shoulder. Domi gave the raccoon a loving hug and a kiss on the end of its pointed nose. “Be good, Moe.”
The raccoon chittered a response, then darted out of the cave.
Regretting the hike’s abrupt end, Lakesh followed Domi out of her personal archive and down the rocky slope of the hill.
KANE STOOD, a silent sentinel at the Cerberus redoubt’s entrance as the Sandcat rolled up. His cold gray-blue eyes regarded the modified armored personnel carrier as it slowed to a halt, its side door swinging open to allow Lakesh and Domi out. The six-foot-tall former Magistrate was always an imposing figure, but the dour expression darkening his features gave Lakesh a momentary pause.
“They’re still alive,” he pronounced grimly.
“Perhaps,” Lakesh replied. “Just because Bry saw evidence of a dropship means nothing. Someone else might have come into possession of one of their craft. It could have been uncovered by the Millennial Consortium, or Erica could have traded for one before Tiamat’s destruction.”
Kane’s eye flickered momentarily at the scientist’s suggestions, but he didn’t relax. “Thanks for trying, Lakesh.”
Lakesh tilted his head in an unspoken question.
“Trying to make it seem less than it could be,” Kane muttered. He escorted Lakesh and Domi along the corridor toward the ops center. “But my job is to look for the worst-case scenario. Let’s simply assume that one of those snake-faced bastards survived Tiamat, and he’s making some moves.”
“It’s your job to be prepared for the worst. It’s my job to look at all possibilities equally,” Lakesh replied, trying to keep up with Kane’s long strides, spurred on by his tension. “Both are important, and let us do what we do best. This is part of the synergy that has kept us going all this time.”
Kane nodded grimly, slowing to accommodate his two companions, realizing the effort Lakesh expended to maintain his pace. “The only synergy I want is the blending of a bullet and an Annunaki face. I’d thought that we were done with the fucking overlords.”
“The only one who died for certain was Lilitu,” Lakesh said. “With our rogue’s gallery, unless you see the corpse, they truly cannot be discounted. And even then, some whose corpses we’ve beheld as forever stilled…Colonel Thrush, Enlil, Sindri…”
“Sindri was just beamed into a storage pattern, no corpse to ‘behold,’ as you put it,” Kane corrected, his voice taking on a derisive tone that usually accompanied any mention of the miniature transadapt genius. While Kane reserved a murderous rage for the overlords, the wolf-lean warrior harbored a deep-down annoyance for Sindri.
The three people entered the redoubt’s ops center, where Bry, Brigid Baptiste, Grant and Brewster Philboyd were waiting. Bry and Brigid were at one of the computer workstations. Philboyd and Grant were sitting at a desk, throwing cards down in a quick game of War. With Kane’s entry, Grant seemed relieved, obviously tired of the card game.
“Glad you finally showed up,” Grant grumbled. While Kane was an imposing figure, Grant was truly menacing. Taller than Kane, with a thick, powerful build, Grant was also a former Magistrate. Not only was the ex-Mag one of the finest combatants Lakesh had ever observed, but also his massive strength was coupled with an uncanny skill at piloting nearly any craft, air, land and sea.
“Not again,” Kane replied, looking over to Philboyd.
“Grant, the game’s called War. Do you fight fair?” Philboyd asked.
“It’s a card game. You’re not supposed to cheat,” Grant replied. “What’s the fun in that?”
“Now, this is hypothetical because I am not a cheater—” Philboyd began.
“Yes, you are,” Grant interjected.
“Let us know when you two are finished,” Brigid spoke up, a chilly disdain for Grant and Philboyd’s minor quarrel weighing on her words.
“Busted,” Kane said with a grin. He leaned in conspiratorially to his friend. “Besides, who else are you going to play cards with?”
“I dunno. I was thinking my partner,” Grant retorted.
“Maybe if I catch amnesia and forget how much of a hustler you are,” Kane said. He looked at the monitor where Bry and Brigid were busy. “That’s the contrail from the dropship.”
Brigid adjusted her spectacles on her nose. Years of constant reading as an archivist had left her vulnerable to eyestrain when going over fine imagery and small print. “We can’t tell who was piloting the dropship. It could be anyone who gained access to one of them. We spotted the transsonic atmospheric distortions in the island chain that used to be Greece.”
Lakesh frowned. “It has to be something important for the surviving overlords to risk exposure. As far as we knew, when Tiamat was destroyed, they all died.”
“Hard to believe that something as old and big as Tiamat could die,” Grant grumbled. “The big bitch might be down, but I don’t think it’s forever.”
“By the time she recovers from her injuries, we’ll hopefully be long dead,” Lakesh noted, referring to the living megalithic ship in which the Annunaki had ridden to Earth. “Preferably of old age.”
Brigid let loose a cleansing breath, pushing away the horrifying thought of Tiamat, the miles-long living chariot of the gods, reawakened to spread more destruction. The starship had more than enough power to scour all life from the surface of the planet. Its crippled and comatose state had accounted for lessened stress in her life, though the thought of an active Annunaki overlord was hardly reassuring. “Right now we are looking at some footage recorded from a recent conflict in that region.”
Bry’s fingers danced over the keyboard, and a bird’s-eye view flashed on the monitor. “The footage is about twenty minutes old, and we only caught the tail end of things.”
The monitor’s image sharpened until Kane and Lakesh could see the presence of massive sets of coppery metallic heads and shoulders, like living statues, leaving behind a morass of green-and-black corpses.
“I’ve double-checked the math, and the dead creatures are about a shade over five feet tall, and they are identical, at this magnification at least,” Bry explained. “They resemble the humanoid reptilian mutants that used to roam across the remnants of the United States.”
“Scalies,” Lakesh mused. “But they were exterminated.”
“Here on the North American continent, but you have to remember that these mutants could be artificially created,” Brigid said.
“If they’re about five feet tall, then how big are those constructs walking away?” Lakesh asked.
“Approximately twelve to fifteen feet, and almost half as wide,” Bry stated. “What did you call them, Brigid?”
“Mecha,” the archivist said. “A generic term for robotic combat vehicles.”
“Giant robots,” Lakesh murmured. “Larger than the ones we encountered in China. And heavily armed by the looks of them.”
“Close-ups of the
