guts being mistaken for the tube hookups on an ancient space suit.”
Kane shrugged. “Lazy speculators, or just plain gullible nuts.”
He sighed, getting back to the business at hand. “We seem to be on a peninsula. There’s a land bridge leading down from that cliff. So far, I don’t see any movement that would indicate the locals are aware of our presence.”
“Thank heaven for small favors,” Brigid replied.
Kane continued to scan the countryside when suddenly a column of blue-white electrical fire speared down into the land, creating huge clouds of debris and smoke from the earth. He recoiled from the power and the violence. At first, he thought it was a lightning bolt, but the searing slash of energy was too focused, too intense and lasted far too long to be a simple work of nature. Flames licked up from charred ground and, sprawled in the scarred landscape, burned corpses steamed. The dying sunset had been blotted out, overwhelmed by the brilliance of the sky fire. Cries of fear and suffering echoed in his ears, and he could smell the sickly scent of roasting human flesh.
Despair surged through him when he realized that he had been grasped firmly by Grant. Kane blinked away the flashes, and the sights, sounds and smells faded.
“Kane?” Grant asked, as if he were repeating himself. The big ex-Magistrate’s Sin Eater retracted back into its powered forearm holster, though Grant appeared confused at what had caused Kane to stagger and reel.
“No, of course you wouldn’t have seen that,” Kane muttered. “It wasn’t real.”
“See what?” Domi replied. She still hadn’t put her handgun away. “You froze for a moment, then started backing away from the edge.”
Kane looked around the ruins. “The oracle helped me experience a psi-mutie vision.”
“What did you see?” Brigid asked.
“Lightning,” Kane said. “But it wasn’t natural lightning. It was a weapon, and it tore the ground apart. And it was focused. It left swathes of charred corpses in its wake.”
“Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods, had a quiver of thunderbolts forged for him by Hephaesteus. Zeus’s thunderbolts were so powerful, they could destroy even the greatest monsters in the land,” Brigid said. “That myth could have its basis in an Annunaki weapon.”
Domi’s nose wrinkled. “This shit’s getting weird.”
“You asked to come along,” Grant chided. He glanced back at their hidden stash of weapons. “Monsters, other gods, cities, too, right?”
Brigid nodded. “Zeus obliterated anyone and anything with his thunderbolts.”
“So nothing in our bags is ever going to match that kind of firepower,” Grant announced. “Let’s just head down the bridge and meet the locals before Zeus drops the sky on us.”
Kane nodded in agreement, finally past the harrowing realism of his momentary psychic flash. “Good plan.”
The arcs of future lightning were still harshly inscribed on his mind’s eye, an ominous premonition of hell peeling back the sky and incinerating the earth below. He couldn’t dismiss his dread, and so he threw himself into his work. Maybe knowing the potential tragedy looming in the future gave Kane the power to prevent it.
It was as good a coping mechanism as any.
THE FARTHER THEY GOT from the oracle, across the ramp of stone and packed earth sloping down from the ancient temple’s remains, Kane’s senses grew clearer, returning to normal. As his senses sharpened, he realized that they were not alone. He shot a glance toward Domi, knowing that her own feral instincts were also preternaturally sharp. She was on edge.
Grant picked up on his two allies’ silent, brief exchange. “Where?”
“Feels like we’re surrounded, at least two flanks,” Kane explained.
Grant nodded. The hilly, rolling terrain was covered with sparse scrub, making it difficult for anyone to hide any closer than the hillcrests that bracketed them. Only the tops of the ridges provided sufficient concealment, as well as a good commanding view of the rut they passed through. Even with the deepening shadow of evening, their stalkers would be behind the ridges. The massive ex-Magistrate flipped down the faceplate on his black polycarbonate helmet, and vision-enhancing optics were engaged. While the shadow suits and mandibular implants had superseded most of Grant’s old armor’s protection and communication functions, the image-intensifying and night-vision capabilities of the black helmets were too valuable to surrender. The Mag helmet was also one of the few pieces of equipment that Grant was able to perform repairs on without compromising the fit of the Magistrate armor piece.
A heat source flared on a ridge, a head poking over the hilltop. Grant locked on to it, but the figure disappeared quickly. Still, he had enough for cursory identification. “Humanoid. Scrawny, hairless and naked according to the signature. Mammalian core heat.”
“Naked?” Kane asked. “Then it’s not the robots laying out this welcome mat.”
“More like the mutants we saw on satellite view,” Brigid said. “Strange that they have reptilian skin, but mammalian endothermic metabolisms.”
“Strongbow’s old crew were scaly faced, as well,” Grant said. “Though they had remnants of facial hair.”
“Makes you wonder about the so-called scalies often referenced in the Wyeth Codex,” Brigid said.
“Less ancient history, more current events,” Kane grumbled. His own faceplate was down, his point man’s instinct working together with the advanced electronics of the Magistrate helmet.
“There is some historical relevance. Zeus’s greatest enemy was the monster Tiamat, mother of a million tormenting beasts,” Brigid noted.
“Tiamat is dead,” Kane said coldly.
“Our Tiamat,” Brigid responded. “But look at places like the Archuleta Mesa, or the attempted use of Area 51 to produce Quad Vee hybrids—two locations that had the technological potential to create biological constructs. It stands to reason that if Greece is a location for Annunaki-designed robots, there might also be the technology for creating monsters. Literally the womb of Tiamat. The First Folk are a prime example of Annunaki genetic tampering.”
Kane’s brow furrowed under the polycarbonate visor. “So whoever played Zeus the first time, long ago, made his own rogue’s gallery?”
Brigid shrugged. “The towns in these islands are heavily fortified. That bespeaks of an ever present, hostile enemy in herdlike numbers. Especially considering the corpses shoved into the mass grave and the amount of damage those poorly armed humanoids were able to inflict on a single robot, we must be dealing with some sort of cloning facility.”
Kane hadn’t slowed his pace, and he could hear Brigid panting as she tried to keep up while applying her intellect to the problem at hand. “So they’d be akin to the mutant herds that roamed the American wasteland after the war. Bred specifically to be alien, of animalistic intelligence and a hostility toward nonaltered humans, they would be a perfect means of keeping the surviving population in check until the Program of Unification.”
“Can you think of a better way
