James Axler - Pantheon Of Vengeance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hera shook her head. “No.”

“But—” Diana began in protest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ari glanced at the angelic reptilian once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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