Pantheon Of Vengeance

“Potentially,” Brigid said. “But I’d presume that it would simply be more efficient to hang one off the bottom of a Deathbird. I’d consider a Manta, but the damaged armor appears ill suited for orbital use.”

Grant took a deep breath. “Fifteen feet tall. Plenty big, but not as big as some of the monstrosities in myths.”

“Like Talos or the Colossus of Rhodes,” Brigid mentioned.

“How big would those be?” Domi asked.

“Descriptions are inconsistent,” Brigid explained. “And they could have been highly embellished as mythology advanced. Talos could reasonably have been about forty to sixty feet tall, and the Colossus about twice that.”

Domi looked back to the robot laying on its back. “Well, it’s nice to know that we have friendly folks in control of that technology. I can see why we’d want to hook up with them right away.”

Philboyd nodded. “The Greek robot pilots can fight, and they have an advanced form of technology. It’d be like the Tigers of Heaven had our Mantas from the start.”

“And if the snake-faces are back and in action,” Grant began, “we can use that kind of fighting power.”

“Which explains the presence of a dropship in the region,” Kane grumbled. “The Greeks represent a possible enemy, and the overlords don’t want to have to deal with them.”

“You’re right. We’d better assemble an away team to meet them,” Lakesh urged. “Especially if they can be potential allies.”

“With a heads-up, we could make invaluable friends,” Brigid noted. “What could go wrong?”

Philboyd paled, remembering the conflict with Maccan, a Tuatha prince, that had been sparked when the Outlanders visited the Manitius Moon base for the first time. Grant and Kane looked at each other silently.

“Suit up,” the two partners said in harmony.

“I’m coming, too,” Domi added.

“We might need backup from CAT Beta,” Kane said.

“Then I’ll be on scene. If necessary, the rest of my team will pop in,” Domi said. “One of the ex-Mags can substitute for me.”

Brigid Baptiste sighed. In asking the rhetorical question, she’d thrown out temptation for fate. She groaned softly. “Time to break out the battle bra again.”

Chapter 3

Diana was just another wheelchair jockey in the meeting hall, sitting with the rest of the pantheon of hero-suit drivers. Zoo, Airy, Pollie and the rest were arranged around a bisected corpse illuminated by a searing white cone of light. The separated torso had been seared. Cauterized wounds from Airy’s thermal ax had sealed in the dead thing’s juices behind walls of charred flesh. The face had been cleaned up, and it was at once handsome and intimidating. Though finely sculpted, the face’s beauty was sheathed in fine-scaled, lizardlike armor. Diana tried to shake off her imaginings of this creature’s angelic magnetism, even in its sleep of oblivion.

She had to remind herself that this being had been fighting alongside the Tartarus mutants, joining them in a raid on a New Olympian settlement. The mutants were mass murderers, bred for attacking and exterminating humans. The wake of death and terror that Thanatos’s minions had left was something that Diana would never forget. She reminded herself of the scaled thugs’ horrific actions every time she touched her fused, fire-scarred cheek or forehead. The handsome snakelike humanoids that were related to the lifeless thing under the blazing light were allied with the monsters that inspired Diana to sacrifice her remaining leg so that she could fit into the cockpit of a hero suit.

The orichalcum-framed battle suits had been designed around slighter, smaller creatures. As such, even a small woman like Diana had been before the Tartarus raids had scarred and mutilated her, was too large for the cockpit. The metal caps on her thigh stumps and the cybernetic port adjacent to her lower spine were less a reminder of her wounds than they were badges of her empowerment. Her half-destroyed face was a brand of the evil that rose from the Tartarus vats.

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.”