The powerful Earthshaker had opened the crack down to the mile-deep, ancient Annunaki cavern, and rendered vast stretches of Greek countryside inland seas. Inside the Find, after three days of climbing and battling past territorial scaled mutants, Helena, Thurmond and Danton had discovered the prize she had been expecting, as well as hints of a secret world history that no one could have imagined. Helena, now titled Hera, had constructed the theory based on historical records uncovered among the ruins and remembered pillow talk from her time with Baron Cobalt. While it seemed incongruous to Zoo at first, there was no denying that he was now inside a man-machine interface that was far more than the sum of its parts.
With a single bound, he began his descent down into the crack in the world, hopping like a spider from cliff to cliff, secondary orichalcum claws securing him to a rocky ledge with more than enough strength to counter the downward momentum of three thousand pounds of mechanoid. He leaped and caught walls with a facility that no one would ever assume capable in a massive, clanking monstrosity. The zigzag hopscotch down the sheer walls of the crevasse turned the mile-deep descent into a gleeful ride that took only minutes rather than an arduous, life-threatening trek. Zoo whooped with delight as freefall rendered him weightless, and the hydraulic extension of his body danced through the air in showy somersaults.
Landing in a crouch, the secondary orichalcum skeleton and its Annunaki-designed hydraulics cushioned what would have been skeleton-shattering impacts. His heart felt light, the journey a cleansing experience that washed away the poisonous dread in his spirit. Zoo looked into the gaping black entrance of the Find, the cavern that was also the back door into the Tartarus clone vats. Feral yellow eyes blinked in the darkness, but the mutants didn’t dare make a move against the hated thunder god that strode through the cave. The bearded clockwork giant walked with strength and confidence that no scrawny little reptilian creature would be able to harm him even if he did summon up the courage to launch his minuscule frame against the king of the clockwork war suits. Zoo ignored them, walking into the domain of his goddess-queen’s publicly sworn enemy, Thanatos.
Helena Garthwaite and her two Magistrate bodyguards, Thurmond and Danton, had been raised up, with the wonders of the Find, from seekers of mythology to the very beings of legend. The technology that would have allowed Baron Cobalt an edge to sweep aside his hybrid brothers and assume the throne of Lord of the Earth, instead became the forge in which Hera Olympiad, Zeus and Thanatos were born, the core of a new pantheon that would be their first step on a ladder of continental expansion.
Zoo had remade himself the most, going under the carving saw and the spine-violating implant of the cyberport that left him legless, half a man, but only when he was away from the magnificent orichalcum skeleton and its steel armor. His mobile suit was the finest of the cache of fifty, and undeniably he was the mightiest and greatest of the robot god warriors. As a Magistrate, he was intimidating, but merely a drone. Now he was a magnificent copper-skinned exemplar of metallic godhood.
“Thanatos?” Zoo called over his loudspeaker.
The clones seemed confused, as if there was no one to give them focus or purpose. Normally, Thanatos would have strode out, greeting his brother. Something alerted Zoo’s instincts, informing him that there was danger in the air, a doubt that had started when the metal-armored reptilian was discovered among the mutant hordelings.
His light-amplification optics kicked in, minor illuminators giving the lenses something to target. They picked up a massive silvery disk, taller than the mechanized war suit and so wide that it had to have had entered the chasm sideways to land. Zoo couldn’t find a single aperture, no hatches or thrust nozzles on its smooth, mirror-polished surface. Something crunched under his clawed foot, and Zoo looked at the ground, seeing the charred husks of mutants ankle deep around him. The piles of dead had been incinerated by some form of high-energy weapon, and from the numbers of corpses, they had to have surged in violent, desperate defense of their cave.
“Than! Than, are you all right?” Zoo called out.
“Danton is well,” an unearthly voice boomed. Though it possessed an alien intonation, it was familiar. The address of Thanatos by his old name sent an urgent jolt of menace running up Zoo’s spine, but Zoo dismissed his panic, using his reason to decipher the mystery of the familiar yet alien voice.
The fifteen-foot robot genuflected, dropping to one knee in submission. It was an old reflex, stretching back to his days as a Magistrate. “Baron Cobalt, my lord!”
“Please, Thurmond.” The alien voice resonated across several frequencies. “Or shall I call you Zeus?”
Zoo looked around the darkness, unable to tell where the voice was coming from, despite the fact that it didn’t produce an echo due to its multitonal reverberation.
“I, too, have a new identity, my loyal subject.”
“Baron Cobalt?”
Zoo finally focused on movement in the darkness. It was a seven-foot-tall figure, a silhouette of physical perfection clad in cobalt-blue shimmering metal armor that was as finely wrought as Hera’s silver skin. The Baron Cobalt he remembered was only a shade over five feet and willowy, while this newcomer was carved from slabs of lean muscle and long, straight limbs. The rippling musculature under the metal, skin-conforming armor was a far cry from the frail leader he’d remembered. Finally, the stranger’s face came into view of his night optics, an angelic face sculpted in reptilian skin, beautiful and menacing in the same instant.
“Please, Zoo, call me Lord Marduk.”
Inside Z00s’s cockpit, Thurmond’s jaw went slack in awe.
MILES AWAY, another former Cobaltville Magistrate’s jaw dropped in surprise, but not at the appearance of an Annunaki overlord. Rather, Kane gaped at the sight of a gigantic mechanoid bounding over the crest of a hill, Domi clinging to its shoulder and hooting in excited delight.
The paltry remnants of the hordeling marauders, already in disarray from the concentrated firepower and fighting coordination of the Cerberus explorers, completely lost their nerves at the sight of a more familiar but no less implacable enemy. Against efficient human warriors and a towering mecha, with their overwhelming numbers depleted, the reptilian clones were helpless. A wild panic broke through the half-dozen remaining ambushers as they scurried toward the nearest bolt-holes.
Artem15 landed ten yards from the Cerberus explorers, then set her hand on the soil of the valley in order to give Domi a means to scramble down off her shoulder.
“Look what I found!” Domi exclaimed, unable to contain her glee, especially now that she had seen that her friends were safe.
Kane looked over the giant robot and simply had nothing to say. He fell back on his old standby sarcasm. “Well, if you promise to clean up after it and walk it every day…”
Domi’s nose wrinkled in mock admonition. “You know what I mean.”
Kane nodded, then looked up at the fifteen-foot titan. “Uh, hi. We saw your kind in a satellite photo, and we decided to drop on by.”
Artem15 straightened, even though she knelt to stay more or less level with the humans. “There are still satellites up there?”
Kane’s litany of surprises continued to roll, this time at the youth and femininity of the robot’s voice. “Yeah. Where we come from, we’re lucky to have access to satellite imagery.”
“Wow,” the voice said through the clockwork mechanoid’s loudspeaker in an awed whisper. She stared at the starry veldt above. Finally she pried
