by James Axler
So much for keeping them all as slaves and prisoners, Domi mused. Vanth was actually providing for their well-being, so they wouldn’t starve or dehydrate. Then again, keeping them alive and healthy might have been the only means of keeping her power sources. There was a mix of humans and animals down there that, together, could provide enough mental energy to do almost anything the demigoddess wanted.
Domi looked around and noticed a stairwell. She debated going down into the pit of prisoners, but also noticed that there was no room for one of the Gear Skeletons to climb the stairs. There must have been some other place of storage for the war machines.
The other reason she declined to go down there was that there was a good chance someone would be awake and alert enough to transmit her presence to Vanth. Better to observe from afar than to get in close. She took several digital photographs using the shadow suit hood, storing them for when they were once again out in the open. She slinked back along the corridor that lead here and heard the clanking of a gate in the distance. She froze in a niche in the wall, waiting for the arrival of the Spartans and the New Olympians that had appeared before, and had granted CAT Beta the means to enter this complex.
The movements of the mechanical giants seemed much slower now, and accordingly, the humans from Greece kept to the more leisurely pace of their robots.
Peering through the dark, she made out the figures as they carried something between them. It was Edwards’s Manta. They hauled it along as if it were just a large chair between two movers. The mind-controlled soldiers stayed around them, guarding, but also using their flashlights to guide the giants and their burden. The group made it to an intersection then turned off.
Domi waited a few moments, then jogged off after them, keeping her profile low, her footsteps soft, though the heavy stomps of Olympian footwear and robotic claw treads made more than sufficient ambient noise to conceal a dancing dinosaur.
Domi stayed with her stealth training, never making a move or a noise that would betray her position, never committing to a movement that would leave her stuck out in the open to an observer. She shadowed the group, who didn’t seem to care if they were followed or not. That didn’t mean she wasn’t remaining on her toes, though. One mistake and this whole mountain could come crashing down on her and her allies in CAT Beta.
She continued counting down the time to Edwards’s deadline in her mind; she’d only been exploring for about six minutes. So far she’d managed to pick up a lot of information about the true scope and nature of Vanth. Continuing along, she paused as the Spartans took the Manta into an underground hangar, settling it down gently on its landing gear. With a quick scan of the hangar, Domi noticed that there was a third Spartan, matching the insignias of the suits taken by Vanth’s song. It was standing in a stall next to the other two. These particular Gear Skeletons had similar but crudely painted insignias and decals that, by comparison, showed them for the frauds they were.
Domi also noticed one other thing. The “pilots” inside those armored giants were far from human. It looked as if someone had turned a person into dough and hurled them into a pilot’s seat rather than an amputee or a dwarven pilot. She wrinkled her nose in disgust as the two suits strode over and parked themselves. Soldiers immediately began bringing food to the melted monstrosities inside the chests of the robots, unseemly heads turning and stretching on necks to gum at spoonfuls of rice and beans.
The insides of their mouths were without teeth and their tongues were bulbous, swollen and pink, flattening out to let the spoonfuls land on them, before slurping back between lips. It reminded Domi of a desert tortoise gnawing at a pulpy cactus, except the turtle was cute to the feral girl. This inspired her at every second to chop it into pieces with an ax then burn the remains.
Domi closed her eyes and took a cleansing breath, steeling her nerves against the disgusting sight. Her distaste at what was on display did not prevent her from snapping pictures on her hood’s optics. The rest of Cerberus was going to get an eyeful, no holds barred. The things down here were atrocities, a familiar-seeming abomination, but these living spitballs, all tentacles and pseudopods, were something new that Brigid Baptiste would have to know about. The truth of the “servile” Spartans was a lie laid bare by the existence of these sluglike horrors.
The soldiers themselves took off their helmets and they, too, seemed to be far from the mindless drones that the Cerberus explorers had encountered so far. Their faces were coated in some form of dust or paint that made them seem pallid and lifeless. They were also not human, not if their glassy, milky eyes had anything to say about it. These things were naturally without any detail or structure to their eyes save for the pinpoint pupil at the center.
She kept “snapping” photos of these creatures. They were hairless, stretched and distorted in their appearance, the Olympian armor the only thing that made them appear normal. As they doffed their uniforms, Domi could see that their color was a natural grayish, and was immediately reminded of Quavell and the other hybrids. These weren’t quite the same, though, as the similarities were vague enough to delay her observation of this fact. They might have been a part of Vanth and Charun’s true race, as the Quad V hybrids had been designed from the ground up to be one of the servant races of the barons.
Indeed, the barons themselves were hybrids, with ancient Annunaki DNA planted into the human race. When Tiamat returned and unleashed her signal to evolve, the barons literally shed their old skins, growing from five-foot spindly creatures to seven-foot, muscular and beautiful godlings. The Quad Vs had been removed from the equation, the hundreds or thousands of these creatures growing to six feet in height, their wills and minds sapped to become the Nephilim.
Domi narrowed her eyes.
The Nephilim were Quad V hybrids whose minds and individuality were stolen or sublimated and then mutated. Bres had also created his own warrior drones—the Fomori. All of this sounded a hell of a lot like the activity Vanth initiated with the Italians and the missing Olympian expedition; all those humans left milling around in their cells.
She tried listening in on the conversations of the unusual aliens, but they didn’t speak. This added to their alien nature, if only for the knowledge that Vanth was suspected of possessing telepathic abilities, as well as other entities that they’d encountered. All of this made Domi keep herself hidden and camouflaged with even more paranoid urgency. Brigid had engaged CAT Beta in posthypnotic suggestions that gave their surface thoughts good cover, should they be discovered. They were also utilizing their Commtacts to produce a form of white noise, rendering them invisible on radio frequencies the Cerberus scientists assumed telepathy operated on.
It was all experimental, and for all Domi knew, the creatures in front of her were simply humoring her, ignoring the nosy little ape as she crawled around their basement.
If that was the case, then Kane and the others were in great danger above.
Domi frowned beneath the faceplate of her armor. These things from Styx—“Stygians” as Brigid labeled them—were beyond the kind of threat they had been anticipating. All their less-lethal combat gear was intended to hold off innocent but mindless throngs of humans sent against them. There were humans and birds used as the eyes of Vanth, but it appeared that when it came to military action, these protean meat puppets were the ones to do that work.
Movement sounded in the corridor leading from the gate and Domi stilled and calmed herself, emptying her mind. There was one last Stygian, wearing the Olympian field armor, walking back. It carried a bloody lump of flesh in both hands. The lump looked like the squirmy, sluglike head of the things bonded with the Gear Skeletons. A severed head.
The soldier came closer and Domi continued to take pictures. The waxy eyes blinked, rippling, oozing flesh acting as lids, demonstrating that the severed part was still alive. Domi also got to see that the neck stump had fused with the Stygian holding it, the fleshy protuberance entering the opened belly of the armor and connecting to the thing
beneath.
The soldier and its grisly charge passed her by, not noticing her, and continued into the robot hangar. Domi watched as the neck came unstuck from its bearer, and she fought the urge to shiver, her skin spawning goose bumps as the disembodied head was placed onto the flesh of one of the other “pilots.”
The dully gumming creature barely acknowledged the new mind merging with its body, until the new head opened its wound of a mouth, moaning for spoonfuls of food. Then, the original head began licking the gore and blood off its new conjoined brother.
Domi steeled herself, ignoring the churning in her belly.
She didn’t envy those who would see these pictures or this vid when she sent it back to Cerberus.
Chapter 18
It took a half an hour for CAT Beta to come close enough to the surface to transmit their findings home. Lakesh had been on the edge of his seat awaiting the news.
“Any problems?” Lakesh asked.
“Nope. As long as there was an open conduit to the surface, even with an iron gate in the way, the signal was clear,” Bry said. “Of course, they had to transmit it to one of the satellites on their horizon, from their perspective.”
“I’m glad you were able to maneuver one to be in line with the entrance to the underground pyramid.” Lakesh sighed. “Otherwise, who knows how long we would have to wait for them to get out of…what is that?”
Bry glanced at the screen Lakesh was watching. Brewster Philboyd was on hand and turned away, spewing his coffee into a garbage can. Philboyd began dry heaving, his torment amplified by the echoes in the small metal bucket.
“That’s—” Philboyd gagged “—nothing that should be.”
Lakesh observed Domi’s photographs of the contents of the Gear Skeletons inside Vanth’s hangar. He’d already made notice of the three captured war suits, but the molten, distorted blobs of flesh and muscle sitting within the cockpits of the extant armors were at once disturbing and enthralling. Though he wasn’t a biologist, he could see where the amorphous nature of the pilots was a boon to their ability to interface with the control systems, especially as he couldn’t see where a command node could be inserted onto their forms.
He also was acutely aware of how similar a set of flesh sculpting had returned him from a 250-year-old cryogenically preserved man physically in his eighties to a man in his late forties. Flesh, bone and even his bionic parts had been broken down and rebuilt to the molecular scale by Enlil in his guise as Sam the Imperator.
That bit of transformation of old and dying cells to “new ones” was one of the few reasons why Lakesh could go out on missions, occasionally, and actually be a suitable lover to Domi. He realized that, quite easily, Sam could have made him into any manner of abomination. He looked through the pictures, eliciting grunts from Bry and Philboyd.
The armored soldiers, however, were an even greater revelation. Lakesh had been in on the Project of Unification; one of the great minds behind the barons and their means of crossing miles and keeping the great villes in touch with each other via mat-trans and the remarkable technologies stored within the redoubts. He realized that humanity’s fate had been hijacked by tyrannical forces from the time that humankind was first crawling on all fours.
The Stygians were similar to the hybrids, but there was sufficient difference that Lakesh was wondering if they were some manner of prototype creatures, perhaps a halfway breed between the Quad V and Balam, the last Archon who had overseen and limited the growth of humanity’s intellect and independence. Balam had wavered from his original mission as minion of the Annunaki and their baronial incarnations.
There was nothing to say that these creatures were not some intermediate form of servitor race. Over the past year Lakesh and the rest of Cerberus had been gaining new insights into the world when Annunaki overlords were the unsubtle rulers of Earth, before their hibernation, their descent into the background due to their accords with the Tuatha de Danaan.
The Igigi were what the Nephilim had once been, before Enlil’s terrible act, lobotomizing the race into a seemingly endless army of warrior drones. Perhaps it wasn’t a lobotomizing of an entire species, but a cloning and genetic manipulation. The Nephilim were not on display here, though. It was the Stygians, and Lakesh saw one of them enter, wielding the apparently severed head of one of its allies. Judging by the similarity of the appearance of the “skeleton pilots” and the fleshy linkage with the humanoid Stygian, this must have been another pilot.
Lakesh had received the report of the battle with the cyclops from Kane and Grant.
This had been the mind operating the giant warrior, the thing that CAT Alpha had fought, shoulder to shoulder with Charun, against. Grant may have showed that he was able to operate the deadly hammer of the Etruscan godling, but a small sliver of the creature survived, possibly for the sake that Kane and Grant had been spent after their war with the gigantic abomination and three of its smaller comrades. Tired, unwilling to stick around the abattoir, the two men and Charun returned to the buried pyramid, letting the “mindless thralls” do the cleanup work and to conveniently bring the surviving seed of the cyclops home.
Lakesh would have to ask DeFore about this. While she was nominally the chief medic at Cerberus, her strengths were in biology, so she would understand these things much better. If that thing could withstand a plasma discharge of the kind that Grant and Kane described, they’d need to know a lot more about these entities.
For now, Lakesh forestalled the ill feelings in his gut and began composing a quick, cryptic note for Brigid Baptiste to receive during their next bit of contact.
Lakesh simply hoped he’d still be able to warn CAT Alpha of the true extent of their trap.
* * *
SMARAGDA WAS GLAD when Domi returned to their hideout in the storage cell. She’d been trying to process the memories of the passage of her fellow soldiers. Her alleged fellow soldiers.
Finally, when Domi returned and explained what she’d seen, the Olympian soldier let out a breath of relief.
“I thought my mind was playing tricks on me,” she told CAT Beta. “None of them looked right as they passed by.”
She looked over the pictures, shared via suit-to-suit electrical conductivity rather than by transmission, on her suit’s forearm sleeve, configured as a monitor. “Then it’s likely that my people are down in the pit?”
“I know you’d love to go down there,” Domi said.
“Only if Charun and Vanth are kept busy,” Smaragda stated. “Face it, we heard the sound of that hammer striking outside. We’re all loaded up with some nice firearms, but that is some terrifying shit.”
“Not looking forward to fighting him, either,” Domi admitted.
“That much is obvious,” Edwards murmured. “All right, so Myrto is not going to get stupid and jump the gun to rescue her partners. Great. We’re all being smart about this.”
“Smart is a relative thing. After all, we’re stuck in here with aliens, including alien-piloted robots, and locked in by a several-ton, wrought-iron gate,” Sinclair said.
“Always looking on the bright side,” Domi answered.
“Well, you came back fairly quickly,” Edwards said. “How much more did you explore?”
“We could look for another exit to the surface,” Sela agreed. “But the chances are, the way up and out would be right through the hangar where the aliens are.”
“And going through them would raise enough of a racket to bring Vanth and Charun running. Or even if we snuck past them…” Edwards noted.
“We wait for them,” Domi said. “Commtacts on passive pickup. Hear when they’re talking.”
“You think they’ll bring them down here to see the prisoners?” Smaragda asked.
“Been dealing with enough of these types,” Domi answered. “Love to show off. Show how smart they are. Their I-love-me wall.”
“Even if that means it’ll turn Kane and the others against them?” Smaragda continued.
Domi no
dded. “Enlil never minded. Walked us all around his ship. Thought he was the shit.”
Smaragda nodded. “Hera was the same way with you, too. The old Hera, that is. She let you in, even though you might have figured out her scam.”
“She was balancing threats at the time. The Hydrae were now under the control of Marduk,” Sinclair added. “And we were the only ones who could help her stop him. Well, Kane, Grant and Brigid.”
“You helped, too,” Domi returned.
Sinclair shook her head. “We all know who the stars of this show are.”
“This world…more complex every passing day,” Domi said. “We get involved as much as they do. We carry our weight.”
“But every day, we get a little closer to being disposable,” Sinclair murmured.
“No,” Domi countered. “We’re all needed to keep building. Protecting future.”
“Yeah, Sela,” Edwards added. “What’d that actor say? No small roles, only small actors?”
“Speak for yourself, Tiny,” Sinclair countered. “All right. Just the way that Lakesh talks about their damn confluence of luck…”
“Hey, we’re still here,” Edwards said. “It’s not like we’re red shirts. Just keep going, one step after another. And don’t be stupid. We weren’t picked because we make mistakes.”
“Just remember, we’re human, not legends,” Sinclair said.
“So’re Kane and others,” Domi added. “Smart enough to avoid mistakes. Tough enough to survive when we make ’em. Quick enough to learn from ’em, too. Why they picked you two. More ’n’ one-dimensional.”
“More than just hammers looking for nails,” Sinclair agreed. “Okay. Even so, we’re going to be waiting awhile.”
“But now we know,” Smaragda said. “We know they’re not using our people as soldiers, and that one of our Spartan pilots didn’t die to give Kane and Grant a good show as a cyclops.”