MYTHIC PROPORTIONS

Insidious alien forces conspiring to enslave humanity grow increasingly dangerous and defiant. Willing to do whatever it takes to defeat these ancient invaders, the Cerberus rebels carry on the fight for freedom.

DAMNATION THRALL

The Cerberus fighters embark on an urgent quest to discover what happened to expeditions lost in Italy, on land that once belonged to the Etruscan empire. On site they encounter the monstrous Charun, armed with the hammer of the gods, and Vanth, the angelic winged huntress with a heart of evil. These alien gods are intent on opening a portal to bring their kind to earth, harnessing the power of victims’ minds while using their bodies as shock troops. As the river Styx is poised to flow again, the Cerberus team must prevail or an invasion from a barbaric dimension will lay siege to Europe…and beyond.

A second brilliant sun had appeared, blazing white and hot

Edwards scrambled to his feet, standing on the front of the Manta. The machine pistol snapped down into his fist, ready to go into action, but the strange glowing disc wasn’t moving. He put on his shadow suit’s faceplate and hoped for the visor to screen and filter out the blinding light, as well as analyze the object in the sky.

The range was ten miles, and it was advancing quickly.

He activated his Commtact microphone. “Guys, wherever you are…”

Nothing. No response, not even static. He turned his gaze back to the sky. For all the polarization of the lenses, he couldn’t make out a detail of the blazing comet looming ever closer. But in the space of fifteen seconds, it had closed to nine miles. He couldn’t get details about the shape of the object, only its range, and there was no guarantee that was right.

Edwards turned to open the cockpit, but the command signal to remotely open the canopy was also jammed.

He was in a complete blackout.

Angel of Doom

James Axler

www.millsandboon.co.uk

A dreadful ferryman looks after the river crossing, Charon, appalling filthy he is, with a bush of unkempt white beard upon his chin, with eyes like jets of fire.

—Virgil, Aeneid

The Road to Outlands—From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

The Road to Outlands

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

Copyright

Chapter 1

They had marched from the sea, landing on the western coast of Italy after a long journey, and when they arrived, they were a full expedition. Three of the fifteen-foot-tall Gear Skeletons, the walking combination of body armor and tank, had been the heavy muscle of the Olympian expedition to Italy. Forged from secondary orichalcum, which combined both lightness of frame with incredible durability, the fearsome war machines were armed with shoulder-mounted light machine guns. But the Gear Skeletons were also versatile, their strength obviating the need for bulldozers or other heavy machinery.

Captain Myrto Smaragda and nineteen of her brethren, brave Olympian men and women, were the bulk of the expedition escorting the powerful war machines. They were experienced soldiers who wore Praetorian armor, a blend of leather and polymer to pay homage to the armor of ancient Greek warriors, all the way down to the odd officer’s side arm: a three-foot falcata such as Smaragda’s own keen sword. The human troops were no more primitively armed than their walking robotic companions. Each soldier was equipped with a helmet with advanced night-vision optics and built-in comms that would keep the warriors in touch with each other. The radio with the power to reach back home to New Olympus rode on the broad back of one of the three Spartans. The device was capable of broadcasting hundreds of miles, thanks to the ancient Annunaki technology, especially the charged energy modules that were built into the millennium-old skeletal robots.

The Gear Skeletons had been designed for use by a smaller race. Former archivist Brigid Baptiste of the Cerberus Redoubt had explained that they were made to accommodate trans-adapts: half-size humanoids of great cleverness, density and durability. As such, there was nearly no leg room for a full-size human. Fortunately the horrors of war had meant there were plenty of capable amputee volunteers to ride in the chests of these great war machines. Amputees were the only norms who could pilot the machines from their truncated cockpits.

Despite their impressive weaponry, Smaragda and her unit were not here as conquerors; they were here as explorers. Even so, they came equipped to defend themselves from whatever horrors lurked on the Mediterranean Sea or in the Etruscan countryside. For years Smaragda and her fellow warriors had battled against the mutated hordes unleashed from the Crack, an abyssal canyon wherein the genetic weapons of long-lost eras were rekindled and turned into a means of ensuring the domination of the young Greeks.

“Remember this. We believed in the ideals of freedom, even as Hera covered our eyes with the scales of her deception,” Diana had told them. “Zoo gave his life so that we could be free of the facade of a false war and to ensure our freedom and self-determination. We can do no less to protect the liberty and freedom of those who will be our neighbors and, hopefully, allies or friends.”

The caution toward gentleness was accompanied by another admonition. “I also will not throw away twenty-three lives and three ancient, alien artifacts to prove how nice we are. If someone tries to kill you, you kill them right back! We’re not loading cupcakes and cotton balls into your machine guns.”

So here the group was, the Spartans ambling with their long brass limbs taking enormous but slow strides so that they didn’t force the New Olympian soldiers to march too hard or heavy. Smaragda knew the giant machines had the ability to cross a hundred miles in the space of an hour, their nimble, precise legs allowing them traction and sure footing on even the roughest of terrain. Even so, the pilots weren’t impatient, allowing their machines to move at such a sedate pace. The Charged Energy Modules that activated and motivated their limbs were remarkable pieces of technology thanks to the Annunaki, the same aliens who had at once created the warrior robot suits and the ones who had kicked off the massive, crippling war that had left New Olympus slow to recover.

Even so, there was little assurance that the CEMs, despite capturing and recovering them from the crashed scout ship that inserted itself into the war, were an inexhaustible supply of power. Just because they had not run one down completely didn’t mean they could not be drained. No one knew how to recharge them, despite the combined efforts of New Olympian and Cerberus scientists.

Unnecessary wear and tear on the crystalline jewels of concentrated energy was to be frowned upon, as well as pain and injury to the pilots. The properties of secondary orichalcum made it rustproof and immutable from hammering or cutting by conventional tools. It also did well to absorb even the hardest of falls and other impacts, lessening the effects upon the pilots. But even with those amazing attributes, the amputee warriors nestled in their chests were still vulnerable. They had not been called Gear Skeletons for nothing, requiring conventional vehicle panels to enclose the users to shield them from the elements and oncoming attacks.

Even with their cushioned pilot chairs, however, movement at high speed and the prodigious leaps the war suits were capable of did leave their pilots with pulled and torn ligaments as well as minor fractures in their spinal columns, even whiplash.

More vulnerable to attack, the body-armor clad Praetorians at least didn’t have to worry about their own physical abilities ripping them or shattering them when they fought to the limits of their bodies.

Smaragda flicked the visor of her helmet to scan mode, sweeping along the sides of the road, searching for unusual heat sources on infrared. The last thing they needed was an ambush. There was not supposed to be an enemy force in this part of the country, despite the rumors that had drawn them here.

Something dark had been awakened in recent days. Towns and villages in the interior had stopped communicating, stopped trading, disappearing as if they had never existed. One man returned from a visit to such a village, his hair turned white, speaking of “they who walked as ghosts” and of winged angels, both horrible and wonderful.

The Italians had turned to their neighbors, seeking help, and New Olympus’s new rulers sensed that such occurrences bore the stink of urgency. A full army would be too much, but with the stories of the horrible angels, the trio of mobile armor suits was, hopefully, going to be sufficient. There was a line between coming in too hard or too soft. Smaragda felt better with the Skeletons lumbering at her side.

All being well, with them present, they would be prepared for the very worst. Three giants with shoulder-mounted machine guns and enormous axes and swords would dissuade any opponent, even if they were winged angels of gigantic proportion themselves.

Smaragda scanned the sides of the road leading to the town that had spooked the Etruscan traders so badly, looking for signs of what could have terrified the lone survivor. She gripped her M-16 rifle tightly, but she kept her finger wrapped around the handle, firmly under the trigger guard so as not to accidentally set off the weapon. She was in no mood to waste ammunition or to cause undue injury. Carrying your gun with your finger on the trigger was a sure way to do both.

Over the heavy, ponderous thuds of the Spartans’ gigantic claws, Smaragda picked up something that she couldn’t quite make out. She immediately held up her fist.

The trained Olympians came to a halt.

Deafening silence descended upon the Greek column and she realized what felt so odd.

There were birds on the branches of the trees along the road, but they made no sound. They were still, no nervous tics she’d seen other birds display as they, even in rest, continuously turned their heads, making certain nothing was creeping up on them. The visible birds, however, was not what had truly disturbed her.

There were trees, heavy and dense with foliage, but the impunity of nests of hidden birds was not accompanied by the riot of tweets and chirps that warned any intruder of how outnumbered they would be if they dared enter the thicket. The countryside was silent.

Smaragda stepped off the road, closing on one of the closest trees. Her men watched as she slung the rifle, then drew the falcata. With a twist, she rapped the spine against a low-hanging branch where a songbird perched.

The creature turned its attention toward her, blinked with eyes slow and gummy, but did not launch. Even the turn of its head was casual, unconcerned, not the flicker movement of a normal bird. Smaragda gave the branch another tap with the spine of her sword. The songbird took a clumsy sideways step further along the branch, then unfurled its wings.

Just before she could tap the branch a third time the songbird took off, wings flapping powerfully, moving with the natural strength and speed of the creature, the limbs beating with the urgency necessary to keep the tiny thing aloft. It wasn’t as if the songbird was in some sort of debilitating trance. It flew straight and true.

It just didn’t seem to care. The normally skittish creature would have taken off on Smaragda’s approach, let alone not stay in place for two raps on its perch.

“Not good,” she said.

Niklo spoke up. “This place has bad mojo.”

Niklo had ten years on Smaragda and it showed in his gruff, grizzled looks. He’d been through plenty of battles, before Hera and Z005 arrived in Greece, mixing it up with bandits and other coldhearted thugs who made their living preying off the defenseless and helpless in postapocalyptic, shattered Greece. When the hydra drones rose up, Niklo had been one of the first who knew what to do back when the best weapons were swords and muskets. Before Hera had opened the Olympus Redoubt and its stockpiles of late-twentieth-century armaments, it was a matter of toughness.

Smaragda and Niklo had been thrown together in the madness of the hydra wars, quickly gaining each other’s trust as they’d stood the line against swarms of mutant clones bred in the ancient vats of the Crack.

Niklo’s unease at the strangeness of this dead countryside echoed hers and, with those five words, cemented Smaragda’s instincts. Despite the fact that Smaragda had gotten an officer’s commission and Niklo remained master sergeant, there was no jealousy or animosity between them. Smaragda’s role entailed much more red tape, something Niklo could pawn off onto her. In the meantime, officer corps didn’t regularly get issued a Squad Automatic Weapon, either, and the brawny, grizzled Niklo loved using the light machine gun to plow their way out of an ambush with a long belt of ammo.

“Tan, get on the radio. We’re experiencing something weird. Everyone, if your weapons aren’t hot already, safeties off,” Smaragda ordered.

“You heard the lady!” Niklo bellowed. “Heads on swivels, standard perimeter protocols!”

“Movement!” came a cry from their scout up the road.

Smaragda turned and jogged toward the man. Niklo cut her off.

“You talk to home base,” he told her.

Smaragda wrinkled her nose, not wanting to expose any of her men to danger while she was busy on the blower back to Olympus. Even so, she was the one in charge and she was the one whose opinion and authority mattered. This was a chain-of-command decision.

“If things look bad, you hold down the trigger until you melt the barrel laying down cover fire for our retreat,” Smaragda ordered him. “And you make damn sure you come back, or I’m swimming across the Styx and dragging you back to life.”

Niklo smirked, his lined face a road map of seventy years lived in the space of forty, dark eyes twinkling. “Myr, I’m counting on you getting me back from Hades.”

The Olympians, turned into a well-oiled military machine of professional warriors, remained in their defensive positions, alert and ready for trouble. No one was in the line of fire of the other and each had a designated vector to scan and search. Everyone knelt, making themselves smaller targets and bringing their knee and thigh armor up to their chests to bolster the protection of their vital organs against incoming fire.

Thanos—“Tan” to his platoon mates and friends, who seemed to be everyone—looked concerned as he was on the radio. “Not getting a signal. Something is jamming us.”

“How can that be?” the pilot of the Spartan asked. “This radio is designed to transmit across hundreds of miles. It’s predark technology, solid-state and can cut through any interference like a knife through mud.”

Tan shook his head. “Listen to this.”

Smaragda took the receiver. The only sound on the other end was…unnatural.

A knocked-out radio should only receive static, white noise, the pop and crackle of random frequencies and the hiss of electromagnetic radiation pouring off the sun onto the surface of the Earth.

A jammed radio should not be singing in unholy but beautiful tones. She couldn’t bear to listen to the blasphemous signal for more than a few seconds before handing the radio back to Tan. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to put it back to his ear, either.

She tried the helmet comm. “Niklo, come back.”

As soon as she stopped transmitting, there was that song; a high, melodic tone, singing verses in a long-forgotten tongue. But even without understanding the words, Smaragda knew it spoke to something that did not belong on Earth. It was a prayer. What was worse, she knew something was listening and somewhere, beyond the veil of her senses, it was struggling to respond.

“Karlo, Rosa, go grab Niklo and Herc and bring them back. We’re heading back to the boat. If you see anyone or anything that’s not Niklo or Herc, open fire,” Smaragda said.

So much for a mission of peace and mercy. Smaragda didn’t like the idea of sending off her soldiers to retrieve their teammates under orders to kill any strangers. However the singing and the odd behavior of the wildlife around them added up to this road being nothing less than a murder trap.

And she’d led her platoon right into it.

Karlo and Rosa jogged up the road to where Herc, the scout, had called back about movement. Niklo had only been out of radio contact for a minute, but it felt like a lifetime. The only heartening thing was that there had been no sound of gunfire. After all, if Niklo didn’t cut loose with the SAW, that meant there was no enemy force rising to engulf them. The Olympian sergeant would have made any ambush pay for their surprise, and the light machine gun would have been heard for miles.

The silence around them, the damned silence smothering the platoon, ate at her. Smaragda upped the magnification on her helmet optics, scanning the road ahead. It had been midday when they’d stopped, clouds moving in. The day had been growing steadily grayer and dimmer, but now the light was fading even faster, when the sun should be highest in the sky.

Her blood seemed to thicken in her veins as even the high-tech optics in her Praetorian helmet, the same advanced night-vision and telescopic lenses that Kane and Grant had as part of their Magistrate armor suits, showed nothing.

“Captain?” A voice spoke up.

“Movement?” Smaragda asked.

“No. Just…smoke,” Tan said.

Smaragda flipped up the visor on her helmet. There, invisible to the infrared scanners, was a roiling, spreading cloud that billowed out onto the road. She glanced through on infrared again. No one seemed to be inside the cloud, utilizing it as cover or concealment. Who knew if the smoke had some properties that could be filtering out even the body heat of her fellow Praetorians?

“Should we open fire?” another soldier asked, nerves jangling in his voice.

“On what?” Smaragda asked. “We might just end up cutting Niklo and the others apart.”

“But they’re not on the infrared,” Tan noted.

“Retreat,” Smaragda ordered.

“Smoke’s closing in on the road behind us,” announced the Spartan at the back of their formation. “I’m going to…”

“Stay put!” Smaragda commanded. “Don’t enter the smoke.”

Every instinct told her to open fire into the infection of black ink spilling onto the road on either end, bracketing them in.

Smaragda wouldn’t risk the lives of her men in a friendly fire incident.

“GS 26, knock us a road through the trees, now!” Smaragda ordered.

The suit in the center of the formation reacted quickly, plunging into the woods. Large, brassy arms wielding unimaginable strength pushed against trunks, shoving trees out of the ground, roots snapping. Branches shattered against the suit’s broad shoulders and Smaragda waved her men into the gap being created by the bulldozer-like robot. She stayed at the back of the group, watching as the walls of inky, foreboding smoke began to close in on where they used to be. It was as if the clouds were only following the road, forming perfect columns, not spreading out into the forest and upon the path that Skeleton 26 pushed through. Smaragda continued stepping backward, minding the exposed roots and splinters left in the robot’s wake.

She kept the muzzle of her rifle aimed at the wall of darkness and turned sideways, skipping back after her men.

“Niklo, I’ll be back,” she whispered. “If you’re alive.”

Silently she repeated that thought. Leaving soldiers under her command behind, in a lurch, was as bad a defeat as seeing them fall in bloody heaps.

“Everyone comes home.” Smaragda repeated the motto of the Praetorians. “Sooner or later, we’ll be back for you.”

A scream split the air. She whirled and looked down the trough cut through the woods. Of the three Spartans in the unit, she could only see one, the other two having disappeared behind a wall of darkness that intercepted them. Of the fifteen soldiers she’d pushed into retreat in the wake of the Spartans, she saw only six, and they were in full retreat.

The mighty robot’s shoulder guns opened up onto the shadowy smoke as it lunged for the brass giant. The flash and flicker of muzzle-blasts did little to dent or illuminate the choking, inky fog that seemed to grow tentacles with which to entrap the robot.

Smaragda shouldered her rifle, but realized that opening fire into the fog would mean that she could be blindly gunning down fellow soldiers taken captive by the cloud. She wanted to yell for a cease-fire from the robot but, watching the giant fight for its life, she noted that tracer rounds struck the smoke, then bounced off the cloud.

GS 26 lashed out with its battle-ax, the edges heated to steamy white by elements inside the gigantic weapon. The ax seemed to fare better, lopping off solid hunks of the darkness, but only if they were slender tendrils. Anything thicker than a human torso caught the ax, forcing the Spartan to struggle and wrench the blade free.

Tendrils whipped out, snatching up another of her men.

Smaragda lunged, drawing her falcata and slashing at the tentacle of living night. Blade met alien smoke and it was as if she tried to chop a tree branch. The solidness of the tendril of cloud rattled her arm, tendons popping as she put enough force into the swing for a follow-through.

The soldier in the fog’s grasp turned ashen, eyes wide with horror. He breathed out, wisps of frosting moisture escaping from his lips.

“Run!” he rasped. “Get away! Live to…”

Another whip of darkness wrapped around the Praetorian’s head and, within moments, he was wrenched off of his feet and into the smoke as if he was never there.

Lashing smoke fingered out toward her, but she swatted the pseudopods aside, scrambling into retreat.

The Gear Skeleton still fighting the fog disappeared; one hand reached up, clawing at the air in the hope of grasping some anchor, but the robotic claw stilled and was sucked into the darkness.

Smaragda turned and raced off a side trail between the trees. Whatever the smoke was, it seemed to have trouble flowing through and around the trunks of the forest. She swerved and wove, bounding over fallen logs and branches. She regretted lifting the visor so that she could see the midnight horror that expanded onto the road as leaves and fronds slapped and slashed at her face and eyes. She struck a tree trunk at full speed while half blinded by a leaf raking her naked eyeball.

The impact jarred her, but she seized the trunk, using it to maintain her footing.

She glanced back and saw that there were three tentacles winnowing their way around trunks, stretched out at far back as she could see through the trees. Smaragda raised her M-16 and opened fire. Rifle rounds shattered the eerie silence that had fallen in the wake of the last Spartan’s disappearance, but they did nothing to dispel the living darkness stretching and seething after her.

Smaragda turned and ran again, having paused only to slide down her eye shield, leaving the advanced optics out of the way.

Smaragda ran for as long and as hard as she could.

Within an hour she was at the coast, on her knees, her chest burning, shoulders aching, trying to vomit but having nothing to spit up.

Twenty-two people were now gone.

She was the lone survivor.

She pulled off her helmet and, for a moment, thought something else had come after her. A sheet of white spilled down over her eyes and she screamed in shock.

Then she realized why she was so stunned.

Before the smoke her hair had been as dark as a raven’s feathers.

Now the tresses that she could see were as pale and wispy as silken icicles.

Trembling, Smaragda looked around for the boat that had brought the expedition.

“Live to tell what happened,” she said in a terrified murmur.

“Live to tell what…happened…” she repeated.

Tears drenched Smaragda’s cheeks as she struggled to her feet.

Chapter 2

Domi crouched deeply as she faced off with the man in black. Perfectly balanced in her hand was the handle of one of her favorite knives, its flats gleaming under the harsh lights. She was a small woman, hardly five feet in her bare feet, and Domi was almost constantly barefoot. Her body looked thin and frail, her complexion was white as bone and her hair was wispy, silvery and trimmed short so as to provide little more than peach fuzz for an opponent to grab on to. Most startling about Domi was her eyes, ruby-red gems that denoted the cause of her pale flesh and translucent hair.

The girl was an albino. And yet she was facing off against a man a foot taller and easily a hundred pounds heavier than she was, her muscles tense, ready for battle. In the centuries before skydark, the cataclysmic nuclear Armageddon that drove humankind to the brink of extinction, albinos had been considered frail. Indeed, as a child, she had been, but surviving in the deadly world outside of the villes, in the harsh wilderness between tiny islands of civilization, had hardened her.

She was thin of limb, yes. But her muscles were corded tight and had strength and swiftness within them, making her akin to a panther. Her “claws” were her knife and her “bite” was a deadly little .45-caliber Detonics Combat Master, which she didn’t have access to now.

The big man in front of her was powerful, armored, and even inside that armor, had a lightness on his feet, bouncing on the ground in a taunting dance, making it apparent that he expected her to charge him. He was dangling himself as bait, waiting for her to commit to an attack before he turned it around.

Domi was a survivor, though. Before she’d begun to learn how to read under the tutelage of Lakesh and Brigid Baptiste, her school had been expanses of desert or gnarled, predator-stalked forests. Her teachers had been the cruel and the powerful, seeking to use her as meat or pleasure or, in some grisly cases, both. And the feral albino girl had been a quick student, passing every test thrown at her.

This was not the first time she’d faced the armored brute in front of her. His head was encased in a glossy but tough helmet, shielding his face and preventing her from seeing if he was blinking or shifting his glance. Without a view of his tells, Domi was partially blinded, at her usual disadvantage. With nothing to betray her enemy’s thoughts, and even his body language distorted by the bouncing dance he shuffled, all of her usual cues as to where or when to strike or even to defend were gone.

The brute lunged. He had his own blade, twice the length of Domi’s, almost a short sword that looked normal-size in his massive fist. The movement startled the wild girl, but even when reflexively responding to the sudden rush, Domi’s body reacted with speed and agility. The edge of the knife whistled through the air and she could feel the brush of wind off its cold, unyielding dagger on her bare upper arm, the lethal edge missing her by fractions of an inch.

Domi’s swift sidestep planted her left foot down hard for support, bracing her so that she could kick up with her other leg, the knee striking the big knife-man in the side. She’d aimed instinctively away from the bulletproof polycarbonate shells that shielded his abdominal muscles and into the ballistic cloth side panel. The impact was more than sufficient to elicit a grunt from behind the opaque black visor of her foe’s helmet.

Domi brought her knife around, finding a brawny shoulder and stabbing into it. Even as she plunged the blade down, she wrapped her other arm around his, snaring it tightly to give her leverage on him and to make her harder to reach with his free hand. The armored brute lurched erect and Domi’s feet left the ground. Now she was riding a bucking beast, and just to make certain he couldn’t shake her free, she wound her muscular legs around his forearm and wrist.

Suddenly the brute not only had to deal with the bulk of his armor and the throbbing pain of her stab, but also the unbalancing, unsettling weight of the feral girl.

“Dammit!” Edwards shouted as he toppled off balance, bringing them both down to the exercise mat.

Domi stabbed again at the ballistic cloth between the polycarbonate plates that would have provided protection against slashing, stabbing steel. Fortunately for the former Magistrate, Domi’s knife was a blunt-edged aluminum copy, meant for training. Even though its edges were soft, rounded, unable to cut anything softer than mud, when you stabbed someone with the tip, it still was hard, unyielding metal slamming into soft flesh.

And it hurt, much to Edwards’s dismay.

“I thought these things weren’t supposed to injure you,” Edwards grunted as Domi slithered off his arm.

“Not normally,” Domi replied, her verbiage clipped as she was still brimming with adrenaline from the training session. “But ’m not normal.”

“You can say that again, runt.” Edwards looked her over. He was used to her dropping pronouns and adjectives while stressed or energized for combat, so was not worried about her suffering some sort of episode or being too out of breath. Indeed, the comment about her not being normal showed she still retained her wits, sense of humor and a significant skill at wordplay.

“Still, I’m damned glad I was wearing armor,” Edwards added, giving her a poke in the shoulder with his fist. “Just too bad you found the kinks in it, little cheater.”

“Was the point,” Domi answered, rubbing her knuckle-brushed upper arm. She smirked at his accusation of cheating. “Pardon pun.”

Edwards grinned, pulling off his helmet. His hair was a close-shaved scruff around his melon-size head, showing off his bullet-bitten ear. Though the Magistrate armor was designed to be environmentally adaptive, beads of sweat still formed thanks to the exertion and condensation of Edwards’s breath inside the helmet.

When they’d met at first, and were being assigned to either run or be a part of the Cerberus Away Teams, Edwards had bristled at the concept of working “beneath” such a young, tiny female.

That was dozens of sparring matches ago, across the past several months. Since then the brawny former Magistrate had come to respect Domi. There were times when she sounded barely more educated than a toddler, and she always looked like a frail wisp of a creature, but there was strength and intelligence in there.

It wasn’t the kind of phenomenal intellect as displayed by others such as Brigid Baptiste or Mohandas Lakesh Singh, who boasted unique scientific and mathematical acumen. It was more the wisdom and agility of mind showed by fellow former Magistrates Kane and Grant. It was knowledge that didn’t involve splitting atoms, but observation of her surroundings, instincts that helped her react and respond to danger at speeds beyond even the most trained soldiers that Edwards knew of.

Being under her command, even if it was a mere three people in the whole Cerberus Away Team, was no threat to his abilities, his prodigious strength and paramilitary Magistrate training. His teammate, the beautiful and bright freezie Sela Sinclair, was another sharp mind and strong woman Edwards had learned to respect.

The Magistrates had been a strictly masculine community, a group of men who were of similar size, similar strength, each picked and groomed from even before birth to become part of the hybrid barons’ elite enforcers. They had been forged as rough, macho and gung ho, their individuality limited by the stripping of their first names. Edwards had been born Edwards, as his father before him and that father before him. His mother had been a donor, a handpicked maiden chosen to bear a healthy child, to mix with the genes of a soldier and warrior to produce an ideal fighting man.

Edwards had been given very little of a normal youth. It was spent physically training, learning the laws and procedures of the Magistrates, not being a boy. For him, as well as Domi, the luxuries of childhood were absent, little chance of play or exploring and nurturing a sense of awe and wonder.

Now, in the wake of the barons’ evolution and shedding of their hybrid-human forms, Edwards was a lawman who found a new vocation as a warrior in the defense of Cerberus Redoubt, and an avocation as an adventurer, a hero to swoop in to the rescue and restore order.

Through this selfless assistance of others, Edwards felt awakened. Reborn even. In helping others, in traveling the world for the purposes of growing knowledge, for the effort of building a world, he was young again. He was alive whereas before he’d merely survived and existed. It was a lesson, a transformation, that Domi had also undergone.

Domi herself was a child of the wilderness. Later, in the Tartarus Pits, the hellish subterranean area in the shadow of the Administrative Monolith in the center of Cobaltville, she’d had to scrabble as a petty thief and was pressed into servitude as a prostitute. It was only her acceptance as an ally, the affection of Grant as a surrogate father and protector, the gentle love of Lakesh, that had turned her from a feral savage into an avid student. She’d gone from a slum criminal totally out for herself to someone who understood that love and affection were not necessarily displayed by sexual desire, as with Grant, and that intimacy could come with gentility, not cruelty, as with Lakesh.

Given such an environment that nurtured goodness, growth and intelligence, Edwards found himself only mockingly grumbling about “babysitting trips with nerds to ruins” and actually showing excitement about learning about the history of the strange planet they lived upon.

“Hey, you two!”

It was Sela Sinclair, who herself had not become involved in the ever-escalating sparring matches of Domi and Edwards. Sinclair’s preference for combat was not the close-quarters of knives and fists but rather the application of leverage and focused energy, usually in the form of the collapsible baton she had become intimate with in her pre-skydark life as an Air Force officer. It didn’t mean she didn’t lack for bare-handed skill, but when things came to a hands-on approach her preference was for the strength-amplifying qualities of an ASP telescoping fighting stick, the same way that Domi preferred a sharp knife. And even then, the ASP was only for situations where she didn’t necessarily require the killing of an opponent.

Sinclair folded her arms, leaning on one leg, hip tilted jauntily.

“Something come up?” Domi asked.

“The CAT teams are being called in for a briefing,” Sinclair said. “Something about a call from New Olympus.”

Domi perked up at the sound of that. Edwards and Sinclair had joined her in that prior mission, arriving later with armor kits meant for Sandcats and Humvees that would be adapted to the Olympian Spartans. They had also been present when Hera Olympiad had gone berserk with power, standing their ground against her madness and the ever-growing energies and mass of her corrupted command node.

Hera, a Cobaltville scientist who had been sent to retrieve Annunaki artifacts from Greece while the Overlord Marduk was still Baron Cobalt, had acquired a smart-metal control nodule when one of Marduk’s Nephilim drone troopers was captured. Using the knowledge she had gained from her exploration of the Crack, she’d manipulated the smart-metal pod to provide herself a new form of clothing. Because the pod was now reacting with an intelligent mind, it followed her commands rather than simply existed as a suit of body-conforming armor.

Of course, Marduk had known of her interference with the Annunaki electronics. He’d tried to take control of her and, barring that, his psychic assault had driven her insane.

Hera had bonded that module with another piece of Annunaki technology, a Threshold, and an electrical drone weapon on top of that. CAT Beta—Domi, Sinclair and Edwards—had been at the forefront of the battle against the out-of-control Hera as she’d continued to add mass and energy to her suit’s frame, assisted by Brigid Baptiste.

Despite the defeat of the superhuman Hera, the damage to New Olympus had been significant. There were sorties from Cerberus to the Grecian nation, teams mostly there to excavate and open up collapsed and damaged tunnels in the deep underground military base that had been the Olympian redoubt. The digging and rebuilding were necessary, as Hera’s destruction had cut off access to redoubt supplies of ammunition, food and medicine stored for the hundreds of years since before skydark.

Rebuilding had been going well, but for New Olympus to actually send out a call for help meant something big had popped up.

“Shower and change. You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Sinclair told them.

The two Beta Team members headed to the gymnasium locker room where Domi helped Edwards out of his bulky Magistrate armor, cutting the usual de-prep time by half, allowing Edwards to do more than just let the showerhead spit on him for a second. That both teammates were naked was not a distraction to either.

Domi had her devotion to Lakesh, and Edwards was uninterested in settling down and of no mind to steal the scientist’s woman. Indeed, Edwards was a man of personal discipline, and while he believed that men and women could be lovers and work together, he personally did not want to complicate his relationship with the tiny Domi. Edwards also had a preference for taller, fuller-figured women, and to the massive former Magistrate, Domi’s appearance was more of a prepubescent boy’s than an object of sexual desire. Hell, knowing her for this long, becoming nearly a brother to her on the CAT team, she was not an object. She was Domi. Friend. Living being. Person. Not an object of lust.

From what Edwards had read or seen in vids from before the destruction of mankind, he could appreciate that at least one thing had advanced forward since the age of “civilization.” Humanity needed to grow up, to not just focus on their baser instincts and rut like animals. Reproduction was important, but there were other much more vital matters that needed attendance.

By the time Edwards finished his shower and dressed, he and Domi arrived at the briefing with minutes to spare.

In fact, they had both entered sooner than Kane and Grant, and were there to see Brigid Baptiste, the third member of the group that had been entitled CAT Alpha. Brigid was not happy to see Kane and Grant ambling in so slowly after their counterparts had showed such promptness, and she let her distaste for the situation show in her scowl.

“I told you we shouldn’t have stopped for coffee,” Grant said, catching the disgust in Brigid’s glare. He slid into his chair at the meeting table, setting the travel mug down in front of him. Kane shrugged at his friend’s statement of being “busted.”

“It’s not like we’re the B-team,” Kane noted, giving a wink to Domi, who wrinkled her nose at the mock insult. If there was a rivalry between the CAT teams, no one on either of the two squads had been made aware of it. They were comrades and allies. The only rank came from the fact that Sinclair was awakened after Kane, Brigid and Grant became a team, and Edwards had only recently found himself a free agent in the wake of the collapse of the baronies. Kane’s joke was taken in stride, not in malice, and Brigid rolled her eyes.

“As you know, ever since our first contact with New Olympus, we’ve been sending over manpower and assistance to help them with their rebuilding,” Brigid began. “They’ve reciprocated by helping to design Kane’s exoskeleton during…recent troubles.”

“I didn’t get to blow-dry and curl my hair for this recap?” Edwards asked, rubbing his closely shaved pate.

Brigid chuckled. “Sorry, but you know I try to be as completest as possible.”

Edwards shrugged. “Not a problem. I just needed something to…distract me.”

Domi nodded in recognition. Edwards was referring to Ullikummis’s attack and conquest of the Cerberus Redoubt. Not only was Edwards present for that, but also he’d been infected with one of the stony Annunaki’s seeds, making him a puppet, a pawn of the exiled godling. Memories of that time, the loss of life and the madness of their enslavement, were still recent and raw.

“Right now, they’re starting to expand their area of influence over there, peacefully.” Brigid quickly added the peacefully. “They’d sent out an excursion into what used to be the Etruscan countryside.”

“Italy?” Sela Sinclair asked.

Brigid nodded.

Sinclair smirked. “I always wanted to take a vacation in the countryside with the vineyards.”

Brigid gave the Air Force veteran a one percent salute, akin to the gesture that Kane and Grant gave each other. She continued speaking. “Out of twenty soldiers and three Spartans sent into the Italian countryside, there was only one person who returned. The commander of the ground platoon. She was in shock to the point that her hair turned white. She claimed they had encountered an amorphous, seemingly sentient darkness that was immune to gunfire and had swallowed people. Even their robotic support team was unable to break the bonds.”

“Bulletproof fog that eats soldiers,” Grant murmured. “Do you have any historical correlation and background for that, Brigid?”

“Nothing so far,” she replied. “The only possible link to an inky, all-enveloping blackness is the relation of one of the old gods of Italy—Charun.”

“That sounds like the ‘mythological guy who has a boat on the river of the dead’ Charon?” Kane asked. Brigid acknowledged that Kane got the pronunciation and identity correct. “Any relation?”

“Charun, it is believed, was a renamed chooser of the slain in Etruscan mythology. He was a winged god of death,” Brigid explained. “An invulnerable fog or a wave might be in reference to the river Styx’s alleged properties of making anyone dipped in it invulnerable, like Achilles.”

“You’ve been hitting the research hard enough,” Kane mentioned. “Sometimes, it’s best to put speculation aside and put feet on the ground.”

“And hope that we’re not stumbling into a trap,” Sinclair added. “You want us to come with you?”

“In general, we rarely send both teams into the field together, but in this instance, it would be beneficial to have you along. My ankle still isn’t at a hundred percent, so my running and jumping will be impaired, and DeFore still wishes to make certain Kane hadn’t received anything permanent in regard to the crack he received on his head. I’m under the presumption that the reason the expedition encountered such a powerful surge was due to the size of the intrusion,” Brigid said.

“So if we show up with three to six people, we can slip under their radar, so to speak,” Edwards concluded. “I can figure out why you want Beta with you.” He glanced toward Domi as if to provide clarity.

“Indeed. We’ll also be heading to Olympus in two groups. One via traditional mat-trans, and Edwards and Grant in the Mantas,” Brigid added. “We’ll see if our jerry-rigged weapons systems for them might prove sufficient to deal with a superhuman threat.”

“If we have a target that we can use the Mantas against,” Grant added. “Who knows if the thing generating that weird black mass will be out in the open.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Kane said. “The first thing we need to do is get to New Olympus.”

“And since we’re taking the Mantas, we’ll catch up to you in a few hours,” Edwards pointed out. “Don’t drink all the hospitality before we get there.”

Kane chuckled. “It’s not the hospitality you should worry about.”

Edwards didn’t say it out loud, but looking at the concerned features of Brigid Baptiste in the wake of the briefing, he knew that something out there was going to be a terrible challenge.

Then again, that was the reason for the existence of the Cerberus Away Teams, he added grimly and silently.

Chapter 3

The arrival of the strangers was nigh, as the radio signal came through from across the gulf of land and ocean that separated New Olympus from the Bitterroot Mountains. Diana Pantopoulos was at once relieved at the response, and guilty for having drawn the Cerberus warriors back into their continent.

Diana had inherited the role of “queen” of New Olympus, an unenviable task alongside Aristotle Marschene stepping into the “boots” of Z00s, in the wake of that last visit. As of now, Greece was actually working on a charter and constitution allowing a representative government, but also allowing Diana and Ari to act as “ranking managers.”

The two were still commanders of the Gear Skeleton forces, having risen in rank with the loss of Z00s—the Magistrate formerly known as Thurmond—and Hera Olympiad—Helena Garthwaite, the scientist sent by Baron Cobalt to uncover ancient technology that the baron recalled on a genetic level. Those two, and another Magistrate, had been sent on an expedition to find the tools of Marduk, Cobalt’s original Annunaki form, and in the process, they had built Greece into a fortress-like society with remarkable Spartan Gear Skeletons as the backbone of their mechanized military force.

It was an empire built upon clay feet. Through the use of clone production facilities, Helena Garthwaite had initiated a program of terror to unify the Greek countryside.

It was the effort of Kane, Grant and Brigid that ended that deception, the years of death and violence, but in such a spasm of destruction that it had left New Olympus heavily damaged and many of its heroes fallen on the battlefield. Diana didn’t want to think if they had not showed up. The true evil behind the whole society, Marduk, the former Baron Cobalt, arrived to claim his storehouse in the Tartarus Crack.

Though teams had come and gone, assisting in the reconstruction of New Olympus in the wake of that war, this would be the first time the men and women of the Cerberus teams would be returning as a group.

Diana smiled at the thought of her friend, the small, feisty Domi among them.

“Incoming mat-trans event at the old Oracle Temple,” came the announcement from her wheelchair’s built-in comm panel. Diana pressed Send.

“Alert received. Reporting to command center,” she answered.

“Shall we get your suit ready?”

“No. Let the new Artem15 meet them,” Diana said.

And with that, the wheelchair-bound administrator of New Olympus felt a pang of regret at her promotion. She’d loved being the armored suit named for the goddess of the hunt, Artemis. But as Aristotle had been promoted to Z00s, a new “queen” was necessary for the rankings. Now, she was H34a, as Zeus and Hera were the king and queen of Mount Olympus. Whereas the previous Hera was petty and manipulative, Diana tried to be a little nobler, a little more righteous. She’d learned from the mistakes of the past.

Or had she? Wasn’t she just buying into the same level of hero worship? Hadn’t she and Ari just taken the place of a manipulator and a man who, up until his final battle, had been happy to deceive others for the sake of his own power?

Rolling herself into the command center, she noted that Aristotle was there, along with the rest of this shift’s personnel. They were watching the progress of Artem15 and two other suits as they bounded across country, taking enormous strides that ate up terrain at great velocity. Diana held a wistful moment for the days when she’d needed to bolt across countrysides on emergency missions. Artem15’s long legs allowed her to easily top 100 miles an hour, and those speeds were necessary in defense of the people under New Olympus’s protection, townsfolk who’d easily be outnumbered and slaughtered in the assaults made by deadly hordes of Hydrae.

That kind of rapid response gave Diana a little wear and tear as she sat in the control couch of the mighty Gear Skeleton, but the hero suits and the Spartans were often ridden hard, beyond acceptable limits. Now, they were only on their way as a means of ferrying the Cerberus visitors from the parallax point atop the remains of the temple of the Oracle to New Olympus itself. There was still a lot of digging to be done to get to the mat-trans buried during the old Hera Olympiad’s rampage.

Those damaged tunnels and elevators themselves were made all the more inaccessible by the fact that there was little way for the fifteen-foot armored titans to fit into the redoubt and dig. Smaller conventional exoskeletons, one of which Kane had utilized during his “infection” by Ullikummis, had provided some ease. But they were not based on a frame constructed of alien technology alloys, nor were their charged energy modules able to operate at maximum capacity due to the conventional human-designed metals not being up to Annunaki-level snuff.

“Queen on the deck!” announced First Officer Orestes, standing to attention, clicking his booted heels together in a sharp salute.

“As you were,” Diana said, waving off the show of respect. She’d earned her place as an officer, but she didn’t feel that she warranted all of this attention or adulation. Even so, Ari gave her a wink from across the room where he was watching the main screens that displayed drone camera views of the countryside.

“ETA to their arrival?” Diana asked.

“They’re a half mile out, sir,” Comms Officer Kindalos said, looking back over her shoulder. As always, Diana felt a little self-conscious. Whereas Helena Garthwaite/Hera Olympiad was beautiful to the point of perfection, the former Artem15 pilot had more wrong with her than merely amputated legs below mid-thigh. The same battle that had taken her lower limbs had left scars spider-webbed across her forehead and right cheek. Diana’s pride forced her to wear her hair flipped over, her blond locks masking her deformity with a curtain of tresses.

Unfortunately, since her ascension, she’d been forced into a more face-to-face role. Hiding her features, no matter how insecure she was about them, would not do when it came to projecting her authority. Ari had tried to tell her that she did not appear bad-looking, even with the crisscross of healed flesh patterned on her face. Diana didn’t believe him. Even though he was in love with her, she still didn’t trust his opinion.

Ari rolled around to her, gave her a clap on the shoulder. “Honey.”

Diana smiled, resting her hand atop his.

“You ever get tired of all these snap-to’s?” she asked her king and lover.

Ari shrugged. “Occasionally. But it reminds me not to mess around with my power.”

“What power? We’re stuck with all the decisions but none of the fun,” Diana told him.

Ari looked to the trio of running and jumping robots. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”

Diana gave him a pop on the biceps, but laughed. “I’m too young to be nostalgic and shit.”

“Just keep smiling. You look prettier,” Ari told her.

“Liar,” Diana called him, but she still leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

The two returned their attention to the screens. Mounted on tiny motorized planes, the pursuit cameras enabled the New Olympians the ability to keep their eyes, remotely, on things without endangering the cameraman. The unmanned drone concept was still in its earliest developments when, in 2001, the world had been blown to hell by a global nuclear cull, all caused by a renegade dimension traveler by the name of Colonel Thrush. But, thankfully, in the postwar era, more than a couple survivors had come to Greece from Israel, which had been extremely active in such technological development.

The tiny airplane zipped ahead of the trio of welcoming robots toward the ramped natural obelisk upon which the Oracle Temple had been built. There were four people visible atop the clean-cut “table” at the peak of what had been a spire of granite. The structures atop, walls formed from a henge of natural-appearing stones and a long-gone roof, wood and thatch rotted away by the passage of history and impact of storms a millennium ago. It bore more recent damage; burns from ASP blasters striped the massive, lithic columns, evidence of a more recent battle between the heroes who had arrived back then and Marduk’s ASP-armed Nephilim. At the base of the ramp was a golden puddle, a mirror made of the molten remains of Hera Olympiad and Z00s, and the metals surrounding their bodies as Z00s had made the final sacrifice to end her unholy rampage.

The puddle itself was a reminder of wounds, the deaths of four other Gear Skeleton pilots slain at the talons and blasters Hera had absorbed into her extended, reprogrammed body. It also commemorated Thurmond’s end, especially in the face of his admission of his wrongs and his ultimate betrayal of Hera’s foul protection scheme. It was now an honored tomb, a memorial to true freedom, and the birth of equality under law for all of New Olympus.

As the drone swooped closer, they saw four people in the midst of the henge that formerly held the temple roof and walls together. Three women, one man and the sight of small, slender, spider-limbed Domi, her bone-white complexion a stark contrast to the deep ebony of her shadow suit, made Diana’s heart skip a beat. A kindred spirit had returned. She imagined this was what it felt like to have a visit from a sister after a long time, Diana being an only child.

The other woman was undoubtedly Brigid Baptiste; Diana quickly recognizing her on the screen thanks to her flame-gold tresses, vibrant and noticeable. The tall woman knelt, punching the recall code into the small pyramid-shaped interphaser, sending it back to Cerberus Redoubt. The small device exploited the intersection of naturally occurring energy paths or “parallax points” as referred to by the designer of the interphaser, Mohandas Lakesh Singh. It was a priceless piece of technology, so recalling it to the redoubt would keep it from ending up in the wrong hands.

This was not Cerberus’s indictment of New Olympus as “the wrong hands,” but as there was no way to penetrate into the mat-trans chamber for New Olympus’s redoubt, it would be useless to Diana and her people, and leaving it out in the elements would make it too vulnerable.

The third woman was also familiar to Diana—a slender woman with a dusky complexion, her short hair arranged in braids. She stood at attention, maintaining the demeanor of even the highly trained New Olympian troopers, keeping the frame of her Copperhead submachine gun clasped, muzzle down to her belly and finger off the trigger. It was just a brief inkling of Sela Sinclair’s Air Force officer’s skill and mental alertness. Though it was unlikely she’d accidentally tug on the trigger of the compact, bullet-spitting weapon, a true professional never took chances. If the firearm discharged without Sela’s will, the gunfire would only harm the ground at her feet. At the same time, her eyes scanned their surroundings.

“This is Grant to New Olympus command and control.” Another familiar voice piped up. “We are approaching your airspace in two Manta craft.”

“Edwards here, in Manta Beta” followed the other aircraft’s radio.

“Welcome to New Olympus airspace. Antiaircraft measures are being tuned down for your safe passage,” Kindalos announced loud enough for the rest of the command center to hear. Quietly, in a lower tone, she switched channels on her headset and contacted the air defenses. While it was unlikely that mere .50-caliber machine guns could bring down two transonic Manta craft, it was better to not have even that slight risk.

“Sir? Majesties? We just got word that there were two aircraft coming in, and from the west, of course, right?” radar station officer Niko Mikoles asked. “I’ve got three contacts on radar. All from the west.”

Diana and Ari immediately tuned in on their observation screen.

“Kindalos! Let them know,” Diana commanded, sharp and urgent.

Kindalos’s fingers flew to the frequency switch, linking back to the fast-flying Mantas. “Cerberus flight. Be advised. Unidentified flying object flying in parallel,” the comm officer said quickly.

Before there was a chance for Grant or Edwards to reply, a loud screech blazed over the speakers.

Kindalos, wearing her headset, was literally slammed from her seat by the sonic burst exploding so close to her ear. At the same moment Mikoles’s radar screen blazed brightly, energy seeming to pour into the readout. After another instant the screen cracked down the center, wisps of ozone rising from the shattered glass.

“Medic to C-and-C!” Orestes yelled into the intercom.

Diana and Ari turned to the armrest comm-links on their chairs, but discovered that whatever odd pulse that had literally floored Kindalos and caused screens to die in a spectacular manner had rendered their radios equally useless.

Aristotle didn’t delay an instant, dropping himself from the seat of his chair to the floor beside Kindalos. Though king, the training and instincts of a soldier were hard to bury and the former Are5 showed that he was as skilled in the ways of emergency medical treatment as he had been in waging war. He laid Kindalos so that there was no strain or stress on her neck, in the event of reflex-inducing whiplash. The headphones were swiftly discarded.

The young woman’s left ear was drenched in blood. Ari tore a kerchief from his breast pocket, applying it gently to the side of her head to keep away infection and stop the slow trickle pouring from her burst eardrum.

“Come on, kid, don’t do this,” Ari murmured. Other officers joined Ari in looking over the injured Kindalos. In the meantime Diana and Orestes checked on Mikoles for injuries.

“I’m fine,” the young man told his superiors. “We need a fire ext—”

As if to answer his incomplete suggestion, a guard pulled the trigger on a CO2 canister, blasting through the radar screen to whatever produced the stink of ozone beneath the broken glass.

Diana spared a small part of her mind to show pride in the military precision and loyalty presented in responding to the injury and the damages done to their electronics. While there would always be those who thought of soldiers as nothing more than mindless thugs and fodder, real troops would band together and move quickly with calmness, practiced problem-solving and true care for their fallen comrades.

However, with the pulse that had knocked out both radar and the radio communications, they were out of touch with Grant and Edwards in their Mantas.

Right now, all they were able to do was to get their own comms back up and running. Even as she thought this, there were already guards racing on foot to convey alerts to the rest of the Olympian redoubt.

So much fixed, and now another attack had driven them back to blindness and primitive messages.

At least we got the fire extinguisher on the radar screen, Diana thought to herself. Otherwise, we would have been sending smoke signals.

* * *

THE SUDDEN BURST of feedback that struck Grant brought a mixture of good news and bad news to the brawny pilot. First was good news, in that the Commtact’s new frequency filter had managed to minimize the brain-rattling discomfort of…whatever that electronic howl was. One of the weaknesses of the implants and their plates was that it was quite possible to blow out the hearing of someone listening with either too loud a response or via electromagnetic interference. Fortunately, Lakesh and the other whitecoats back at Cerberus had been diligent in improving the Commtact network and the electronics within.

Unfortunately there was more bad news. The navigational instruments based off radar, which was pretty much everything in the Manta cockpit, were rendered as useless as his Commtact. There was little to tell if the systems themselves had suffered catastrophic damage or if they were merely jammed, dazed by the sudden wave of energy.

At the very least Grant and Edwards had been able to hear the majority of the warning coming from New Olympus. Grant would have felt a lot more confident had not the Heads Up Display on the pilot’s helmet been equally invalidated by the interference pulse. Still, there was a dome of glass, and Grant was an expert pilot, so at least he wouldn’t find himself crashing. Just to make certain, he pulled on his shadow suit hood. One thing the faceplate allowed for, in addition to being a self-contained environment, was advanced optics and sensors.

Grant glanced back and could see, in the distance, the outline of Edwards’s ship. They couldn’t talk by radio, but maybe they could communicate with hand gestures, especially with the telescopic zoom available in the eyepieces.

He throttled down only a fraction, steering to parallel Edwards, when he caught a flicker of darkness from the corner of his eye.

So much for being able to use sign language with Edwards before the UFO arrived.

Grant turned his head, swinging the Manta into an S-turn that would allow him to survey a maximum of sky around him. The cockpit glass of the high-velocity ship allowed him a fairly good panorama of the Mediterranean airspace. Edwards was visible, as well. He was keeping his distance and was focused on something Grant couldn’t see at this moment.

“Deaf and mute, and half blind,” the big, former Magistrate grumbled to himself. “I might as well be a sitting duck…”

With that thought, however, Grant noticed Edwards suddenly accelerate his Manta, as if to engage ramming speed against his fellow pilot. There was only a brief instant of confusion until he realized that whatever had drawn Grant’s attention as the UFO was now flying on his tail, sticking to his blind spot.

That turned out to be a much better form of nonverbal communication that instantly clicked in Grant’s mind. Within a moment he throttled up to near escape-velocity speed, tearing away from his pursuit utilizing the scram jet engines built into the moon-base-built wonder craft. He only maintained escape velocity for a few seconds, but that was more than sufficient to have created a few miles of space between the Manta and his pursuit.

With a deft spin, Grant was able to see the UFO as it raced to catch up. He could see a pair of powerful wings, but what hung beneath them was no mere bird, not even a pteranodon.

He employed his optic enhancements and zoomed in, focusing on a man.

No, to call it a man would have been a misnomer. With electronic readouts on the transparent shadow suit’s faceplate, Grant could see that the entity had a wingspan of thirty feet, its skin tone blued like that of a pallid corpse. Around its bare, brawny arms, he saw what at first appeared to be coiled serpents, but recognition immediately kicked in. He bore some version of the serpentine ASP blasters worn by the Nephilim drones who served beneath Enlil and the other Annunaki overlords. They glinted like metal in the sun, but those weapons seemed puny in comparison to the winged humanoid’s handheld device. It was a gigantic hammer, gripped in sinewy, powerful hands.

Grant looked at the face of his foe, one twisted in grim rage, tusks protruding and curving out over his mustached upper lip, a black beard of writhing worms crawling up the sides of his face before they lengthened into serpents like a male version of the Greek monster Medusa. His nose plunged down over his peeled-back lips like the hook of a vulture’s beak and its eyes were shadows beneath bulging, clifflike brow ridges.

Grant’s shock at the hurtling creature knocked him from taking a mental inventory of the beast’s appearance, and he flipped the circuits to activate the weapons recently added to the Manta. As he did, there was a whine of protest from the systems, informing him that whatever had negated radio communications had likewise disabled the weaponry controls.

“Isn’t that just great?” Grant growled, throttling up the engines and hurtling toward the flying humanoid. Though he was certain the hammer was far more than just a brutish weapon meant for crushing skulls, he was gambling on a Mach 2 impact stunning the flying opponent. The creature was not thematically different from the gigantic Kongamato from Africa, and he always wondered how one of those muscular horrors would have dealt with being run over by a supersonic Manta.

The tusked mouth turned into a semblance of a smile through the telescopic magnification on Grant’s faceplate and immediately he started to regret playing chicken with a flying demon.

He didn’t have long to doubt his course, though, as a moment later the Manta jolted violently. Even strapped into the pilot’s couch, Grant’s head and arms flailed wildly in the cockpit. Alarms and lights jerked to life around the cabin, the violence of impact making the horizon cartwheel in the cracked windshield of the supersonic craft.

Stunned, Grant tried to will his hands back to the joystick nestled between his knees. Unfortunately centrifugal force and a stabbing pain in his back and shoulder kept them dangling at the ends of his ropy arms. All the while, his optics displayed a countdown of the Manta’s altitude as it spiraled toward the Mediterranean Sea below. At this speed, striking incompressible water, it would be like hurling a melon against a stone wall, except the meaty fruit disgorged would be Grant’s internal organs.

Chapter 4

Edwards was aghast at the sight of the winged monstrosity flying to meet Grant’s Manta at ramming speed. At the same time he grimaced at the inconvenience of having his weaponry disabled by whatever had knocked out the radios. As it was, the flying monster itself was spiraling out of control, seemingly as stunned as the Manta, its pilot locked in a fatal corkscrew heading toward the waiting sea beneath them. However, even as the hammer-wielding flier toppled head over heels through the empty air, Edwards’s Commtact came back online.

“Grant!” It was a chorus of alarmed cries in familiar voices.

Edwards looked between the stunned monstrosity and his fellow Cerberus warrior plummeting toward the ground. With a pit of disgust in his belly, he realized that the newly armed Mantas had very little that could be used to save another aircraft from crashing. The upgrades were meant to swat threats from the sky, to ensure that they crashed.

And if Edwards could not rescue Grant, he’d sure as hell avenge his friend. His thumb flicked up the safety switch on his joystick and he pressed down on the trigger. In a moment a pair of .50-caliber machine guns roared to life beneath the keel of his Manta, streams of lead locking on the falling humanoid. As tracers described the path of fire from Edwards’s guns, the winged creature jolted to alertness. One bullet smashed through the beast-man’s wing, but no pain registered on his target.

Instead the huge hammer was raised in both hands. It lowered its head and the hammer’s bonce began to glow brightly, turning into a blazing sun at the end of its two-meter-long shaft. Edwards watched as the air in front of the hammer and the falling devil sparked to life. Instinctively the former Magistrate realized what those individual flares were as he eased off the trigger. The hammer was incinerating the massive bullets in flight, shielding the stunned opponent.

“So, if you want to play it that way,” Edwards murmured, “let’s try something that won’t burn up.”

Edwards kicked in what passed for afterburners on the Manta, and the crush of acceleration pushed him deeper into the pilot’s couch, the transonic aircraft blistering along at escape velocity. This low, he wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace very long, but it was merely a short burst of speed that roared him past their winged opponent. Unlike Grant, he wasn’t going to ram his enemy, but rather, let the sonic boom in his wake beat at the odd, hammer-wielding being.

And since the interference had stopped and the Manta’s cockpit was now receiving camera images, he was able to spot the effects of the thunderclap of his passage on the creature. It had lost its hammer and, once more, it was working into a spiral. Unfortunately this spiral was slow and winding, lazy and controlled.

Even so, there was no way that Edwards was going to allow it anywhere near its fallen hammer, wherever it would have landed. He swung his Manta around, all the while hoping that somewhere Grant had regained control of his craft.

The winged creature spotted the incoming scram jet and righted itself, putting on its own burst of blinding speed. Within moments it was out of sight, a spray of .50-caliber lead chasing it over the horizon.

“Guys? How’s Grant?” Edwards asked, still distracted by whatever it was they’d encountered.

* * *

IT COULD HAVE been adrenaline surging through Grant’s limbs that gave him the strength to pull his hands back down to the joystick, or it could have been the more automated systems on the Manta kicking into gear, providing just enough of an iota of balance and slowing for him to regain control of himself in the death spiral. Or it could just have been the mental image of him exploding like overripe fruit against the surface of the Mediterranean Sea that found Grant with his fingers wrapped tightly around the controls once more.

Whichever it was, he hit full reverse on the thrusters, jets blasting out bellows of air to slow his twirling descent, even as his other arm seized fast to the stick, bringing the control surfaces back to level.

With that all going on in the space of a few moments, the inertia of Grant’s insides caused a sour ball of bile to roll up into his throat, acidic taste making him grimace in disgust as the Manta’s crash course with oblivion came to an abrupt halt. It wasn’t like crashing into a wall of stone or an ocean from nearly a mile high, but it certainly was an upsetting experience. He couldn’t see through the gloves of his shadow suit, but he could feel how whitened his knuckles were as he clutched the throttle and collective.

Despite the environmental protections provided by the full-body shadow suit, Grant was drenched in sweat, his heart hammering to the point where he wondered if it would burst through his ribs. Adjusting the thrusters in VTOL mode, he steered a course toward the Oracle. He wanted to set down because he could feel a stream of cold air hissing through the cracked windscreen, hear the flap of torn seals and bouncing metal holding the cockpit’s canopy in place.

In the distance Grant heard a sonic boom and wondered if it was the explosion of Edwards’s ship or the detonation of some other weapon. It might have been the distraction of keeping the Manta on course for its emergency landing, but it took a moment to sink in that Edwards and his ship had gone supersonic.

Whatever Grant had collided with had proved to be more than capable of standing up to the incredible withering power of the jerry-rigged .50-caliber machine guns and missiles on their ships. And since Edwards saw with his own eyes what “ramming speed” accomplished, the big, bald brute went with a balance of raw power and ability. The blast of air parting and then clapping back together at Mach speed was the trick he’d opted for.

“Grant, you all right?” Kane asked over the Commtact, his voice showing far more emotion and concern than the stoic Cerberus warrior had displayed in a long time.

“Yeah. I’ve got my Manta limping to a landing near you,” Grant responded. “Any clue as to how much damage I’m suffering? Systems are still on the fritz here and there in the wake of that feedback blast.”

“You can see it for yourself once you land,” Kane replied, his voice growing harder.

Grant curled his lip. It was likely that it was more than just a scratch. He kept the pace even and steady, knowing that imperfections in the hull would make a renewed effort at supersonic transit a very messy method of suicide. The shadow suit provided a modicum of small-arms protection and had kept him from shattering limbs on short falls or minor crashes, but should the cockpit split open and the restraint belts on the pilot’s couch fail, no amount of non-Newtonian fabric would keep him from being crushed as he hit the ground after thousands of feet of free fall.

“Guys?” Edwards spoke over the comm-link. “How’s Grant?”

“Limping along. What happened to the winged bastard who ran me over?” Grant asked back.

“He took off running after I knocked the hammer from his hands,” Edwards replied. “Do we have contact with New Olympus yet?”

“You got a hammer from him?” Brigid interjected.

“Big bad hammer. It just missed opening Grant’s Manta like a can of rations,” Edwards explained.

“That’s a fair assessment,” Grant added. “He was an ugly cuss, with blue-gray skin and snakes for hair…”

“Charun,” Brigid stated.

“So much for a skeletal boatman,” Grant murmured. “What, we have the cross between Thor and some ugly angel?”

“No, Charun was a god of the dead. Edwards, you going to keep watch over where the hammer landed?” Brigid inquired.

“Damn straight. Once I knocked the thing out of his hands, we got our comms back,” Edwards explained. “So keeping the hammer away from him is, in my humble opinion, a great plan.”

“Good,” Brigid said. “Then we can see if we’re dealing with Annunaki technology or—”

“Charun had some metallic snakes wrapped around his arms that immediately reminded me of Enlil’s ASP blasters,” Grant said, cutting her off. “But these were bigger, thicker. Presumably more powerful. And being wound around his arms, he likely still has them.”

“Confirm on that,” Edwards advised. “We’ll need people on the ground to get to the hammer before Charun returns.”

Grant’s mood was not good as he grew closer to the spire where his compatriots had landed with the interphaser. So much for having the advantage of air superiority, he mused.

He grit his teeth. Of course they had air superiority. Edwards’s Manta still was in perfect condition, and as long as the strange, hammer-like device was out of the hands of their enemy, their weapons systems would operate and they could communicate with each other. And from the way that Edwards seemed dead set on protecting the airspace over the fallen weapon, it occurred to the CAT Beta ex-Magistrate that the hammer was special.

Maybe the winged humanoid had access to powerful arm blasters, but there were bigger and more impressive tricks in his lost tool bag.

Grant frowned, swinging the wounded Manta closer to the ground, making the decision to land near the puddle of molten secondary orichalcum. There was more flat ground and he didn’t want to damage the wings or harm his friends with too clumsy of a landing. The henge stones would likely add to the damage of his wounded aircraft, making repairs even more difficult.

Soon he was in range so that he didn’t even need the telescopic zoom on his helmet to inform him that three Gear Skeletons, one adorned as a “hero” suit, two others as Spartans, had arrived at the base of the ramp leading to the top of the oracular spire.

The giant exoskeletons spread out, forming a perimeter in which Grant could set the Manta down. Even as they did so, they extended their arms upward to cushion the descent of the craft in case it had suffered more damage and couldn’t extend its landing gear.

Grant kept up his vigilance upon landing. The last thing he needed was to get sloppy, no matter what kind of help he had available to him. Even so, when he felt the powerful robotic hands latch on to the hull of his Manta, Grant was relieved.

Unfortunately the big man realized that such relief was only temporary. This was only his first encounter with a winged monstrosity powerful enough to engage an armed Manta. Another godlike being, different in some ways from their usual Annunaki opponents, but still formidable, still extremely dangerous.

He hoped that Charun was alone, but even as he did so, he realized that things were never that easy.

* * *

EDWARDS DIDN’T HAVE to search too hard for where the hammer went down. It had produced so much energy in its shield against the twin machine guns on his Manta that it left a smoke trail and its landing produced a highly visible scar on the countryside. So far, his systems were continuing uninterrupted, but that didn’t mean the winged enemy wasn’t trying to slip back into Greek airspace after being driven off.

However, he didn’t want to waste any more of the Manta’s endurance than necessary, so he swung the aircraft low over the crater. As he did so, sensors in the Manta’s cockpit measured the width and depth of the dent the hammer had made in the ground. It was only two feet in depth, and little more than two and a half feet wide, but it was a crater carved into solid rock.

Edwards was no expert at mathematics, but he’d seen large bombs go off before and placed the power of the hammer’s impact equal to about twenty-five kilograms of plas-ex. That was merely from falling from a great height, not being thrown.

Now he could see why even a glancing blow had almost crushed Grant’s Manta.

Edwards landed the ship and used the shadow suit on his forearm as a keyboard and monitor to gather the crater’s information and transmit it to the others. If anything, Brigid Baptiste would want to see the physical environmental effects of the artifact. It might be only pure trivia, but it could also give the brilliant archivist some form of scale from which to determine just what they were up against.

Edwards got out of the cockpit and jogged closer to the hammer, letting the optics in his shadow suit faceplate continue to record information about the hammer. As he closed with it, he could see that the handle was fully two meters in length, and it was not made from any material he recognized. It was dull, not resembling the polished brass of secondary orichalcum or any other natural alloy the Cerberus explorers had encountered.

No, that was wrong, Edwards thought. There was a woodlike grain to the handle, but the shadow suit’s analytical optics were not registering it as anything carved from a tree that he’d ever seen. He frowned. He’d seen something made of wood but not wooden before, and he wished he’d had a hint of Brigid Baptiste’s photographic memory at times such as this.

“Brigid,” Edwards called.

“Thank you for the camera footage of the artifact,” she answered. “What are you going to ask about?”

“The handle. It looks like some kind of material I’ve seen before, but I can’t place it. I’m hoping…”

“The Cedar Doors we encountered underground in Iraq,” Brigid responded. “In mythology, they were the gates to an entire Cedar Forest, whose fruit, when eaten, would provide immortality. Unfortunately said eternal existence came in the form of zombie-like reanimation and was not full of cedar trees as we understood them.”

Edwards took a deep breath of relief. “That’s what was bugging me. So, this is fake cedar? Or a petrified tree material?”

“It is possible,” Brigid answered. “But I would prefer a closer look.”

Edwards grunted. “I’ll babysit this thing until we can get a recovery team here.”

“Do not attempt to move it yourself,” Brigid admonished. “Who knows—”

“Yeah, I wasn’t going to get zapped by any security systems built into a hammer that can punch a hole in rock like fifty-five pounds’ worth of TNT,” Edwards murmured. “And while I don’t know the kind of heat that could incinerate two ounces of armor-piercing shell, let alone a whole volley…” Edwards trailed off, hoping for her to give him a bone of information.

“Even that calculation is beyond my current knowledge,” Brigid interjected. “But the melting point of lead is 328 degrees Celsius.”

“That’d be nice if I were shooting a handgun, but the Fifties fire tungsten-cored bullets.”

“Three thousand, four hundred and twenty-two degrees Celsius,” Brigid offered. “Oh, my.”

“Ten times hotter than you thought?” Edwards asked.

“Ten point four-three-three rounded to the nearest hundredth, but, yes,” Brigid said.

Edwards could hear the smile in her voice as he demonstrated at least a semblance of mathematical skill, so that the big brawler showed that he wasn’t a complete drain on the brains of the assembled Cerberus Away Teams. “This is very disconcerting.”

Edwards nodded, even though he knew the head-bob wouldn’t translate over the Commtact. But if he gave voice to his personal fears, he would lose more than a little of his appearance as a tough guy. Even so, he couldn’t disagree with Brigid’s own outwardly calm evaluation. The hammer’s powers were formidable, easily as dangerous as the glove that Maccan utilized in his attack on Cerberus, maybe even worse, since it was a larger item.

Edwards’s curiosity led him nearer to the deadly hammer, examining the crater even more closely. For all the force of its impact, it stood flatly on its head and had not penetrated the bottom of the bowl. This set the hairs on his neck on edge, because that was not how it should have been naturally. He recorded this, and transmitted it to Brigid.

“Edwards, do not approach any closer,” she warned.

“It fired off something like a braking rocket, didn’t it?” Edwards asked.

“Yes,” she told him. “Which means that the artifact, indeed, has some manner of autonomy.”

Edwards took a couple of strides backward, but even as he did so, he recalled the shape of the head. It was not the normal shape for a sledgehammer, nor was it a stylized T shape with Celtic carvings enmeshed on the sides, as the holy symbol for Thor that Edwards had seen before. This was a more crystalline structure, semitransparent, flat-sided but held in place by webbing forged from molten metal. It was a hexagonal prism, with a pair of hexagonal pyramids forming the caps on each end, as if it were a gigantic piece of quartz.

Except this quartz was bloodred and glowed from within as if possessed by a hellish flame at its core. The whole thing had an eerie electricity that made Edwards’s skin crawl, even behind the protection of his shadow suit. As he was fully environmentally enclosed within the high-tech garment, his instincts were on maximum alert simply due to the crackle of energy he felt in the air.

Brigid Baptiste, as usual, had been correct in her assessment. He’d gotten too close to an entity that could protect itself with the same facility it had protected its wielder from the heaviest “small arms” that had ever been developed. Edwards flexed his forearm and the Sin Eater automatically launched into the palm of his hand, ready to spit lead. He didn’t think it would be any more effective than the heavy machine guns he’d fired earlier, but Edwards was not going to go into death without a fight.

The throb of dread in the air lessened the further he backed from the alien weapon.

“Okay. If I don’t mess with you, you won’t mess with me,” Edwards murmured. As he spoke he could feel a tickle in his forehead, right from the spot where the inhuman Ullikummis had inserted the seed of his flesh into his brain. With that action, the ancient stone godling had gained total control of Edwards, turning him from a protector of Cerberus into an oppressive, dangerous marionette. The feeling was still raw inside his skin and spirit.

Whatever the source of the odd reminiscent feeling, it made him angry, reminding him of his violation by another alien mind as well as his failure as a protector of freedom. As much as he fought, he’d still ceded his will to something else, no matter how powerful. That even Brigid had likewise been changed and abused by the same godling didn’t help, as she’d found a way to fight Ullikummis’s control. Edwards hadn’t.

It still didn’t matter that the would-be conqueror was no less than the son of Enlil, nor engineered to even greater abilities than a standard Annunaki overlord. Edwards had fallen, and he still hadn’t felt as if he’d washed that stain from his spirit.

And right now, he felt as if the alien artifact in front of him saw that stain, smelled the stink of failure upon him, and saw an opportunity.

Edwards grit his teeth and settled in, standing guard. The anger spurred by the shame he felt made him wish someone would try to steal the hammer.

He wouldn’t even have minded going into battle against the winged monstrosity when it returned for its property.

Chapter 5

Perched on the nose of the parked Manta, his Sin Eater retracted into its forearm holster, Edwards knew he’d be waiting a while for someone to show up for Charun’s fallen hammer. Even at this distance, thirty yards from where it’d cratered the rocky hillock, its emanations whispered promises of ancient evil up and down his spine.

He checked his wrist chron, a display built into the forearm of the sleek, body-conforming shadow suit, actually. Brigid had contacted him again, alerting him that they would be on his position in about two hours. The big Magistrate passed the first hour and a quarter thinking about the brief, brutal aerial chase and battle he’d undergone. At supersonic speeds, even a few seconds of movement translated into miles of ground to cover, especially since there were a couple of ranges of mountains between him and New Olympus.

Even with the mighty strides and leaps of the Gear Skeletons, it was unlikely that there would be an arrival within the next thirty minutes.

Edwards started to inform himself not to take aerial combat so far away from friends who could come to his aid, but his common sense kicked in. The whole purpose of air support was to distance aerial combatants from troops on the ground. Getting the horrific Charun as far from his compatriots was the best thing to do. He couldn’t have anticipated the presence of a powerful artifact in need of recovery.

For a moment he saw that he had two shadows on the ground, looking past the wrist chron. Edwards squinted, then looked back up into the sky. Up there, somehow, had appeared a second brilliant sun, blazing white and hot. He scrambled to his feet, standing on the front of the Manta. The machine pistol snapped down into his fist, ready to go into action, but the strange, glowing disc was not moving. He put on his shadow suit’s faceplate and hoped for the visor to screen and filter out the blinding light as well as analyze the object in the sky.

The range was ten miles and it was advancing quickly.

He activated his Commtact microphone. “Guys, wherever you are…”

Nothing. No response, not even static. He turned his gaze back to the sky. For all the polarization of the lenses, necessary for use on walks outside the Manitus Moon Base, he could not make out a detail in regard to the blazing comet looming ever and ever closer to him. But in the space of fifteen seconds it had closed to nine miles. He couldn’t get details about the shape of the object, only its range, and there was no guarantee that it was right.

Edwards turned to open the cockpit, but the command signal to remotely open the canopy was jammed. He was in a complete blackout. He ground his teeth behind the faceplate and looked back at the hammer. “You wouldn’t be alone, would you?”

The hammer didn’t speak, but it didn’t have to. There was a new malice hanging in the air; a smug sense of superiority that proved annoying in humans but was infuriating when it came from a supposedly inanimate object.

Edwards tried to open the manual hatch, a backup in case of the failure of the remote access. The only problem with that was that now the hatch was shut; immobilized by a force so strong that even using his foot-long fighting knife he couldn’t budge it open. He bent the blade by sixty degrees and gave up for fear of losing an important survival tool or causing himself injury should the blade shatter. In frustration, he gave the cockpit a hammering blow in an effort to somehow override the Manta’s security systems.

“Come on, open,” he growled.

The Mantas, however, were machines meant to withstand the stresses of supersonic flight and re-entry flights from the moon. As strong as Edwards was, he was nothing compared to the force of air pressure striking the atmosphere at multiples of the speed of sound. And with the Manta sealed tight by the interference put out by Charun or one of his partners, it was far too late to grab a few grens from his war bag.

All he had were his Sin Eater and his Copperhead. It was formidable firepower when dealing with bandits or mindless mutants, but the mind behind the ever-approaching torch was encased in a body that had survived a crash with a Manta. Though his gun’s bullets moved at the same speed as a Manta in full acceleration, neither of them possessed the raw mass of the orbital transport. He might as well be throwing kernels of rice at the opposition.

Edwards grimaced in his impotence. He could stay and provide a brief, valiant, but ultimately doomed resistance, or at least try to do something useful. Thinking ahead, he knew he had to opt for the latter choice.

Edwards sighed, looking at the hammer in disgust, then ran, bounding off the Manta. Sticking around would be suicide, or worse, get him captured and used against the others. Running away was not going to be his course of action, though.

Edwards raced to find a good spot wherein he could hide his bulk. At least the shadow suit’s fiber optics were still in working condition, picking up the surrounding dirt and scrub brush to disguise him among them. It wasn’t invisibility, but it was still great camouflage. The suit’s fibers were also radar-absorbent, so that meant he might not be picked up by any form of detection.

The environmental seals in place with his faceplate also prevented his scent from escaping the skintight garment. With all of these precautions, however, Edwards was still worried. This wasn’t his first go-around with entities of superhuman weaponry or ability. One of the previous had strung him around like a marionette, turning him from an individual fighting for the future of the planet to a foot soldier trying to conquer it.

There was a bowel-chilling sense of dread as the blazing sun died down. Two winged figures hung in the air at least a hundred feet above the hammer. Edwards almost flinched as the faceplate optics zoomed in on them, almost as if they could hear the electronics focusing. He held his breath in an effort to further lower his profile. With his body mass draped over the Copperhead and Sin Eater, there were no metal objects to reflect radar pulses or show up magnetically, he hoped.

His thoughts were racing, so if either of these two were telepaths, they would hear him as if he were screaming at the top of his lungs. His fists clenched and he fought to control himself, to deaden his frantic mind. All the while, he hoped that the faceplate was still recording the image of these two entities.

Though they were winged, neither set of appendages on either appeared to move, not Charun and his leathery, demonic adornment, or the other’s feathered limbs. The other was far from being Charun’s equal in ugliness. Instead of a scaled, lipless crack with curved tusks sweeping up from his jaw, her mouth was lush with lips like flower petals or succulent as orange wedges and the color of wine. Instead of a scraggly black mane, thinning and pierced with yellowed horns, her brow was smooth, with auburn tresses cascading in looping curls that spiraled down past her shoulders.

Charun’s skin was blue-gray, holding the pallor of a near-mummified corpse, despite the vital and bulging muscles beneath that ashen, crinkled hide. Hers was deep and richly tanned, vibrant and glowing from within; a decidedly Mediterranean bronze gained by long hours taking in the sun. She, like he, was topless, her full, pendulous breasts jostling as they were framed by an X of leather straps that seemed to connect her to either the eerily motionless wings or the quiver across her shoulder.

Both of them were the same height, nearing eight feet from toe-tip to the top of their heads.

In one hand she held a great, hornlike torch that had faded to merely the brightness of ordinary flame now. In the other she held a bow. But even with his greatest magnification on the shadow suit optics, he could not see the string on the ancient-seeming weapon. Instead, where the bowstring would have been notched, on each arm of the bow there was a bejeweled block of golden metal that shimmered with the same brassy sheen of a Gear Skeleton. There was a hand-molded grip in the center, with a stubby projection making it seem like some form of pistol around which a bow had been built.

Edwards couldn’t help but think that this device might be more than gaudy, ornamental, ancient weaponry and more a piece of alien technology. The resemblance of segments to secondary orichalcum, the same Annunaki alloy in the Olympian war suits, was all the evidence he needed to make the assumption.

Speaking of the devil, the woman extended her arm with the torch. With a flash of brilliant flame, the ground suddenly came alive with several pillars of sprouting light. Edwards’s stomach twisted as either his eyes adjusted to the brilliance or the shapes of the pillars solidified into human forms. There were two Gear Skeletons, and from Brigid’s briefing, Edwards could recognize the Spartans as having the same ID numbers as those reported missing.

There were about twelve soldiers with the two battle robots, and the Cerberus Away Team member let out a low hiss of his retained breath, inhaling to replace the stale air. The armored warriors were clad in the familiar mix of modern Magistrate polycarbonate and classical Greek leather armor.

The faceplates were open on their helmets, though, and through the empty space, Edwards made out the white-eyed, slack-jawed expressions of the Olympian soldiers. They moved with normal agility and walked apace, but there was literally nothing but pinholes in the middle of their eyes.

Edwards’s molars ground together until they locked in place. Not good. Not at all, he thought.

The fluid nature of their movements indicated that the blank-eyed soldiers were in perfect health and ability, but the unblinking, slack nature of their features warned of something darker, deadlier, at work than hammers capable of smashing Mantas from the sky or torches that burned with the brightness of a sun. These were thralls, lost completely to the control of an outside entity.

And yet, for the soulless, zombified expressions, they were spread out, searching carefully for any sign of Edwards, their guns at arms. The two Gear Skeletons walked over and seized the Manta, picking it up as if it were a toy, further testimony to the kind of raw power of ancient Annunaki robotics. The mecha began walking to the west, carrying the aircraft in their powerful arms.

“The pilot might not have gone far.” The woman spoke, lowering closer.

Again, the motionless nature of those wings, despite their classic angelic or demonic shape, dug into Edwards’s nerves. It only took him a few moments to realize that the appendages wouldn’t be natural, but artificial constructs designed to match a human’s view of a winged deity. He’d been around with Cerberus long enough to know when technology was the explanation of something occurring in mythology, be it the hammer of a god or something as simple as flight.

The wings were silent and motionless on the backs of Charun and his beautiful partner, which took away one possibility that they were some manner of jet pack or rocket belt. Indeed, the eerie quiet pretty much narrowed things down to some manner of antigravity system. As to why their flying devices were so similar to wings…well, even the Manta had wings. It just made flight and maneuvering easier. He couldn’t see flaps or ailerons, but given their biological appearance, they could have been supple, enabling them to steer.

This also explained the lack of pain or reaction to injury when Edwards had put a .50-caliber round through Charun’s wing. He saw the scorched hole, flesh split and tattered at the edges of the “wound.” His optics couldn’t detect any mechanics sandwiched between layers of leathery skin, but nor could he see blood vessels or other signs that the wing was alive.

As if on silent, telepathic cue, Charun looked down at his injury, the limb bending around so he could look at it more closely. That tusked maw turned up at the corners in a smile.

The woman looked across and met his smile with her own. Almost playfully, Charun brought the bullet hole up to eye level and peered at his partner through the aperture, which elicited a laugh from the angelic female.

It looked like a true friendship between the two entities, reminiscent of what he had seen between Kane and Brigid, the ability to communicate entire ideas in just a few gestures, because the audio pickups on his suit’s hood were not conveying anything more than breathing between the two. The only words she had spoken seemed to be toward the slave stock searching the Manta’s landing area.

That spoke to either telepathy between the flying pair or an intimate friendship that often did not require a single word. Edwards, at this point, was desperately hoping it wasn’t telepathy. Such doomie powers would make all of the camouflage and hiding a moot, useless point. Thankfully, it didn’t seem as if the zombified Olympian troops had any more special senses as he lay, still as a rock, his suit’s camouflage system making him look like inert stone and soil piled as a short berm.

A soldier walked to within inches of Edwards’s motionless form, even looked right down at him, then continued on. The big brute of a man made a convincing pile of rocks, but that did not give him the freedom to breathe a sigh of relief. Instead he kept frozen, muscles tense to the point of aching. His breathing ran shallow and he only allowed himself to blink when his eyes were dried and burning.

It seemed like hours before the soldiers moved on and Charun and his “bride” rose further into the sky. She waved her torch, almost dismissively, and suddenly streaks of the same light that deposited the Olympian zombies on the ground flashed up, sucked into the tongue. Charun alighted on the ground just long enough to lift the massive hammer.

Edwards didn’t move his head, didn’t do more than sweep his eyes to the periphery of his vision at either angle. He waited, remaining still despite the growing ache and fatigue in his shoulders and neck.

He didn’t know how long it was, but finally the heavy tread of Gear Skeleton feet resounded again. Edwards almost didn’t want to relax.

“Edwards!” a voice shouted. When he turned his head toward the sound of that call, he could feel tendons popping at the base of his skull, making it feel as if hot, wet gore splashed down on his neck. He winced and gasped.

“Here,” he croaked.

A slender but muscular figure raced to his side. It was Kane.

He helped Edwards to his feet.

Looking around, he could see one of the suits, complete with a quiver of javelins and brassy, steel-wool curls flowing down over her shoulders. That had to have been the new Artem15.

“We’ve been trying to contact you for an hour,” Kane said.

Edwards pulled off his shadow suit hood. Beads of sweat splashed and evaporated in the cool air of the Greek afternoon.

Kane tilted his head and looked at the Commtact plate on his friend’s jaw. He snapped it off its mounting and looked closer at it. “Your Commtact looks like it burned out. What happened to the Manta?”

“Charun and his girlfriend showed up,” Edwards explained. “With two of the missing mobile suits. The suits picked up the Manta.”

“Girlfriend?” Kane asked, fishing into a belt pouch for a replacement plate. Once he did, he handed it to Edwards, who donned the new communicator.

Almost instantly he heard Brigid Baptiste’s voice. “Give me a description of this girlfriend,” she ordered.

Edwards launched into his recorded memory, then tapped the interface on his suit’s forearm. “I’m also sending you the vid my suit captured.”

“That is Vanth, and her torch is of equal power to Charun’s hammer,” Brigid explained. “And, yes, they are partners. Psychopomps.”

“Psychos? Yeah, I can see that,” Edwards grumbled. “Psychopomp…that’s not the same as crazy, right?”

“The term ‘psychopomp’ is Greek. Literally translated, it is ‘guide of the soul,’’’ Brigid told them both. “Choosers of the slain. Angels or sub-deities who take people to the afterlife.”

“That explains the zombie-like appearance of the Olympian soldiers searching for me,” Edwards added.

“The theft of their spirit is a concerning development,” Brigid mused over the Commtact. “As do Charun’s recovery of his hammer and the disappearance of our second and currently only flight-capable Manta.”

Kane frowned. “You said this torch could spit out the bodies and then pick them up again. Don’t yell at me for being wrong, but that sounds an awful lot like the Threshold or Lakesh’s interphaser.”

“If that,” Edwards mused. “It could be like one of those traps in the old vids. The ones with the four guys fighting the ghosts?”

“Turning the humans and the mecha into energy, then storing it in that format?” Brigid inquired. “And, yes, Kane, I can see the similarities in your assessment, as well.”

Edwards frowned. “Great.”

“What’s wrong?” Kane asked.

“I’m getting used to this crazy shit,” Edwards grumbled.

Kane clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Come on. There’s room for you on Artem15’s other arm.”

Edwards nodded and the two men were picked up, gingerly, with a gentle touch belying the robot skeleton’s massive might. Once they were settled into the crooks of the giant’s elbows, it turned and began to run; long, looping strides that crossed first fifteen, then twenty, then finally thirty feet in a single bound.

The wind in Edwards’s face was cool and refreshing, a release from the paralyzed caution and stony patience he’d had to endure while waiting for the arrival of his allies.

He still couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d let everyone down. No matter how much information Brigid and Kane got from his report and his vid.

Chapter 6

Smaragda sat at the conference table, her shoulders slumped, shocks of her white bangs hanging low over her baggy eyes. She stared at the top of the table, but she was so deadened, so numbed by the trauma of losing her platoon, she didn’t even register the grain of the faux wooden veneer topping the furniture in front of her. All she could do was fight the need to close her eyes, to dispel the horrors of her platoon’s swallowing, to keep the echoes of their screams from ringing in her ears.

She was clad in a nearly shapeless sweatshirt that covered her arms, hiding the recent work she’d carved into it with a razor. The flesh of her forearms was heavily checkered now and was raw from the disinfectant she’d poured over the dozens of new cuts to prevent sepsis. Smaragda hadn’t cut herself since she was a mere teenager, the focus and élan of being with the New Olympian military stealing not just privacy for the act, but also drowning out the need for controlling her pain.

Now her forearms stank of hydrogen peroxide, dampened somewhat by the loose bandages and the rumpled sleeves of her top. She didn’t know if her acknowledgment of the odors was just a strong memory or if she truly was literally reeking of it. Either way, it was too late now as the lights came on in the conference room, people filing in through different doors. Smaragda’s eyes rose slightly and she watched her queen roll herself along on her wheelchair.

Their eyes met as they were at the same level, and Smaragda instinctively looked back down, wishing that she could wither away, shrinking into the ground and out of the presence of Queen Diana.

She pressed her forearms harder against the tabletop and the pressure on her skin allowed slowly healing snips and cuts to pop open. It wasn’t the same kind of rush as she got from pressing a razor blade against it, but the pain still clouded her perceptions, taking her out of the moment, out of her self-loathing for…surviving.

Conversations murmured around the corners of her consciousness and it was something that helped her to muffle the distant memories of her dying friends. If only she’d stood her ground…at least she wouldn’t have felt so useless. No, she would have had the beautiful darkness of oblivion, her body and soul swallowed completely by the Stygian cloud, her suffering ended by its ravenous greed.

“So we have a new development,” Diana announced, her voice cutting sharply through both the conference room and into Smaragda’s numbed mind. “Our people are still alive.”

Smaragda looked up, staring at her queen, her hands clenching into tight fists so that even her closely trimmed nails threatened to spear through her palms. “What?”

“They are alive and under some form of mind control, or have had their bodies commandeered by the Etruscan menaces,” Diana clarified for her. “We have video of both the intruders and our missing people, thanks to Edwards over there.”

Smaragda glanced in the direction Diana pointed and saw a brawny, brooding figure, he having cast his eyes downward.

“Just trying to get as much as I could. I sure as hell was useless in terms of fighting those two,” Edwards grumbled.

Smaragda turned and glanced toward the screen, the lights dimming.

“Myrto, see if you can recognize anything off of the initial parts of the video,” Diana ordered. The queen’s voice held more than a little concern, something the disgraced soldier couldn’t understand. If anything, she should have been executed for such a disgusting failure.

Why worry about me? Smaragda mused silently. Why even have me here at this table?

But even as she did so, a small monitor was slid to her section of the table and she looked at the flying entities.

“Did you see anything like that?” Brigid Baptiste asked.

Smaragda shook her head. “The only thing any of us saw was a literal flood of dark, churning smoke. However, we were in the woods, and I couldn’t see through the canopy of trees.”

Brigid nodded. “Perhaps that is why there was that form of manifestation.”

Smaragda looked down at the screen, watching as her friends suddenly appeared, deposited on the ground by streams of light emanating from the torch held by the flying female figure, Vanth.

She could recognize them by the subtle differences, the little bits of customization on each of her fellow soldiers’ armor, even before the camera focused on the faces inside their open-visored helmets. She looked at one set of eyes and her heart sank. Every instinct was to grab the tiny monitor and hurl it aside, but she didn’t even possess the will to lift her arms, to even touch the image of lost brothers.

Edwards leaned across the table, his long arm snatching up the tablet and turning it away from her.

“She doesn’t need to see that shit,” the big man gruffly announced. “Pardon my language.”

“It’s excused,” Diana stated. “I’m sorry, Myrto.”

The failed soldier just shook her head, tried to say, “It’s okay,” but could only manage a mumbled, garbled semblance of human speech.

“Are you sure you’re all right to continue this debriefing?” Edwards spoke across the table.

A hand rested upon her shoulder and she looked up to see that it was Brigid Baptiste. Her touch was delicate and her expression was one of concern. “Let me talk with her alone, everyone.”

Smaragda shook her head. “I can be useful…”

“We know that,” Brigid answered her. “I just want to talk to you. One-on-one.”

Smaragda looked into the emerald, shining eyes of the tall woman, seeing a warmth that made her dislike herself even more, not wanting to deserve any of that for all that she’d failed to do. And yet the offered hand was irresistible and she rose, guided to a doorway.

* * *

EVEN IF BRIGID BAPTISTE were not possessed of a photographic memory, enabling her to recognize the signs of severe emotional trauma, she would have noticed the turmoil that wrapped up the frost-haired Smaragda. Taking her into the hallway, away from the presence of others, she managed to give the young woman some privacy. The corner of the corridor was well lit, but no one was using it.

“I’m sorry for dragging down the debriefing…” Smaragda began.

“You aren’t,” Brigid told her. She braced Smaragda’s face in both of her hands, locking eyes together. “Just look into my eyes and concentrate on my voice.”

“Why? What are you doing?” Smaragda asked.

“First, I’m going to get your complete testimony without causing you more conscious mental harm,” Brigid explained. “I’m hypnotizing you now, lulling your senses, making you feel more and more comfortable. As the notes of my voice strum gently in your ears, I am commanding your visual attention. With sight and hearing focused, calmed, you will become more attuned toward the cues that interfere with your detailed memory, as well as separate yourself from your emotional barriers.”

Smaragda’s dark, red-veined eyes slowly unfocused with Brigid’s continued description of the hypnosis process, calming her, fixating her until Brigid was able to draw her hands away from the girl’s cheeks.

Smaragda stood stock-still and the Cerberus archivist began asking her questions and receiving honest answers. The trick to hypnosis was simply a case of distraction of the conscious mind, taking away filters of behavior and emotion that would otherwise interfere with clarity of communication.

The shell-shocked soldier was much more forthcoming in her responses, and didn’t seem as if she wanted to fold herself away under the table. And since this was Brigid Baptiste, not a single syllable, not a single impression, would be forgotten or lost in the translation. Her brilliant mind absorbed every fact and description uttered by Smaragda, as well as opinions and impressions on things she could only speculate about.

The whole hypnotic session took only fifteen minutes for the direct questioning and Brigid was partially of a mind to continue, digging into Smaragda’s self-loathing and attempt to take care of it, like a surgeon having discovered a tumor in the midst of an operation. However, Brigid realized that if she attempted to dig too deeply, she could cause as much harm as she’d attempt to undo. No, meatball surgery on the traumatized young woman was not going to be on the menu today.

Smaragda’s healing would have to come from a more conventional source, but even as Brigid closed out the hypnotic session, she complimented the woman on her observational skills and her ability to bring vital intelligence to New Olympus. Positive reinforcement on the subconscious level could be a minor salve, but it wouldn’t upset the Greek woman’s thoughts such as an attempt to bury her feelings of self-loathing and survivor’s guilt. Putting that down deeper in Smaragda’s mind would be exactly the opposite of removing a tumor; it would be pushing a packet of septic and diseased flesh into a vulnerable set of organs, waiting for one moment to split and infect the rest of her, poisoning everything else she did.

No, Brigid couldn’t sublimate the raw feelings on Smaragda’s part. She could only attempt to leave an impression that she actually had done some good.

With a snap, Smaragda blinked her bloodshot eyes.

There was a moment where the soldier seemed unsteady on her feet, but Brigid assisted her with a firm hand on her shoulder.

“What happened? It feels like I fell asleep,” she said.

Brigid nodded. “In a way you did. I hypnotized you.”

Smaragda’s brow wrinkled as she looked up at the tall Cerberus woman. “Hypnotized. You didn’t do something like make me cluck like a chicken if someone says ‘dinner’ or something, right?”

“Nothing like that,” Brigid answered.

Smaragda managed a brief flicker of a smile before she cast her gaze to the floor. “At least I was good for something.”

Brigid put her arm around the soldier’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s get back to the meeting.”

This time she sat Smaragda right next to Edwards. The big man seemed confused for a moment.

“She’s too hard on herself, just like you,” Brigid murmured. “Maybe keep an eye on her and take your mind off of your ill-perceived failures.”

The CAT member nodded. “All right. I can take a hint,” he added with a mock growl.

“How’d you screw up?” Brigid heard Smaragda ask as she returned to the head of the table. At this point, Kane and Grant put away the cards they were toying with as they’d waited for her to return. She chuckled at the two of them sitting back up and looking interested, as if they were schoolboys afraid of being busted by their teacher.

“I thought you would be getting more information from Diana and Ari,” Brigid said.

“We did. But after we got all of that, and showed more of the vid, we had time left over,” Kane told her.

“What did you get?” Grant asked her.

“I got deeper information on the situation,” Brigid said. “And it contrasts with the interview in only a few minor errors and differences.”

“I told the truth,” Smaragda interjected.

Brigid nodded. “You did. But human memory is, for most people, a fickle thing. The human mind alters perceptions upon reflection, adding details that might not have been there in the original case, and ignoring others that seemed irrelevant at the time. A study in the late twentieth century proved that eyewitness testimony was only accurate in one instance out of ten where there were other forms of corroboration such as audio and video recording.”

“Really?” Kane asked.

Brigid nodded. “In my instance, that kind of filter for memory is missing, most likely a genetic anomaly.”

“Like a doomie.” Edwards spoke up.

Domi shook her head. “Brigid’s too smart for that. Doomies can’t handle the future. They get crazy. Brigid looks straight back.”

Brigid managed a weak smile. She didn’t want to correct her friend and oft-times student Domi. She could see the future, but only via educated calculations based upon prior data, a cause-and-effect form of premonition. She didn’t engage in it too often, only for the purposes of planning for battle and avoiding dangers. And even then, her calculations were not one hundred percent.

“Did Myrto see anything?” Diana asked.

“She described the fog she mentioned in detail,” Brigid stated. “And as our initial evaluation of potential myths, there was a Stygian aspect to the cloud. And yet there was something equally familiar to us. During a recent expedition to Africa, we encountered a similar unnatural darkness. To every one of our senses, it was something that was a truly physical entity. Not even a flashlight or high-tech optics could cut through it.”

“What was it really?” Aristotle asked.

“It was a psychic projection. One that was so strong, it even numbed tactile senses,” Brigid stated. “So, what Myrto saw could have been something similar. A form of smoke screen.”

“Why not just use an actual smoke screen? Wouldn’t that take a lot of energy?” Aristotle persisted.

“Because they were facing soldiers. There had to be a focus for them to counter. Something akin to my hypnosis of Myrto,” Brigid explained. “The black, invulnerable fog was something that could draw the fire of the Olympian troops without endangering them in the process.”

“You mean that my men were opening fire on a cloud that wasn’t there, and it wasn’t even concealing the ones attacking us?” Smaragda asked.

Brigid felt some relief as the soldier regained some of the fire in her belly.

“It may have, in some instances. But being a black fog to your conscious mind, it allowed you to shoot into it and not even register any impacts. You could even have been steered to shooting between your friends. Or have known, subconsciously, where your brethren were. It is no good to take people as zombie prisoners when their own compatriots open fire and cut them down,” Brigid told her. “In that way, you protected your brethren, deliberately shooting not to hit them.”

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