Pantheon Of Vengeance

“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.”