Pantheon Of Vengeance

Kane’s brow furrowed under the polycarbonate visor. “So whoever played Zeus the first time, long ago, made his own rogue’s gallery?”

Brigid shrugged. “The towns in these islands are heavily fortified. That bespeaks of an ever present, hostile enemy in herdlike numbers. Especially considering the corpses shoved into the mass grave and the amount of damage those poorly armed humanoids were able to inflict on a single robot, we must be dealing with some sort of cloning facility.”

Kane hadn’t slowed his pace, and he could hear Brigid panting as she tried to keep up while applying her intellect to the problem at hand. “So they’d be akin to the mutant herds that roamed the American wasteland after the war. Bred specifically to be alien, of animalistic intelligence and a hostility toward nonaltered humans, they would be a perfect means of keeping the surviving population in check until the Program of Unification.”

“Can you think of a better way to isolate communities?” Grant asked.

The two ex-Mags scanned the hilltops with their light-amplification lenses. The ground was cast in an eerie green haze by the helmet units. Though Domi and Brigid didn’t have the high-tech headgear, Domi’s sensitive albino eyes were accustomed to the darkness, and Brigid was wearing a lightweight Moon base visor. Brigid’s eyewear was slightly bulkier than a pair of sunglasses, but the lenses were polarized to allow protection against intense light sources as well as having a built-in LED UV illuminator and lenses that filtered the tiny lamp into the visible spectrum, as well as amplifying ambient light. Still, the tall archivist envied the telescopic targeting option on Kane’s and Grant’s Mag helmets.

“So far, it only looks like we have one shadow,” Grant said.

“It feels like more,” Kane countered. He looked to Domi. She nodded, then strode off quietly.

“Be careful, girl,” Grant whispered over his Commtact. The admonition brought a smile to the albino’s face, a moment of cherubic warmth before her porcelain features hardened into a grim battle mask.

“You know they’re going to wonder where she went,” Brigid warned.

“Good,” Kane replied. “That will force them to divide their focus. I’m going up ahead to further disperse them. Stay close to Grant.”

Brigid looked as if she was going to protest, but held her tongue. There were times when the four Outlanders operated as a democracy, each applying individual skills and expertise to solving their mutual dilemmas. On the other hand, when being hunted by an unknown number of enemies in the countryside of a far-flung, shattered nation, Brigid would defer to Kane’s warrior knowledge and hard-contact experience. His combat abilities and finely honed instincts provided him with almost instantaneous strategies that would allow the explorers to remain safe and secure from hostile foes without dithering or debate.

Brigid was also irritated by the implication that she was a less capable combatant than the highly trained former Magistrates and the feral albino girl. Compared to most of the rest of the world, she was a formidable survivor of globe-spanning conflicts. But she realized that though she could handle herself in a dangerous situation, when surrounded by a small horde of snarling mutants, reason dictated that the lifetimes of combat endured by Kane, Grant and Domi gave them an edge. Kane’s warning to stay near the towering Grant was not an insult, just common sense. A lightning-quick assessment also provided her with the insight that she and Grant would form the hinge of the two-flanked counterattack by Kane and Domi. Grant needed Brigid’s backup as much as she needed him.

Grant simply nodded at his partner, and Kane advanced fifty yards ahead of the pair.

Kane wasn’t certain if the mysterious stalkers had access to the same optic technology that he and his allies possessed, but he doubted it. The massive warbots would be more likely to possess advanced cameras, but their stealth would be negligible compared to the scrawny mutants that Grant had spotted. From the satellite pictures, they seemed to be more proficient at using their muskets and bayonets as spears rather than rifles, which meant the complexities of electronically enhanced vision would be beyond their limited mental scope. However, if the mutants had sharp, animalistic senses, Domi’s transformation to shadowy midnight wraith would be insufficient camouflage. Even with her shadow suit already blended to the darkened terrain by fiber-optic technology and the addition of a blackened head rag covering her bone-white hair and a scarf wrapped around her nose and jaw, the acute night vision of predatory animals would allow her to be spotted easily. Kane recalled, however, that most reptilian hunters didn’t rely on vision when they stalked at night.

The girl would stand a chance, and even if the hunters did come at her, she’d hold them off long enough for Kane and Grant to even up the odds.

This far from the oracle’s influence, and minutes separating him from his jolting psychic flash, Kane trusted his instincts again, and he felt as if violence was about to break loose like a driving rain. He activated his Commtact. “Domi, eyes on targets?”

“Ten muties close to you,” Domi replied in her clipped, tense vocal cadence. When her adrenaline kicked in, she reverted to her old, primitive way of talking, dropping articles. “Dozen back by others. Haven’t seen me.”

Kane seized his Copperhead from its spot on his web belt. “Definitely muties.”

“Too hunched, scrawny,” Domi answered. “Bald and ugly, and think they can sneak up on me.”

Kane smirked in appreciation of the feral girl’s guts. Though Domi could, and had survived with nothing more than a knife and clad in a few rags in the wilderness, her years at Cerberus gave her an appreciation for more complex tools in concert with her sharp senses. “It feels like they’re ready to make a move.”

There was a grunt over the Commtact, and Kane froze. Before he could call out, something registered on his visor, an infrared trace in his peripheral vision. “Grant, on our left.”

“Just spotted that one,” Grant answered. “Looks like we’re being herded. So the numbers that Domi announced are probably double. This could get rough.”

“What else is new?” Domi grumbled.

“What happened?” Kane asked.

“Banged knee getting behind rock,” Domi responded. “Caught glimpse of muties across way.”

“We’re going to be boxed in, and that’s going to suck. Time for us to make some noise,” Kane responded. He transferred the Copperhead to his left hand and flexed his forearm tendons. The sensitive actuators in the holster for his Sin Eater launched the folding machine pistol into his grasp with a loud, intimidating snap. Back when he was a Magistrate, enforcing the law for Cobaltville, the lightning appearance of the deployed sidearm broke many a criminal’s will to fight. Now, the sudden appearance was the trigger for gibbering yammers of dismay from hilltop mutants.

“That got attention,” Domi announced before, off to Kane’s right, the throaty bellow of the albino’s Detonics .45 split the night.

Kane raced, broken-field pattern, toward the surge of infrared contacts on his left on the ridge across from her position. His charge was met by a half-dozen misshapen heads popping up in response to rapid movement. They peered over the spine of the hill, and a volley of musket balls rippled down from the group.

One of them smacked, wet and hot, against Kane’s chest, stopping his forward charge as if he’d slammed into a brick wall.

Chapter 4

Diana’s slumber was brief, as emotionally charged dreams tormented her. It was as if she were suffering from a sweat-drenched fever. She hadn’t been swamped by such stressful mental imagery since the amputation of her remaining leg. Staph infection had nearly claimed her life even as she was “upgrading” to her current existence.

The dream started out exactly as before. Instead of the sterile, pristine surgical studio where Hera Olympiad conducted the amputation, she was in a flame-lit cavern where the walls seemed carved from pulsating reptilian flesh. Shadows danced wildly behind the silver-clad goddess whose precision instruments had transformed into jagged, gore-encrusted saws and splinter-edged cleavers. Without administering an anesthetic, Hera hacked down violently. Her medical assistants had been replaced by hunch-backed, blue-scaled mutants from the Tartarus horde. Rather than handing her the tools she needed to remove Diana’s healthy leg in order to fit her inside the cockpit of the clockwork war suit, their gnarled claws raked obscenely over her silver-and-gold curves, gibbering in delight at splatters of blood and wriggling pieces of flying flesh. Blue-black tongues stretched from between scaled lips to lap the offal off Hera’s armored skin.

“So tasty is our daughter,” a voice whispered, harsh and raw, from the shadows. “So ugly, tasty and ours.”

Diana craned her neck, trying to get a look at the speaker, but her attention was seized by the metal cap crushing her thigh stump. A bolt was drilled through the bottom, grinding through bone to anchor the cap. The vibrations tore through Diana’s body, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out. A hammer whacked the steel stump cap, and the mutilated girl arched her back in agony.

“Roll over,” Hera demanded. Diana saw a pulsing, gel-filled black creature with barbed and hooked beetle limbs twitching in Hera’s grasp. “I need to put in your interface.”

Diana nodded. It was the sacrifice she had to make, to become powerful enough to fight off Thanatos’s hordes. A reptilian hand caressed her cheek, scales rubbing like sandpaper on her remaining facial skin.

“It’ll only hurt a moment, child,” the mutant grumbled.

Diana’s eyes widened with horror as she recognized the speaker, the one who called her his daughter. It was Thanatos himself, the scale-skinned lord of Tartarus, present at her conversion from fragile flesh to armored warrior goddess. She tried to pull away, but the beetle limbs speared into her back, tearing through skin and anchoring in her muscles. A stinger of venomous fire plunged into her spine, and Diana froze in feverish agony.

Thanatos let go of her face, freezing in his own horror. A hand wrapped around the monster-king’s throat, and with a savage, crackling twist, Thanatos collapsed in a jumble of useless limbs.

Diana relaxed on the table, panting, looking at the newcomer who had executed the demon lord of the Tartarus horde. It was a tall, magnificent creature, even larger in stature than the corpse in the briefing room. Incredibly, its face was even more of a mix of angelic beauty and devilish intensity. Dark eyes looked down on the amputee thrashing on the cracked stone that was the operating table, then dismissed her.

It strode regally around the abattoir table, meeting Hera as an equal, wearing even more splendid skin armor than hers. A long, elegant claw stroked the armored woman’s cheek.

“It has been too long, lover,” the magnificent reptilian angel whispered in a disturbing, resonant, multitonal voice.

“I didn’t know if you’d ever come for me,” Hera replied.

Diana looked in disgust and betrayal as goddess-queen and alien angel kissed passionately.

She was ejected from the dream with a breathless pant. Her strawlike hair was matted to her forehead in the wake of the traumatic nightmare. Almost on instinct, she crawled over to her wheelchair, cable-tight arm muscles maneuvering her truncated body into its seat with acrobatic ease. Even splashes of cool water from the simple metal basin of her sink did little to ease the psychic burns seared into her mind.

She rolled out of her quarters, making her way through the New Olympian complex. Diana needed the comfort of her cramped cockpit, the womb of steel that completed her being. Outside Artem15, Diana was only a husk, a leftover that wasn’t really alive. In the massive clockwork war suit, she became something much more; she was fully alive, not an animated piece of burned and fused meat. The hydraulic limbs, hooked into her central nervous system by the cyberport on her spine, felt as natural as if she had been born with them.

Ted Euphastus was in the hangar, gnawing on a cheroot cigar as he brought his mug over to a coffeemaker on the table. He looked at Diana as she entered. “Can’t sleep?”

“Is she ready to roll?” Diana asked curtly, ignoring Fast’s question. She steered her wheelchair toward the inert robotic figure standing in its coffinlike dock.

“A jolly fucking good evening to you, too,” Fast grumbled. “Yeah. You can see the chest plate’s been rearmored, and I realigned the leg hydraulics.”

Diana rolled up to the trapeze arm off to the side of the robot and hauled herself onto the rung, swinging around on the pivoting metal pole to deposit herself in the pilot’s couch. It took only a moment for her to snap the interface plug into her spine port. As the Charged Energy Modules that powered the mobile armor thrummed to life, imparting vitality into the inert robotic limbs, Diana’s body tingled from scalp to stump cap. She likened the sensation to when her arm fell asleep, cold and prickly, but as the blood rushed back into the arm, warmth dispelled the numb incompletion. She was whole as her nervous system completed the circuit that activated the ancient technology cradling her. Artem15 tapped the trapeze boom out of the way, locking it back over the wheelchair. Red camera lenses glared hatefully down at the conveyance for a cripple.

As the clockwork war suit needed no refuelling thanks to the CEM’s functions, Artem15 didn’t need to worry about wasting resources while on an unscheduled patrol. The other pilots felt the same, enjoying the comfort of the embracing armored tubs.

“Ari and Dion have patrols out,” Fast announced. “And Zoo’s on the prowl by himself.”

“Any particular operation, or just walkabouts?” Artem15 asked.

“No word on what Zoo is doing. He said it was private business. Are5 and D10nysus have Spartan units with them,” Fast said. “Want me to rouse a couple for you?”

“Nah. I’ve got the radio to bring in Ari or Dion,” Artem15 said. “I just need to clear my head and get some fresh air.”

Artem15 gave Fast some credit for mostly concealing the ironic smirk as he considered her remark that going for a stroll wrapped in three-thousand pounds of machinery was getting some fresh air.

“Well, Hera said that you’re not supposed to go on an end run into the Tartarus holdings,” Fast warned.

Diana was glad that Artem15 didn’t have the ability to convey facial expressions, even with the cybernetic hookup between her and the robot. “I said I was going for a walk, not out for a suicide. Speaking of which, I didn’t look. I’ve got replacement javelins?”

“You’ve got a full quiver, and nine yards of ammo per shoulder gun,” Fast explained.

Diana nodded, her golden-haired head bobbing between the gear-shaped shoulder gun mounts. “Thanks, Fast. Sorry about being such a whiny bitch.”

Fast glanced over to the wheelchair. “It’s that thing, kid. Being stuck in it would make me grumpy, too.”

Artem15 put her metal claw tips to where her lips would be if she were human, then bent them back, a robotic kiss blown. That brought a smile to the wrench monkey’s bearded face.

With a graceful pivot, the robotic huntress strode out into the countryside, a skip in her step as she passed through the massive hangar doors.

The gloom induced by fever dreams evaporated as Artem15 walked into the Greek sunset.

THE IMPACT OF THE MUSKET BALL was a shock to Kane. However, thanks to the high-tech polymers of the shadow suit, his remarkable reflexes and the relatively soft primitive lead musket ball, the gunshot only managed to raise a tiny bruise on his pectoral muscle. Kane’s sleek, wolflike frame darted through the peppering cloud of poorly aimed fire seeking him out. Dropping into a shoulder roll, the ex-Magistrate ducked the final volley of black-powder shots.

The ancient, simple weapons couldn’t be reloaded by the creatures who barely had the presence of mind to aim them. Unfortunately for Kane, the gleaming points of a dozen bayonets glared at him under pairs of feral yellow eyes. Their sharpness and the berserk strength of their wielders would overwhelm the protective qualities of Kane’s shadow suit. As each blade was eighteen inches in length, the former Magistrate knew that his organs would be speared through and through.

Kane fired the Copperhead submachine gun, the weapon snarling out small-caliber rounds into naked, scale-encrusted chests. Two of the mutants dropped their bladed muskets and tumbled into lifeless tangles of gnarled limbs. The suddenly inert hordelings formed a barrier to their brethren’s ferocious charge, turning two dead bodies into five more stumbling, disarmed mutants. The dozen growling creatures dropped in number to five active combatants, but their bayonets still thirsted for Kane’s blood.

Kane tracked the Copperhead, aiming at the deformed face of a reptilian attacker, then he pivoted and engaged his Sin Eater. Two thundering shots from the folding machine pistol launched a pair of 240-grain superheavy slugs that blew through mutated chests as if they were soggy slices of bread. One 9 mm round glanced off a dead mutant’s spine and careened at an angle into a second reptilian form, while the other Sin Eater round punctured the creature behind the first dying mutant.

The last mutant lashed out with his bayonet, but Kane batted the blade away with a sweep of the Copperhead’s barrel. With a sharp kick to the mutant’s knee, Kane dropped him on the rocky hillside. A kick to the temple put the mutant out just in time for Kane to address the group of sprawled hordelings that were getting back to their feet.

Their yellow eyes flashed angrily in the starlight, muskets held like spears and clubs. Kane whipped his Sin Eater around, knowing that even a moment of hesitation would allow the bayonet-armed monstrosities time to pinion him. The sidearm roared on full-auto, scything through the group with a salvo of thunderbolt rounds. The scaled half men writhed under the rain of smashing slugs, their bodies wrecked by Kane’s marksmanship.

It was ruthless, but Kane reminded himself of the Greek townsfolk, their corpses visible on satellite photos. The dead people were mute testimony to the murderous intent of the charging horde.

Right now, Kane turned his attention back toward Grant and Brigid. The pair was back to back, Brigid using Grant’s Copperhead while the massive ex-Magistrate attended to the charging swarm on his flank, utilizing his Sin Eater. The two full-auto weapons hammered out vicious volleys that sliced into the savage marauders charging down the slopes.

Domi was nowhere to be seen, and he didn’t hear her on his Commtact.

“Dammit,” Kane growled. Out in the open and heavily outnumbered, Grant and Brigid were hard-pressed by the surging reptilians. Domi at least had the advantage of broken terrain behind the hillcrest to give her an edge over her opponents.

Charging, Kane raced to bolster the defensive line held by his two companions, sending a good-luck wish to the feral albino girl.

AFTER DOMI BURNED OFF the first seven fat rounds in her compact Combat Master, she decided it was time to engage in a strategic retreat. Musket balls crackled through the air, briefly chasing after her before the mutants ran out of ammunition themselves. The hordelings expended the loads from their cheap, simple rifles and were reverting to their primal instincts of stab and smash. Fortunately for Domi, that meant that the gibbering rabble of scrawny reptilian creatures had to catch up with her first.

With a leap, Domi launched herself down the hillside, luring the mass of nine pursuing hordelings away from Grant and Brigid. She and Kane had broken off from the main group in order to thin out the overwhelming numbers of mutants, so if that meant that she had to play wounded bird to draw the cats from her nest, then so be it. She loved Grant and Brigid like family, and no risk would be too great for her.

With a speed belying her short legs, the albino girl opened up her lead over the bayonet-armed reptilians to thirty yards, far enough to give her some breathing room, yet close enough for her to be an enticing target for the misshapen lizard men. Domi paused to eject her empty magazine and shove another stick of seven slugs into the butt of the booming little Detonics .45. A particularly energetic and nimble mutant leaped to within fifteen yards of Domi, but she dumped his corpse onto the rocky hillside with the weight of a .45-caliber bullet. A cavernous chest wound further deformed his mutant body.

“Eight to go,” Domi whispered, racing along to keep the hordelings from surrounding and trapping her in a killing box. The hilly land, with its sparse brush, maze of boulders and jutting rock faces was not that much different from the inhospitable, craggy terrain of the Bitterroot Mountains. As such, the reptilians didn’t have the advantage of home turf, since she could navigate the sloped, uneven ground as quickly as they could.

Domi knew there was the possibility that the enemy would catch up with her, and she’d have to reload the Detonics because there were more pursuers than she had bullets. That didn’t worry her too much, as she still had her wicked, sheathed knife. The mutants might have been too ferocious for farmers and townsfolk hidden behind fortified walls, but against the wilderness-born albino, the savage lizard creatures would discover that had a match for their savagery. Though outnumbered, she had the added skill of countless sparring sessions with Kane and Grant, two highly trained fighting men. Domi wasn’t a martial artist, not by any stretch of the imagination, but she didn’t need to be. Her natural fighting prowess, forged in the Outlands and polished by battling alongside of some of the finest combatants on the planet, had refined her technique without tempering her instinctive brutality.

A mutant raced along a hilltop to her right, screeching unintelligibly to his brothers who were strung out behind them. Domi snapped a shot at the reptilian mutant, but being on the run and not having a stable firing stance, she missed the gnarled hordeling by yards. The half man yowled in indignation and with maniacal strength, threw the musket like a javelin. Domi realized the weight and force behind the foot-and-a-half-long bayonet would be far more dangerous than a soft musket ball. She swerved, barely avoiding the wood-and-steel missile, but the sudden change in direction caused her to lose her footing as she stomped down hard on loose shale. Her lead over the reptilians evaporated as she took a spinning crash into the gravel. Thankfully, she still held on to her .45 and she aimed it at the hilltop mutant who was running straight at her, obviously ready to rend her with his fangs and claws. Braced and stationary, Domi was equally ready to send the clone back to the hell that vomited him onto Earth.

Shockingly, the mutant seized up and exploded, detonating seven yards from Domi. One moment, the misshapen creature was charging; the next his internal organs were externalized as a cloud of red sticky mist. Domi registered the chatter of heavy blasters cutting loose behind her. The guns didn’t make the familiar sounds of her friends’ weapons. It took a moment for her to realize that she had to have stumbled onto one of the giant, coppery robots.

Before she could send a call over her Commtact, two screaming clones charged out from behind a boulder. Domi swung the Detonics toward them and pounded two powerful bullets into one of the mutants, stopping him cold. The other, however, had taken a flying leap, and at the apex of his path, Domi could see the lethal bayonet spearing through the air toward her face. She rolled to one side, hearing the deadly blade sink into the hard, barren soil with tremendous force.

The mutant screeched with insane frustration, trying to pry the weapon out of the ground. Domi scrambled to her feet and whipped the steel muzzle of her pistol across the mutant’s jaw, shattering it with a loud pop that signaled exploding bone. The mutant collapsed into a nerveless, unconscious puddle of bioengineered twitching flesh.