Pantheon Of Vengeance

Chapter 3

Diana was just another wheelchair jockey in the meeting hall, sitting with the rest of the pantheon of hero-suit drivers. Zoo, Airy, Pollie and the rest were arranged around a bisected corpse illuminated by a searing white cone of light. The separated torso had been seared. Cauterized wounds from Airy’s thermal ax had sealed in the dead thing’s juices behind walls of charred flesh. The face had been cleaned up, and it was at once handsome and intimidating. Though finely sculpted, the face’s beauty was sheathed in fine-scaled, lizardlike armor. Diana tried to shake off her imaginings of this creature’s angelic magnetism, even in its sleep of oblivion.

She had to remind herself that this being had been fighting alongside the Tartarus mutants, joining them in a raid on a New Olympian settlement. The mutants were mass murderers, bred for attacking and exterminating humans. The wake of death and terror that Thanatos’s minions had left was something that Diana would never forget. She reminded herself of the scaled thugs’ horrific actions every time she touched her fused, fire-scarred cheek or forehead. The handsome snakelike humanoids that were related to the lifeless thing under the blazing light were allied with the monsters that inspired Diana to sacrifice her remaining leg so that she could fit into the cockpit of a hero suit.

The orichalcum-framed battle suits had been designed around slighter, smaller creatures. As such, even a small woman like Diana had been before the Tartarus raids had scarred and mutilated her, was too large for the cockpit. The metal caps on her thigh stumps and the cybernetic port adjacent to her lower spine were less a reminder of her wounds than they were badges of her empowerment. Her half-destroyed face was a brand of the evil that rose from the Tartarus vats.

No matter how beautiful the stranger was, the ugliness of his allegiance was unmistakable.

Z00s, the chief of the pantheon, looked at her. His furry features made his nickname of Zoo all too appropriate. “Recognize what the creature is wearing, or are you still caught up looking into his eyes?”

Diana bit back a response as she examined the burnished metal sheathing the corpse’s limbs and torso. “Secondary orichalcum. The color is a bit off, but he’s clothed in it.”

“It’s more than just that,” Zoo, the Zeus of the New Olympians, noted. “It’s woven, nearly clothlike, and far more flexible than anything we’ve ever seen except in one instance.”

Diana’s mind flashed to Hera’s skintight armor.

“Airy’s axe carved through it, but we’re talking about a blade swung by a one-and-a-half-ton war machine. You can see the discoloration there and there where our small arms struck it. Bullets penetrated its limbs on only straight hits. Anything less turned into a glancing blow.”

Hera looked at the bisected stranger, her silvery fingertips touching as her mind seemed to be caught in a storm. She rapped her metal-clad knuckle on the inert body’s thigh. “Someone not only knows how to mass-produce secondary orichalcum, but has enough to give it out like clothing.”

“How’d he get in that?” Ari “Airy” Marschene, the pilot of Are5, asked. “It’s not like that getup’s got a zipper.”

“In a way, there is,” Hera noted. She rolled over the top of the torso, revealing a knot-shaped mechanism high between the strange visitor’s shoulder blades. None of the eleven pilots of the pantheon needed to be reminded of the similarity between the device and the one that enabled their goddess-queen to enjoy the protection of impenetrable silver-and-gold skin. The same knotted base for ropes of molded smart armor was a cybernetic port that Hera had been able to reverse engineer in order to allow the pilots to control their robotic war suits. Hera fiddled with the device until ribbons of metal retracted, folding back into a capsule around the cybernetic hub. The metal had only peeled away from the torso and arms, the lower part of the corpse still clad in its glimmering armor.

Zoo wheeled over as Hera pried the mechanism from the back of the corpse. “An almost exact match.”

Zoo’s burly arm reached out and picked up the severed forelimb, still wearing its glove of secondary orichalcum armor. Around the wrist of the grisly trophy, three tendrils of mechanical cable ended in snakelike heads. “Though apparently it still maintains its shape without the proper command impulse.”

“Careful with that,” Ari said. “When I went after him, he fired a burst of energy from the device still on his wrist. It had enough power to smash one of my axes. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. It’s a lot more focused than Pollie’s Greek fire sprayers.”

Hera plucked the blaster-equipped wrist from Zoo’s grasp. She seemed to be weighing it against the cybermodule in her other hand.

“So what is all of this?” Diana asked. “What has you so nervous?”

Hera looked balefully toward Diana. “I want this technology. I want all of this. If we had this kind of weaponry, we could drive Thanatos and his mutants into the ocean. If these become common among the spawn of Tartarus, we’ll be swept from the Earth.”

“Give me a half-dozen Spartans, and I’ll run a reconnaissance,” Diana answered. “A quick raid, and we’ll see if this was the only one, or if there are more.”

Hera shook her head. “No.”

“But—” Diana began in protest.

“Do not make me repeat myself, girl,” Hera snapped.

The wheelchair-bound pilots all fell silent. They had never seen their goddess-queen this agitated in the years that they had known her. Most of all, they had never imagined that Hera would have growled a threat at any of them, let alone Diana, the girl who was Hera’s surrogate daughter. The menace hanging in the air, however, was unmistakable.

“Zoo, come on,” Hera barked, urgency speeding the words from her lips. “I’m taking this back to my lab.”

The queen and her amputee consort left the conference room without another word.

Diana watched silently, feeling a knot of nausea forming just under her sternum. The goddess who had raised her up from a useless cripple had delivered her a rebuke before her peers. After all she had done for the pantheon, earning herself a role as named pilot of a hero suit with blood and sacrifice, Diana stung as she was discarded, tossed aside like a petulant child. Ari wheeled over to her.

“Di, baby…” Ari began, affection purring under his words as his deep brown eyes studied her fused mask of a half face.

“Just leave me alone,” Diana answered curtly. “I’m too old to need sitting.”

Ari swallowed, regretting his choice of words. The high-tech war-avatar pilot made no secret of his love for the straw-haired girl who commanded the robotic huntress. He also was very clear and careful to always treat her with respect, even though Diana had cut herself off from interpersonal ties, feeling herself unworthy of romance. He reached out to take her delicate fingers in his grasp. “Di, something is worrying Hera. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be so on edge. I mean, there’s a fucking alien laying on the table, and he had a laser gun and bulletproof armor. Look at it.”

“I have been,” Diana answered. “It’s almost human, though. An alien should be…alien, shouldn’t it?”

Ari glanced at the angelic reptilian once more.

“Think about it,” Diana continued. “Two eyes. Two ears, vestigial as they are. Nose. Mouth. Arms. Legs. This could be something out of those cheesy old vids about the starship, where they distinguished aliens with bumps on their forehead or just some rubbery makeup.”

“This is a lot more convincing than latex,” Ari said. “It looks like the big brother of the Hydrae horde. The one that got all the good genes, while the others are just crappy copies.”

“That’s why Hera’s so scared?” Pollie interjected. He’d remained taciturn as his two friends, Ari and Diana, spoke. “Think this critter is the one who supplied the template for Thanatos’s clones?”

“It’s possible,” Diana murmured. Her friends could tell that she was in retreat, curling back into her shell. All she could think about was Hera’s bitter rebuke.

Diana wheeled her chair back to her quarters, alone. Hauling herself into her bunk, she finally allowed herself to give way to the sting of tears.

THE INTERPHASER’S HUM FADED in Kane’s ears, and mistlike energy plasma dissipated around him. His keen point man’s instincts kicked in, sweeping the area where they’d emerged. The interphaser’s design was a godsend after years of employing conventional mat-trans visits. The psychic and physical trauma that accompanied traditional gateway jumps was greatly minimized if they used the interphaser instead. The interphaser exploited naturally occurring vortices that were spread around the globe and even on other planets. The energy points had been mapped by the Parallax Points Program, which they had discovered on Thunder Isle and then input into the interphaser.

The sky blazed a burned orange marking the sunset, and the mountaintop ruin was silent, except for the baleful calls of terns that hovered on thermals, watching the strange appearance of Kane and his companions. Kane could smell the brine of the ocean—the Agean, he’d learned from Brigid.

He set down his war bag and jogged to the edge of the weathered and cracked stone floor. Behind him, Brigid, Grant and Domi set about stowing their own equipment bags. Grant made certain to secure his huge rifle case. The container was taller than Domi was, but there was a crack in the stone floor large enough to secure it. Brigid and Domi elected to leave behind their Copperhead submachine guns and the bandoliers of grenades in their war bags. Kane and Grant opted to keep their Copperheads with them. The four Cerberus exiles were on a first-contact mission, and the two men would be out of place without something heavier than the powerful Sin Eaters in their forearm holsters. However, if all four showed up packing enough guns to fight a war, it would send the wrong message.

Kane and the others had been around enough to balance shows of strength with diplomacy. Grenades and Grant’s monster-sized Barrett rifle were stashed away for contingency in the event of betrayal and disarmament. The extra weaponry disappeared under a camouflaging tarpaulin that Grant covered with dirt.

Kane pulled a pair of compact field glasses from a pouch on his equipment belt slung over his shadow suit. The high-tech polymers of the uniform conformed to his powerful muscles, providing nearly complete environmental protection from all but the most inhospitable climates. While not able to withstand rifle rounds like his old Magistrate polycarbonate armor, the shadow suit still offered minor protection against small arms and knives. In return, the suits granted greater ease of movement and offered protection against radiation and temperature fluctuation. Kane also noticed that the shadow suits were far less intimidating than the ominous black carapaces of their Mag battle armor.

“No movement,” Kane announced. He turned to see Brigid Baptiste tracing her fingers over the surface of weather-beaten column. “Any ideas what this was?”

“Considering that many of the vortices were recognized by ancient peoples as places of power, aided by the influence of the First Folk, this could have been an oracle. This isn’t Delphi, but it has a similar layout,” Brigid answered. “Sadly, nothing of archaeological significance remains.”

“So you won’t be distracted by shards of pottery,” Kane returned with a wink and a smile.

Brigid shook her head. “No. The only thing that could be found here would be in the form of resonant psychic energy.”

Kane raised an eyebrow. “Oh, right. Because the oracles were manned by ancient psi-muties. The nodes’ energy would increase their perceptions.”

“That’s a very good theory,” Brigid said. “You’ve been doing some reading?”

Kane shrugged. “Continuing education. With all the crap we’ve encountered, and all the telepathic trespassing that’s gone on in my head, it helps to be prepared. Granted, I’m going off of digital copies of the Fortean Times in the redoubt’s library.”

Brigid smiled. “I remember when you asked for that archive disk. I thought it was just to get more information on Atlantis.”

“That’s where it started,” Kane admitted. “A lot of the theories in those old rags sounded crazy. But after slugging it out with Quayle in the outpost, I had a feeling we’d eventually run across Atlantis itself. Along the way, other articles caught my eye, mainly from personal experience.”

“We know for a fact that the Annunaki took the roles of the Sumerian and Greek gods, among other identities,” Brigid noted. “With that knowledge, some of von Danniken’s alien-god theories come off much more plausibly…if you’re willing to ignore the obvious sloppy interpretation of an Aztec sacrifice’s guts being mistaken for the tube hookups on an ancient space suit.”

Kane shrugged. “Lazy speculators, or just plain gullible nuts.”

He sighed, getting back to the business at hand. “We seem to be on a peninsula. There’s a land bridge leading down from that cliff. So far, I don’t see any movement that would indicate the locals are aware of our presence.”

“Thank heaven for small favors,” Brigid replied.

Kane continued to scan the countryside when suddenly a column of blue-white electrical fire speared down into the land, creating huge clouds of debris and smoke from the earth. He recoiled from the power and the violence. At first, he thought it was a lightning bolt, but the searing slash of energy was too focused, too intense and lasted far too long to be a simple work of nature. Flames licked up from charred ground and, sprawled in the scarred landscape, burned corpses steamed. The dying sunset had been blotted out, overwhelmed by the brilliance of the sky fire. Cries of fear and suffering echoed in his ears, and he could smell the sickly scent of roasting human flesh.

Despair surged through him when he realized that he had been grasped firmly by Grant. Kane blinked away the flashes, and the sights, sounds and smells faded.

“Kane?” Grant asked, as if he were repeating himself. The big ex-Magistrate’s Sin Eater retracted back into its powered forearm holster, though Grant appeared confused at what had caused Kane to stagger and reel.

“No, of course you wouldn’t have seen that,” Kane muttered. “It wasn’t real.”

“See what?” Domi replied. She still hadn’t put her handgun away. “You froze for a moment, then started backing away from the edge.”

Kane looked around the ruins. “The oracle helped me experience a psi-mutie vision.”

“What did you see?” Brigid asked.

“Lightning,” Kane said. “But it wasn’t natural lightning. It was a weapon, and it tore the ground apart. And it was focused. It left swathes of charred corpses in its wake.”

“Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods, had a quiver of thunderbolts forged for him by Hephaesteus. Zeus’s thunderbolts were so powerful, they could destroy even the greatest monsters in the land,” Brigid said. “That myth could have its basis in an Annunaki weapon.”

Domi’s nose wrinkled. “This shit’s getting weird.”

“You asked to come along,” Grant chided. He glanced back at their hidden stash of weapons. “Monsters, other gods, cities, too, right?”

Brigid nodded. “Zeus obliterated anyone and anything with his thunderbolts.”

“So nothing in our bags is ever going to match that kind of firepower,” Grant announced. “Let’s just head down the bridge and meet the locals before Zeus drops the sky on us.”

Kane nodded in agreement, finally past the harrowing realism of his momentary psychic flash. “Good plan.”

The arcs of future lightning were still harshly inscribed on his mind’s eye, an ominous premonition of hell peeling back the sky and incinerating the earth below. He couldn’t dismiss his dread, and so he threw himself into his work. Maybe knowing the potential tragedy looming in the future gave Kane the power to prevent it.

It was as good a coping mechanism as any.

THE FARTHER THEY GOT from the oracle, across the ramp of stone and packed earth sloping down from the ancient temple’s remains, Kane’s senses grew clearer, returning to normal. As his senses sharpened, he realized that they were not alone. He shot a glance toward Domi, knowing that her own feral instincts were also preternaturally sharp. She was on edge.

Grant picked up on his two allies’ silent, brief exchange. “Where?”

“Feels like we’re surrounded, at least two flanks,” Kane explained.

Grant nodded. The hilly, rolling terrain was covered with sparse scrub, making it difficult for anyone to hide any closer than the hillcrests that bracketed them. Only the tops of the ridges provided sufficient concealment, as well as a good commanding view of the rut they passed through. Even with the deepening shadow of evening, their stalkers would be behind the ridges. The massive ex-Magistrate flipped down the faceplate on his black polycarbonate helmet, and vision-enhancing optics were engaged. While the shadow suits and mandibular implants had superseded most of Grant’s old armor’s protection and communication functions, the image-intensifying and night-vision capabilities of the black helmets were too valuable to surrender. The Mag helmet was also one of the few pieces of equipment that Grant was able to perform repairs on without compromising the fit of the Magistrate armor piece.

A heat source flared on a ridge, a head poking over the hilltop. Grant locked on to it, but the figure disappeared quickly. Still, he had enough for cursory identification. “Humanoid. Scrawny, hairless and naked according to the signature. Mammalian core heat.”

“Naked?” Kane asked. “Then it’s not the robots laying out this welcome mat.”

“More like the mutants we saw on satellite view,” Brigid said. “Strange that they have reptilian skin, but mammalian endothermic metabolisms.”

“Strongbow’s old crew were scaly faced, as well,” Grant said. “Though they had remnants of facial hair.”

“Makes you wonder about the so-called scalies often referenced in the Wyeth Codex,” Brigid said.

“Less ancient history, more current events,” Kane grumbled. His own faceplate was down, his point man’s instinct working together with the advanced electronics of the Magistrate helmet.

“There is some historical relevance. Zeus’s greatest enemy was the monster Tiamat, mother of a million tormenting beasts,” Brigid noted.

“Tiamat is dead,” Kane said coldly.

“Our Tiamat,” Brigid responded. “But look at places like the Archuleta Mesa, or the attempted use of Area 51 to produce Quad Vee hybrids—two locations that had the technological potential to create biological constructs. It stands to reason that if Greece is a location for Annunaki-designed robots, there might also be the technology for creating monsters. Literally the womb of Tiamat. The First Folk are a prime example of Annunaki genetic tampering.”