Pantheon Of Vengeance

It might have been a consolation that Domi only had five more mutants to face, but the creatures lurched into view all at once, hopping atop boulders. They were spread out, so she couldn’t shoot them all, even if she had five bullets left in her gun. As they grinned maliciously, fangs shimmered in the starlight.

Panting, she curled her lip in defiance. Detonics in one hand, she slid her knife from its scabbard, her ruby-red eyes staring with the same rage as the pairs of soulless, yellow orbs that sized her up. “Want eats? Come and get ’em.”

A gibbering chuckle escaped five pairs of lips, and they lurched forward just before freezing, yellow slits widening with horror. Domi had heard the thunderous beat of ponderous footfalls shaking the earth behind her, but now there was only silence. She would be caught in the line of fire between the machine-gun-armed robot and the savage clones anyway, so she stood her ground, ready to make the mutants pay dearly for her life. The wind rose over her head, the breeze so strong that it flicked the head wrap off her bone-colored hair, the rag fluttering away uselessly. It was a sudden, unnatural breeze that set off her instincts. Reflexively, she rolled backward, away from the quintet of hordelings, but the golden-maned titan wouldn’t have landed on her. The crash of three thousand pounds of mechanized warrior shook Domi almost off her feet.

Even more stunning was the raw power emanating from the armored war machine standing in front of her.

It had landed on one mutant, and twisted limbs poked up between the giant’s metal toe claws. With a grace belying its enormous bulk, the robot lashed out with long, hydraulic-piston arms. It quickly snatched up two mutants from their perches atop boulders, eliciting screeches of horror. Powerful crushing fingers closed on their toylike little bodies, gore vomiting between gigantic metal fingers. The squeals ended moments before the creatures’ lower bodies plopped greasily onto the rocky ground, everything that their bellies and legs had been attached to pulverized into liquid mush. A fourth hordeling screeched in rage, lunging to attack the mechanized warrior.

Domi snapped up her pistol and blew it out of the air, .45-caliber slugs cutting it down in midflight.

Artem15 whirled at the sound of gunshots and watched the reptilian clone flop dead on the ground. Red camera lenses tightened in focus, examining the young woman she’d come to rescue.

“Lower the weapon,” she ordered the albino girl.

“Not on your life,” Domi said. She clenched her pistol and knife, ruby-red eyes glaring in defiance.

“Why not?” Artem15 challenged.

“Not wrapped in metal!” Domi spit. Her anger dissipated into alarm. “One’s getting away!”

Artem15 whirled in response to the warning, following the flash of movement as the last mutant fled with a speed born of pure terror. Her shoulder guns chattered to life, ripping out streams of bullets that sliced the misshapen horde clone to ribbons. “Thanks for that.”

“Not your enemy,” Domi returned. “Thanks for your help.”

Artem15 straightened and nodded.

“You speak English?” Domi asked.

“All robot pilots do,” the woman in the mobile armor replied. “But you…Where are you from? Where’d you get that gun? And what is that uniform you’re wearing?”

Domi looked down at her pistol, realizing that the flood of the pilot’s questions were more than she could easily explain. “My stuff’s from a lot of places. Me, I’m from America. I’m from a place called Cerberus.”

Artem15 tilted her head. “Cerberus?” she said with interest. “Did you come alone?”

“Three friends,” Domi answered, still nervous enough to speak in her clipped vocabulary. Her ruby-red eyes widened with shocked realization. “Back this way!”

Artem15’s robot cameras whirred, looking toward the direction that Domi was starting in. “Wait! I hear the fighting. Climb on!”

“Climb on?” Domi asked.

Artem15 extended a powerful, blood-slicked metal hand toward Domi. “My way’s faster. Trust me.”

Domi looked at the pulped remains of the mutants that had been crushed in the enormous digits. “You got to be kidding.”

“I won’t hurt you, and we need to get to your friends quickly,” Artem15 said.

Domi grabbed on to Artem15’s “thumb” with both hands and hauled herself up into the main joint that formed the robot’s palm. With ridiculous ease, Artem15 carried her up to the gigantic shoulder gear housing for the robot’s left gun.

“Name’s Domi,” she offered.

“Um…Diana,” Artem15 answered. An uncomfortable silence followed the pronunciation, as if the words had somehow caught in her throat.

“What’s wrong?” Domi asked.

Diana couldn’t explain—and honestly didn’t want to—the sudden identity trauma she’d caused herself. “Nothing. We have to reach your friends. I’ll try to explain later.”

“Okay,” Domi replied uncertainly.

“Hang on tight,” Artem15 warned.

Domi wrapped her arms around the steel gear-shaped shoulder armor without protest. Moments later, the albino understood why as massively powerful leg hydraulics flexed, then sprung, launching both robot and girl skyward.

Domi’s voice rose in a wail of dismay and shock as they accelerated into the starlit night, but the wail gave way to a crescendo of childlike glee as she realized that she was flying on the shoulder of a robotic giant.

For a moment, she allowed herself the windswept joy of sailing in flight as she’d never traveled before.

Chapter 5

He had named himself Z00s, a numerical phonetic for Zeus, when he had been remade as the first of the robot pilots of New Olympus. It was an identity he had folded himself completely into, a stark contrast to his cold and clinical title of Thurmond, Magistrate of Cobaltville. As a Magistrate, Thurmond had no given name, only his family title, an appellation that mentally conditioned him to surrender his individuality in the service of the Program of Unification. Identity subsumed behind the faceless black carapace helmet, the Magistrate was just another selfless drone, the latest edition in a lineage of protective knights who defended the villes’ status quo.

Renaming himself was one thing, but the affectionate nickname of Zoo, bestowed upon him by his subordinates, was a title he wore with loving pride. Ever since he was assigned, along with fellow Magistrate Danton, to Dr. Helena Garthwaite for the expedition to Greece, Zoo had lived a whole new lifetime he never imagined. Helena had been dispatched by Baron Cobalt, partially because the baron wanted to break in a new lover, and partially because Helena had promised him that she had discovered the clues to an amazing new technology that would grant Cobalt an advantage over his fellow barons. The expedition was a harrowing journey across the wastelands of postapocalyptic America, over the tumultuous Atlantic Ocean and finally a trek through the wreckage of southern Europe until they finally reached the Find.

Standing over it now, even in the immense fifteen-foot mobile armor, Zoo felt tiny. The Find was at the bottom of a mile-deep fissure that had been cracked open by an Earthshaker bomb. The Earthshaker was a buried hydrogen bomb designed to cause enormous seismic trauma to a countryside, detonating with enough force to break open massive canyons, flatten mountains or hurl flatlands into mile-high plateaus. Just another of humankind’s wonders created in the service of self-destruction, as opposed to the clockwork mobile armor Helena had discovered in the Find. The skeletons were designed as multiuse animatronic frames, as capable of being common workers as they were unstoppable fighting mechanisms. Helena figured out a way for them to house a human warrior, but only if the pilot was smaller than five feet in height, due to the construction of the torso framework.

The powerful Earthshaker had opened the crack down to the mile-deep, ancient Annunaki cavern, and rendered vast stretches of Greek countryside inland seas. Inside the Find, after three days of climbing and battling past territorial scaled mutants, Helena, Thurmond and Danton had discovered the prize she had been expecting, as well as hints of a secret world history that no one could have imagined. Helena, now titled Hera, had constructed the theory based on historical records uncovered among the ruins and remembered pillow talk from her time with Baron Cobalt. While it seemed incongruous to Zoo at first, there was no denying that he was now inside a man-machine interface that was far more than the sum of its parts.

With a single bound, he began his descent down into the crack in the world, hopping like a spider from cliff to cliff, secondary orichalcum claws securing him to a rocky ledge with more than enough strength to counter the downward momentum of three thousand pounds of mechanoid. He leaped and caught walls with a facility that no one would ever assume capable in a massive, clanking monstrosity. The zigzag hopscotch down the sheer walls of the crevasse turned the mile-deep descent into a gleeful ride that took only minutes rather than an arduous, life-threatening trek. Zoo whooped with delight as freefall rendered him weightless, and the hydraulic extension of his body danced through the air in showy somersaults.

Landing in a crouch, the secondary orichalcum skeleton and its Annunaki-designed hydraulics cushioned what would have been skeleton-shattering impacts. His heart felt light, the journey a cleansing experience that washed away the poisonous dread in his spirit. Zoo looked into the gaping black entrance of the Find, the cavern that was also the back door into the Tartarus clone vats. Feral yellow eyes blinked in the darkness, but the mutants didn’t dare make a move against the hated thunder god that strode through the cave. The bearded clockwork giant walked with strength and confidence that no scrawny little reptilian creature would be able to harm him even if he did summon up the courage to launch his minuscule frame against the king of the clockwork war suits. Zoo ignored them, walking into the domain of his goddess-queen’s publicly sworn enemy, Thanatos.

Helena Garthwaite and her two Magistrate bodyguards, Thurmond and Danton, had been raised up, with the wonders of the Find, from seekers of mythology to the very beings of legend. The technology that would have allowed Baron Cobalt an edge to sweep aside his hybrid brothers and assume the throne of Lord of the Earth, instead became the forge in which Hera Olympiad, Zeus and Thanatos were born, the core of a new pantheon that would be their first step on a ladder of continental expansion.

Zoo had remade himself the most, going under the carving saw and the spine-violating implant of the cyberport that left him legless, half a man, but only when he was away from the magnificent orichalcum skeleton and its steel armor. His mobile suit was the finest of the cache of fifty, and undeniably he was the mightiest and greatest of the robot god warriors. As a Magistrate, he was intimidating, but merely a drone. Now he was a magnificent copper-skinned exemplar of metallic godhood.

“Thanatos?” Zoo called over his loudspeaker.

The clones seemed confused, as if there was no one to give them focus or purpose. Normally, Thanatos would have strode out, greeting his brother. Something alerted Zoo’s instincts, informing him that there was danger in the air, a doubt that had started when the metal-armored reptilian was discovered among the mutant hordelings.

His light-amplification optics kicked in, minor illuminators giving the lenses something to target. They picked up a massive silvery disk, taller than the mechanized war suit and so wide that it had to have had entered the chasm sideways to land. Zoo couldn’t find a single aperture, no hatches or thrust nozzles on its smooth, mirror-polished surface. Something crunched under his clawed foot, and Zoo looked at the ground, seeing the charred husks of mutants ankle deep around him. The piles of dead had been incinerated by some form of high-energy weapon, and from the numbers of corpses, they had to have surged in violent, desperate defense of their cave.

“Than! Than, are you all right?” Zoo called out.

“Danton is well,” an unearthly voice boomed. Though it possessed an alien intonation, it was familiar. The address of Thanatos by his old name sent an urgent jolt of menace running up Zoo’s spine, but Zoo dismissed his panic, using his reason to decipher the mystery of the familiar yet alien voice.

The fifteen-foot robot genuflected, dropping to one knee in submission. It was an old reflex, stretching back to his days as a Magistrate. “Baron Cobalt, my lord!”

“Please, Thurmond.” The alien voice resonated across several frequencies. “Or shall I call you Zeus?”

Zoo looked around the darkness, unable to tell where the voice was coming from, despite the fact that it didn’t produce an echo due to its multitonal reverberation.

“I, too, have a new identity, my loyal subject.”

“Baron Cobalt?”

Zoo finally focused on movement in the darkness. It was a seven-foot-tall figure, a silhouette of physical perfection clad in cobalt-blue shimmering metal armor that was as finely wrought as Hera’s silver skin. The Baron Cobalt he remembered was only a shade over five feet and willowy, while this newcomer was carved from slabs of lean muscle and long, straight limbs. The rippling musculature under the metal, skin-conforming armor was a far cry from the frail leader he’d remembered. Finally, the stranger’s face came into view of his night optics, an angelic face sculpted in reptilian skin, beautiful and menacing in the same instant.

“Please, Zoo, call me Lord Marduk.”

Inside Z00s’s cockpit, Thurmond’s jaw went slack in awe.

MILES AWAY, another former Cobaltville Magistrate’s jaw dropped in surprise, but not at the appearance of an Annunaki overlord. Rather, Kane gaped at the sight of a gigantic mechanoid bounding over the crest of a hill, Domi clinging to its shoulder and hooting in excited delight.

The paltry remnants of the hordeling marauders, already in disarray from the concentrated firepower and fighting coordination of the Cerberus explorers, completely lost their nerves at the sight of a more familiar but no less implacable enemy. Against efficient human warriors and a towering mecha, with their overwhelming numbers depleted, the reptilian clones were helpless. A wild panic broke through the half-dozen remaining ambushers as they scurried toward the nearest bolt-holes.

Artem15 landed ten yards from the Cerberus explorers, then set her hand on the soil of the valley in order to give Domi a means to scramble down off her shoulder.

“Look what I found!” Domi exclaimed, unable to contain her glee, especially now that she had seen that her friends were safe.

Kane looked over the giant robot and simply had nothing to say. He fell back on his old standby sarcasm. “Well, if you promise to clean up after it and walk it every day…”

Domi’s nose wrinkled in mock admonition. “You know what I mean.”

Kane nodded, then looked up at the fifteen-foot titan. “Uh, hi. We saw your kind in a satellite photo, and we decided to drop on by.”

Artem15 straightened, even though she knelt to stay more or less level with the humans. “There are still satellites up there?”

Kane’s litany of surprises continued to roll, this time at the youth and femininity of the robot’s voice. “Yeah. Where we come from, we’re lucky to have access to satellite imagery.”

“Wow,” the voice said through the clockwork mechanoid’s loudspeaker in an awed whisper. She stared at the starry veldt above. Finally she pried her attention from the heavens and returned to the four companions. “Domi and I have already made our introductions. I am Artem15.”

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