Charun’s skin was blue-gray, holding the pallor of a near-mummified corpse, despite the vital and bulging muscles beneath that ashen, crinkled hide. Hers was deep and richly tanned, vibrant and glowing from within; a decidedly Mediterranean bronze gained by long hours taking in the sun. She, like he, was topless, her full, pendulous breasts jostling as they were framed by an X of leather straps that seemed to connect her to either the eerily motionless wings or the quiver across her shoulder.
Both of them were the same height, nearing eight feet from toe-tip to the top of their heads.
In one hand she held a great, hornlike torch that had faded to merely the brightness of ordinary flame now. In the other she held a bow. But even with his greatest magnification on the shadow suit optics, he could not see the string on the ancient-seeming weapon. Instead, where the bowstring would have been notched, on each arm of the bow there was a bejeweled block of golden metal that shimmered with the same brassy sheen of a Gear Skeleton. There was a hand-molded grip in the center, with a stubby projection making it seem like some form of pistol around which a bow had been built.
Edwards couldn’t help but think that this device might be more than gaudy, ornamental, ancient weaponry and more a piece of alien technology. The resemblance of segments to secondary orichalcum, the same Annunaki alloy in the Olympian war suits, was all the evidence he needed to make the assumption.
Speaking of the devil, the woman extended her arm with the torch. With a flash of brilliant flame, the ground suddenly came alive with several pillars of sprouting light. Edwards’s stomach twisted as either his eyes adjusted to the brilliance or the shapes of the pillars solidified into human forms. There were two Gear Skeletons, and from Brigid’s briefing, Edwards could recognize the Spartans as having the same ID numbers as those reported missing.
There were about twelve soldiers with the two battle robots, and the Cerberus Away Team member let out a low hiss of his retained breath, inhaling to replace the stale air. The armored warriors were clad in the familiar mix of modern Magistrate polycarbonate and classical Greek leather armor.
The faceplates were open on their helmets, though, and through the empty space, Edwards made out the white-eyed, slack-jawed expressions of the Olympian soldiers. They moved with normal agility and walked apace, but there was literally nothing but pinholes in the middle of their eyes.
Edwards’s molars ground together until they locked in place. Not good. Not at all, he thought.
The fluid nature of their movements indicated that the blank-eyed soldiers were in perfect health and ability, but the unblinking, slack nature of their features warned of something darker, deadlier, at work than hammers capable of smashing Mantas from the sky or torches that burned with the brightness of a sun. These were thralls, lost completely to the control of an outside entity.
And yet, for the soulless, zombified expressions, they were spread out, searching carefully for any sign of Edwards, their guns at arms. The two Gear Skeletons walked over and seized the Manta, picking it up as if it were a toy, further testimony to the kind of raw power of ancient Annunaki robotics. The mecha began walking to the west, carrying the aircraft in their powerful arms.
“The pilot might not have gone far.” The woman spoke, lowering closer.
Again, the motionless nature of those wings, despite their classic angelic or demonic shape, dug into Edwards’s nerves. It only took him a few moments to realize that the appendages wouldn’t be natural, but artificial constructs designed to match a human’s view of a winged deity. He’d been around with Cerberus long enough to know when technology was the explanation of something occurring in mythology, be it the hammer of a god or something as simple as flight.
The wings were silent and motionless on the backs of Charun and his beautiful partner, which took away one possibility that they were some manner of jet pack or rocket belt. Indeed, the eerie quiet pretty much narrowed things down to some manner of antigravity system. As to why their flying devices were so similar to wings…well, even the Manta had wings. It just made flight and maneuvering easier. He couldn’t see flaps or ailerons, but given their biological appearance, they could have been supple, enabling them to steer.
This also explained the lack of pain or reaction to injury when Edwards had put a .50-caliber round through Charun’s wing. He saw the scorched hole, flesh split and tattered at the edges of the “wound.” His optics couldn’t detect any mechanics sandwiched between layers of leathery skin, but nor could he see blood vessels or other signs that the wing was alive.
As if on silent, telepathic cue, Charun looked down at his injury, the limb bending around so he could look at it more closely. That tusked maw turned up at the corners in a smile.
The woman looked across and met his smile with her own. Almost playfully, Charun brought the bullet hole up to eye level and peered at his partner through the aperture, which elicited a laugh from the angelic female.
It looked like a true friendship between the two entities, reminiscent of what he had seen between Kane and Brigid, the ability to communicate entire ideas in just a few gestures, because the audio pickups on his suit’s hood were not conveying anything more than breathing between the two. The only words she had spoken seemed to be toward the slave stock searching the Manta’s landing area.
That spoke to either telepathy between the flying pair or an intimate friendship that often did not require a single word. Edwards, at this point, was desperately hoping it wasn’t telepathy. Such doomie powers would make all of the camouflage and hiding a moot, useless point. Thankfully, it didn’t seem as if the zombified Olympian troops had any more special senses as he lay, still as a rock, his suit’s camouflage system making him look like inert stone and soil piled as a short berm.
A soldier walked to within inches of Edwards’s motionless form, even looked right down at him, then continued on. The big brute of a man made a convincing pile of rocks, but that did not give him the freedom to breathe a sigh of relief. Instead he kept frozen, muscles tense to the point of aching. His breathing ran shallow and he only allowed himself to blink when his eyes were dried and burning.
It seemed like hours before the soldiers moved on and Charun and his “bride” rose further into the sky. She waved her torch, almost dismissively, and suddenly streaks of the same light that deposited the Olympian zombies on the ground flashed up, sucked into the tongue. Charun alighted on the ground just long enough to lift the massive hammer.
Edwards didn’t move his head, didn’t do more than sweep his eyes to the periphery of his vision at either angle. He waited, remaining still despite the growing ache and fatigue in his shoulders and neck.
He didn’t know how long it was, but finally the heavy tread of Gear Skeleton feet resounded again. Edwards almost didn’t want to relax.
“Edwards!” a voice shouted. When he turned his head toward the sound of that call, he could feel tendons popping at the base of his skull, making it feel as if hot, wet gore splashed down on his neck. He winced and gasped.
“Here,” he croaked.
A slender but muscular figure raced to his side. It was Kane.
He helped Edwards to his feet.
Looking around, he could see one of the suits, complete with a quiver of javelins and brassy, steel-wool curls flowing down over her shoulders. That had to have been the new Artem15.
“We’ve been trying to contact you for an hour,” Kane said.
Edwards pulled off his shadow suit hood. Beads
