Pantheon Of Vengeance

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.