gibbering chuckle escaped five pairs of lips, and they lurched forward just before freezing, yellow slits widening with horror. Domi had heard the thunderous beat of ponderous footfalls shaking the earth behind her, but now there was only silence. She would be caught in the line of fire between the machine-gun-armed robot and the savage clones anyway, so she stood her ground, ready to make the mutants pay dearly for her life. The wind rose over her head, the breeze so strong that it flicked the head wrap off her bone-colored hair, the rag fluttering away uselessly. It was a sudden, unnatural breeze that set off her instincts. Reflexively, she rolled backward, away from the quintet of hordelings, but the golden-maned titan wouldn’t have landed on her. The crash of three thousand pounds of mechanized warrior shook Domi almost off her feet.
Even more stunning was the raw power emanating from the armored war machine standing in front of her.
It had landed on one mutant, and twisted limbs poked up between the giant’s metal toe claws. With a grace belying its enormous bulk, the robot lashed out with long, hydraulic-piston arms. It quickly snatched up two mutants from their perches atop boulders, eliciting screeches of horror. Powerful crushing fingers closed on their toylike little bodies, gore vomiting between gigantic metal fingers. The squeals ended moments before the creatures’ lower bodies plopped greasily onto the rocky ground, everything that their bellies and legs had been attached to pulverized into liquid mush. A fourth hordeling screeched in rage, lunging to attack the mechanized warrior.
Domi snapped up her pistol and blew it out of the air, .45-caliber slugs cutting it down in midflight.
Artem15 whirled at the sound of gunshots and watched the reptilian clone flop dead on the ground. Red camera lenses tightened in focus, examining the young woman she’d come to rescue.
“Lower the weapon,” she ordered the albino girl.
“Not on your life,” Domi said. She clenched her pistol and knife, ruby-red eyes glaring in defiance.
“Why not?” Artem15 challenged.
“Not wrapped in metal!” Domi spit. Her anger dissipated into alarm. “One’s getting away!”
Artem15 whirled in response to the warning, following the flash of movement as the last mutant fled with a speed born of pure terror. Her shoulder guns chattered to life, ripping out streams of bullets that sliced the misshapen horde clone to ribbons. “Thanks for that.”
“Not your enemy,” Domi returned. “Thanks for your help.”
Artem15 straightened and nodded.
“You speak English?” Domi asked.
“All robot pilots do,” the woman in the mobile armor replied. “But you…Where are you from? Where’d you get that gun? And what is that uniform you’re wearing?”
Domi looked down at her pistol, realizing that the flood of the pilot’s questions were more than she could easily explain. “My stuff’s from a lot of places. Me, I’m from America. I’m from a place called Cerberus.”
Artem15 tilted her head. “Cerberus?” she said with interest. “Did you come alone?”
“Three friends,” Domi answered, still nervous enough to speak in her clipped vocabulary. Her ruby-red eyes widened with shocked realization. “Back this way!”
Artem15’s robot cameras whirred, looking toward the direction that Domi was starting in. “Wait! I hear the fighting. Climb on!”
“Climb on?” Domi asked.
Artem15 extended a powerful, blood-slicked metal hand toward Domi. “My way’s faster. Trust me.”
Domi looked at the pulped remains of the mutants that had been crushed in the enormous digits. “You got to be kidding.”
“I won’t hurt you, and we need to get to your friends quickly,” Artem15 said.
Domi grabbed on to Artem15’s “thumb” with both hands and hauled herself up into the main joint that formed the robot’s palm. With ridiculous ease, Artem15 carried her up to the gigantic shoulder gear housing for the robot’s left gun.
“Name’s Domi,” she offered.
“Um…Diana,” Artem15 answered. An uncomfortable silence followed the pronunciation, as if the words had somehow caught in her throat.
“What’s wrong?” Domi asked.
Diana couldn’t explain—and honestly didn’t want to—the sudden identity trauma she’d caused herself. “Nothing. We have to reach your friends. I’ll try to explain later.”
“Okay,” Domi replied uncertainly.
“Hang on tight,” Artem15 warned.
Domi wrapped her arms around the steel gear-shaped shoulder armor without protest. Moments later, the albino understood why as massively powerful leg hydraulics flexed, then sprung, launching both robot and girl skyward.
Domi’s voice rose in a wail of dismay and shock as they accelerated into the starlit night, but the wail gave way to a crescendo of childlike glee as she realized that she was flying on the shoulder of a robotic giant.
For a moment, she allowed herself the windswept joy of sailing in flight as she’d never traveled before.
Chapter 5
He had named himself Z00s, a numerical phonetic for Zeus, when he had been remade as the first of the robot pilots of New Olympus. It was an identity he had folded himself completely into, a stark contrast to his cold and clinical title of Thurmond, Magistrate of Cobaltville. As a Magistrate, Thurmond had no given name, only his family title, an appellation that mentally conditioned him to surrender his individuality in the service of the Program of Unification. Identity subsumed behind the faceless black carapace helmet, the Magistrate was just another selfless drone, the latest edition in a lineage of protective knights who defended the villes’ status quo.
Renaming himself was one thing, but the affectionate nickname of Zoo, bestowed upon him by his subordinates, was a title he wore with loving pride. Ever since he was assigned, along with fellow Magistrate Danton, to Dr. Helena Garthwaite for the expedition to Greece, Zoo had lived a whole new lifetime he never imagined. Helena had been dispatched by Baron Cobalt, partially because the baron wanted to break in a new lover, and partially because Helena had promised him that she had discovered the clues to an amazing new technology that would grant Cobalt an advantage over his fellow barons. The expedition was a harrowing journey across the wastelands of postapocalyptic America, over the tumultuous Atlantic Ocean and finally a trek through the wreckage of southern Europe until they finally reached the Find.
Standing over it now, even in the immense fifteen-foot mobile armor, Zoo felt tiny. The Find was at the bottom of a mile-deep fissure that had been cracked open by an Earthshaker bomb. The Earthshaker was a buried hydrogen bomb designed to cause enormous seismic trauma to a countryside, detonating with enough force to break open massive canyons, flatten mountains or hurl flatlands into mile-high plateaus. Just another of humankind’s wonders created in the service of self-destruction, as opposed to the clockwork mobile armor Helena had discovered in the Find. The skeletons were designed as multiuse animatronic frames, as capable of being common workers as they were unstoppable fighting mechanisms. Helena figured out a way for them to house a human warrior,
