Dark Goddess

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

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

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Special thanks to Mark Ellis for his contribution to the Outlanders concept, developed for Gold Eagle.

Prologue

The former barony of Beausoleil, the Tennessee River Valley

Sean Reichert moved in quickly, knocking the cudgel aside and striking the slagjacker hard in the belly with his right fist.

Air exploded from the small man’s lungs with a sound like a protracted, phlegm-saturated cough. The wooden club clattered to the floor and the man clutched at his midriff, doubling over. Reichert drove a knee into the slagjacker’s face, enjoying the sensation of the man’s nose collapsing under the impact.

Blood spewing from both nostrils like an opened faucet, the man collapsed to the floor of the tavern and lay there, twitching. Reichert swept the people watching from the tables with a bright-eyed stare and boyish grin. “Want to see me his kick his head loose of his shoulders?”

The patrons of the Tosspot Tumor didn’t answer. The few who hadn’t averted their gaze glared at the young man with angry, resentful eyes. Larry Robison, sharing a corner table with a nude woman with hair the color and texture of a hayrick, called out, “Yeah, we so fuckin’ want to see it.”

He chucked the blonde beneath her chin with a finger. “Don’t you, baby?”

The woman blinked her glassy, unfocused eyes and reached for the bottle on the table. “Uh-huh.”

“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.

As the four men gaped in silent astonishment, the craft settled down on top the monolith and from the rim sprouted three tentacles of alloy. They curved out and down, plunging through the slit windows.

“What the fuck is that?” Robison half gasped, voice quavering. “It’s like a fuckin’ flying saucer—!”

“No fuckin’ way!” Reichert blurted, but he didn’t sound completely certain. “Maybe we’d better get Bob warmed up—just in case.”

“Just in case what?” Weaver asked, a slight mocking edge to his voice. “Just in case it is a flying saucer?”

Sean Reichert glared at him through narrowed eyes, then he nodded. “Yeah. Just in case.”

The four men sprinted down a narrow alley running alongside the Tosspot Tumor. The alley opened up into a wide courtyard where Bobzilla was quartered. The huge, armor-plated LAV-25 had been modified by the Phoenix Project designers to serve as the team’s rolling base of operations.

As they reached the rear hatch, a shadow momentarily blotted out the sunlight and in unison they heeled around, necks craning, heads tilting back. Reichert’s face paled despite his dark complexion, and he muttered, “Fuck.”

Another silver disk hovered barely five yards overhead. As it slowly sank toward the courtyard, Robison fumbled with the hatch latches and swung the heavy metal panel open on squeaking spring hinges. “Let’s get our asses heeled!” he bellowed.

Swiftly, he took an AK-108 and then passed one of the lightweight carbines to Weaver. Hays reached around Robison and snagged an FIM-921 Stinger shoulder-fired antiaircraft rocket launcher. Reichert grabbed an M-203 grenade launcher combined with an M-16 rifle. With expert fingers, he loaded the weapon with three blunt-nosed 40 mm explosive rounds.

The disk slowly descended, but it didn’t come to rest. From the half dome on its undercarriage snaked out three gleaming legs. They in turn sprouted three claws that sank deeply into the muddy soil and lent the machine a resemblance to an old-fashioned milking stool coated with a shifting sheath of quicksilver.

A chill fist of dread squeezed Weaver’s heart and he said to his companions, “Let’s not jump the gun, boys. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”

Hays snorted in derision, placing the tube of the launcher on his right shoulder. “I’d say it’s those fuckers that don’t know what they’re dealing with.”

Weaver fearfully eyed the tripodal machine. “Heard that before, Major. But this time we’re not facing a bunch of childish savages with bows and arrows. We need to discuss tactics before we—”

The disk emitted a harsh, electronic hoot, which to Weaver sounded like a warning to get out of its way. Three legs moving in unison, the machine took a weirdly graceful step forward.

“Here’s your tactics, Joe!” Hays bellowed. “Turn out the dogs!”

The weapons in the hands of the four men spit flame, thunder and multiple kinds of projectiles. The courtyard became a crashing, exploding, blazing inferno. Steel-jacketed bullets sparked a dozen miniature constellations on the rim of the disk ship’s hull.

Mike Hays squeezed the trigger of the FIM-921 and the Stinger rocket leaped from the hollow bore, propelled by a wavery ribbon of smoke. It struck the disk ship broadside, the warhead detonating amid a billowing mushroom of black smoke and a blinding gush of flame that rolled over the hull.

The flurry of grenades fired by the howling Sean Reichert burst all around the tripod, eardrum-compressing detonations blooming against and below it. Dirt and mud erupted, raining down in all directions.

Smoke billowed, a shroud of gray enveloping the courtyard, completely obscuring the disk from view. As the roiling canopy of haze and smoke spread, Team Phoenix ceased fire.

Coughing, fanning the air in front of his face, Robison declared hoarsely, “Overwhelming firepower trumps tactics every fuckin’ time.”

Hays dropped the rocket launcher and gusted out a satisfied sigh. “Smoo-o-oth.”

He and Reichert bumped knuckles. The young Latino crowed triumphantly, “Team Phoenix for America, fuck yeah!”

Weaver squinted through the thinning vapor, his leaking eyes picking out the orange smears of flame. He realized that the entire rear of the Tosspot Tumor tavern had been pounded into a litter of broken, firelaced kindling. The roof had collapsed, but he saw no sign of the silver tripod.

Weaver lifted his spectacles and cleared his blurred vision with swipes of his fingers. When he was able to see more or less normally again, he realized why he couldn’t find the disk. The craft had simply retracted its three legs and floated soundlessly above the barrage. It hovered thirty yards above them, not so much as a smudge mark visible on its iridescent hull.

But where the tripodal legs had been planted now stood three motionless figures. The drifting scraps of smoke imbued them with an eerie, ghostly quality. Although all three of them wore formfitting silver-blue armor, two of them were almost identical in physique and features. Set deep beneath jutting brow ridges, their white eyes did not blink, nor did their craggy, scale-pebbled faces register emotion.

Ovoid shells of alloy rose from the rear of their body armor, sweeping up to enclose the back and upper portion of their hairless skulls. From the undersides of the shells, hair-thin filaments extended down to pierce both sides of their heads. Conduits stretched down from inch-thick reinforcing epaulets on their shoulders, connecting to the alloyed gauntlets that sheathed their extended right forearms and hands.

From raised pods on the gauntlets rose three small flanges, curved like the letter S cut in halves. The ends of the flanges flared out like cobras’ hoods, and red energy pulsed in the gaping mouths of the stylized serpent heads.

The third figure was leaner, slighter in stature, but still obscured by floating planes of smoke and settling dust. “How dare you threaten a member of the Supreme Council? Lay down your weapons and beg me not to have you killed where you stand!”

The tone, pitch and timbre of the voice was sharp, imperious, and although holding a sibilant echo, it sounded undeniably female.

Major Mike Hays stiffened in surprise and his expression molded itself into one of contempt. He glanced toward Robison and Reichert. “That’s just some mouthy bitch out there!”

Sighting down his Mag-58 subgun, Hays snarled, “Beg this, bitch!”

Although he had no idea of what kind of council the sharp-voiced woman referred to, sudden terror galvanized Joe Weaver to slap down the barrel of the Mag-58. “Mike—no!”

Reichert uttered a sneering laugh, bracing the stock of the grenade launcher against his hip, aiming it at the three armored figures. He roared, “Team Phoenix for America—”

A series of crack-sizzles cut off the rest of his mantra. Bolts of energy, glowing like globules of molten lava flung from catapults, struck Sean Reichert directly in the head, blowing away his trim mustache and face in a pinwheel burst of flame.

Frozen in place, Joe Weaver watched two more balls of seething energy explode against the heads of Mike Hays and Larry Robison. He caught only a fragmented glimpse of the one blazing toward him before his world turned to a dazzling orange flare, instantly followed by impenetrable darkness.

LILITU WRINKLED her delicate nose at the concatenation of odors wafting throughout the Tartarus Pits. During her ninety years as Baroness Beausoleil, she had never ventured within a thousand yards of Tartarus, fearing that she would contract loathsome diseases. Now she realized she had not suffered from an infection phobia so much as the place simply stank.

Narrowing her vertical-slit-pupiled eyes, Lilitu glanced up at the Administrative Monolith. The sunlight winked on the surface of the disk of smart metal still attached to the roof. The uppermost floor of the high, round tower had served as her sanctuary and home for many years—no, not a home, she corrected herself, but a cocoon, one that had sheltered the chrysalis form of the baroness until she shed it and emerged as Overlord Lilitu.

Gesturing diffidently with the metal-shod fingers of her right hand, she waved toward the four smoldering corpses of the humans who had threatened her.

“Make sure those dung beetles can crawl no more,” she commanded her armored Nephilim. “Then begin razing this entire cesspit.”

Quarlo, her personal bodyguard, glanced toward her, no emotion in his dead white eyes. “The complete barony, Goddess?” His whispering voice held a hollow quality, as if only the echoes of his words passed his lips.

Lilitu’s beautiful, scale-patterned face creased in a smile. “And everyone who still lives in it. They no longer serve my purpose, and the mandate of the Supreme Council of the Annunaki has ever been that all humans must serve a purpose for their gods.”

Chapter 1

Coral Cove, the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Kane raced through the night, cursing the heat and cloying humidity that sapped most of his stamina. His legs felt as if lead weights were tied to his knees. The sweat that stained his camo-striped T-shirt and flowed down from his hairline stung his eyes.

He wanted nothing so much as to fling himself facedown in the palmetto scrub and drink from his canteen. He also wanted to forget why he had agreed to lend Cerberus’s support to a rebellion against the coastal pirates led by the ridiculously named Billy-boy Porpoise.

Over the rhythmic boom of the surf, the faint baying of hounds and shouting of men reached his ears. Kane swore beneath his breath, but he continued to run. Twice bullets had skimmed very close to him, and once he had nearly been caught beside the waters of the drainage canal that cut in from the Gulf of Mexico and served as a moat around the Porpoise estate. Only the fact that he could dive and swim like an otter saved him.

The pillared trunks of cypress, pine and palm trees surrounded him. Palmetto plants, their fan-shape fronds gleaming with patterns of ebony and silver in the moonlight, rose up on either side of the narrow trail. Insects chirped and buzzed from the shadows. His chest feeling as if it were pressed between the jaws of a tightening vise, Kane halted in the murky lee of a log overhang, where lumber had been piled to use as palisade walls in the settlement.

He breathed deeply, regaining his breath. He ran a hand through his longish dark hair. It was soggy with sweat, stiffening with salt. His clothes reeked of sewage and brine, but he took a little solace in the fact he knew he had smelled worse.

A hoarse male voice bellowed beyond the far edge of the canal. The words were unintelligible, but the tone was angry. Kane’s palm itched where his Sin Eater would have fitted if it were not packed away with the rest of his equipment in the settlement. He stepped deeper into the shadows, his movements fluid but cautious, like a man in a jungle wary of poisonous snakes. He often thought of the world in which he lived as nothing but a snake-infested jungle.

Kane struggled to tamp down a surge of homicidal fury at his pursuers, but he was honest enough to admit that distaste at playing the role of prey fueled his rage, not that his attempt to breach the Porpoise estate had been stymied.

Fleeing didn’t come naturally to a former Magistrate like himself. He was a tall man, as lean and sinewy as a timber wolf, and his pale eyes were the color of dawn light touching a blue-steel knife blade. A three-inch hairline scar cut whitely across his clean-shaved left cheek.

Kane had considered growing a beard for the op, so he could infiltrate Porpoise’s crew, but he couldn’t stand to go without shaving for more than a few days. His years as a Cobaltville Magistrate had instilled in him a loathing of whiskers longer than an eighth of an inch.

He heard a dog bark and he clenched his fists. It was bad enough he had been discovered while trying to climb the wall around Porpoise’s compound, but now he felt the hot breath of death on the back of his neck.

When Kane heard the men’s voices again, their words drowned out by the baying of the hounds, his lips peeled back from his teeth in a silent snarl. They were much closer, and he knew he had to start running again.