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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

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.”