a challenging stare. “I drop my shit where I please.”

“Yes, I can see that,” the man shot back. “That’s why I mentioned it.”

Hays locked eyes with the bartender, hoping he would notch up his objections from the verbal to the physical. He wished he could vent a fraction of his frustration by shooting several holes in the man’s head with his Mag-58.

His frustration sprang less from boredom than the knowledge he had once again failed to achieve an erection, even under the ministrations of the girl he had bribed with several MRE packs.

When the bartender dropped his gaze, Hays announced loudly, “I think it’s time we leave this fuckin’ burg and take the fight back to where it fuckin’ belongs.”

Reichert groaned wearily. “Not more fuckin’Indians.”

Hays scowled at him. “It don’t have to be Indians, but—”

He broke off when a high-pitched whine touched his hearing. Hays, Weaver, Reichert and Robison stared around in puzzlement. Little sprinkles of dust sifted down from the ceiling as the drone grew in volume.

“A chopper?” Robison asked. “One of those old Apache 64s the Magistrates call Deathbirds?”

Reichert shook his head. “We’d hear the fuckin’ rotors.”

Hays spun toward the door, hefting his subgun. “Let’s recon.”

The four men rushed out into the humid afternoon air and stood in a muddy street that twisted between ramshackle buildings, past hovels, shacks and tents. There was no main avenue, only lanes that zigged in one direction and zagged in the other.

They looked toward the latticework of residential Enclave towers connected to the Administrative Monolith, a massive round column of white rockcrete that jutted hundreds of feet into the sky.

A featureless disk of shimmering silver twenty feet in diameter hovered above the flat top of the tower. The configuration and smooth hull reminded Joe Weaver of the throwing discus he had used in his college days. Perfectly centered on the disk’s underside bulged a half dome, like the boss of a shield.