Pantheon Of Vengeance

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.”