Pantheon Of Vengeance

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.