spinal columns, even whiplash.
More vulnerable to attack, the body-armor clad Praetorians at least didn’t have to worry about their own physical abilities ripping them or shattering them when they fought to the limits of their bodies.
Smaragda flicked the visor of her helmet to scan mode, sweeping along the sides of the road, searching for unusual heat sources on infrared. The last thing they needed was an ambush. There was not supposed to be an enemy force in this part of the country, despite the rumors that had drawn them here.
Something dark had been awakened in recent days. Towns and villages in the interior had stopped communicating, stopped trading, disappearing as if they had never existed. One man returned from a visit to such a village, his hair turned white, speaking of “they who walked as ghosts” and of winged angels, both horrible and wonderful.
The Italians had turned to their neighbors, seeking help, and New Olympus’s new rulers sensed that such occurrences bore the stink of urgency. A full army would be too much, but with the stories of the horrible angels, the trio of mobile armor suits was, hopefully, going to be sufficient. There was a line between coming in too hard or too soft. Smaragda felt better with the Skeletons lumbering at her side.
All being well, with them present, they would be prepared for the very worst. Three giants with shoulder-mounted machine guns and enormous axes and swords would dissuade any opponent, even if they were winged angels of gigantic proportion themselves.
Smaragda scanned the sides of the road leading to the town that had spooked the Etruscan traders so badly, looking for signs of what could have terrified the lone survivor. She gripped her M-16 rifle tightly, but she kept her finger wrapped around the handle, firmly under the trigger guard so as not to accidentally set off the weapon. She was in no mood to waste ammunition or to cause undue injury. Carrying your gun with your finger on the trigger was a sure way to do both.
Over the heavy, ponderous thuds of the Spartans’ gigantic claws, Smaragda picked up something that she couldn’t quite make out. She immediately held up her fist.
The trained Olympians came to a halt.
Deafening silence descended upon the Greek column and she realized what felt so odd.
There were birds on the branches of the trees along the road, but they made no sound. They were still, no nervous tics she’d seen other birds display as they, even in rest, continuously turned their heads, making certain nothing was creeping up on them. The visible birds, however, was not what had truly disturbed her.
There were trees, heavy and dense with foliage, but the impunity of nests of hidden birds was not accompanied by the riot of tweets and chirps that warned any intruder of how outnumbered they would be if they dared enter the thicket. The countryside was silent.
Smaragda stepped off the road, closing on one of the closest trees. Her men watched as she slung the rifle, then drew the falcata. With a twist, she rapped the spine against a low-hanging branch where a songbird perched.
The creature turned its attention toward her, blinked with eyes slow and gummy, but did not launch. Even the turn of its head was casual, unconcerned, not the flicker movement of a normal bird. Smaragda gave the branch another tap with the spine of her sword. The songbird took a clumsy sideways step further along the branch, then unfurled its wings.
Just before she could tap the branch a third time the songbird took off, wings flapping powerfully, moving with the natural strength and speed of the creature, the limbs beating with the urgency necessary to keep the tiny thing aloft. It wasn’t as if the songbird was in some sort of debilitating trance. It flew straight and true.
It just didn’t seem to care. The normally skittish creature would have taken off on Smaragda’s approach, let alone not stay in place for two raps on its perch.
“Not good,” she said.
Niklo spoke up. “This place has bad mojo.”
Niklo had ten years on Smaragda and it showed in his gruff, grizzled looks. He’d been through plenty of battles, before Hera and Z005 arrived in Greece, mixing it up with bandits and other coldhearted thugs who made their living preying off the defenseless and helpless in postapocalyptic, shattered Greece. When the hydra drones rose up, Niklo had been one of the first who knew what to do back when the best weapons were swords and muskets. Before Hera had opened the Olympus Redoubt and its stockpiles of late-twentieth-century armaments, it was a matter of toughness.
Smaragda and Niklo had been thrown together in the madness of the hydra wars, quickly gaining each other’s trust as they’d stood the line against swarms of mutant clones bred in the ancient vats of the Crack.
Niklo’s unease at the strangeness of this dead countryside echoed hers and, with those five words, cemented Smaragda’s instincts. Despite the fact that Smaragda had gotten an officer’s commission and Niklo remained master sergeant, there was no jealousy or animosity between them. Smaragda’s role entailed much more red tape, something Niklo could pawn off onto her. In the meantime, officer corps didn’t regularly get issued a Squad Automatic Weapon, either, and the brawny, grizzled Niklo loved using the light machine gun to plow their way out of an ambush with a long belt of ammo.
“Tan, get on the radio. We’re experiencing something weird. Everyone, if your weapons aren’t hot already, safeties off,” Smaragda ordered.
“You heard the lady!” Niklo bellowed. “Heads on swivels, standard perimeter protocols!”
“Movement!” came a cry from their scout up the road.
Smaragda turned and jogged toward the man. Niklo cut her off.
“You talk to home base,” he told her.
Smaragda wrinkled her nose, not wanting to expose any of her men to danger while she was busy on the blower back to Olympus. Even so, she was the one in charge and she was the one whose opinion and authority mattered. This was a chain-of-command decision.
“If things look bad, you hold down the trigger until you melt the barrel laying down cover fire for our retreat,” Smaragda ordered him. “And you make damn sure you come back, or I’m swimming across the Styx and dragging you back to life.”
Niklo smirked, his lined face a road map of seventy years lived in the space of forty, dark eyes twinkling. “Myr, I’m counting on you getting me back from Hades.”
The Olympians, turned into a well-oiled military machine of professional warriors, remained in their defensive positions, alert and ready for trouble. No one was in the line of fire of the other and each had a designated vector to scan and search. Everyone knelt, making themselves smaller targets and bringing their knee and thigh armor up to their chests to bolster the protection of their vital organs against incoming fire.
Thanos—“Tan” to his platoon mates and friends, who seemed to be everyone—looked concerned as he was on the radio. “Not getting a signal. Something is jamming us.”
“How can that be?” the pilot of the Spartan asked. “This radio is designed to transmit across hundreds of miles. It’s predark technology, solid-state and can cut through any interference like a knife through mud.”
Tan shook his head. “Listen to this.”
Smaragda took the receiver. The only sound on the other end was…unnatural.
A knocked-out radio should only
