James Axler - Pantheon Of Vengeance

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

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

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

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

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

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 Her medical assistants had been replaced by hunch-backed, blue-scaled mutants from the Tartarus horde.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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