by James Axler
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.
