I’m damned glad I was wearing armor,” Edwards added, giving her a poke in the shoulder with his fist. “Just too bad you found the kinks in it, little cheater.”
“Was the point,” Domi answered, rubbing her knuckle-brushed upper arm. She smirked at his accusation of cheating. “Pardon pun.”
Edwards grinned, pulling off his helmet. His hair was a close-shaved scruff around his melon-size head, showing off his bullet-bitten ear. Though the Magistrate armor was designed to be environmentally adaptive, beads of sweat still formed thanks to the exertion and condensation of Edwards’s breath inside the helmet.
When they’d met at first, and were being assigned to either run or be a part of the Cerberus Away Teams, Edwards had bristled at the concept of working “beneath” such a young, tiny female.
That was dozens of sparring matches ago, across the past several months. Since then the brawny former Magistrate had come to respect Domi. There were times when she sounded barely more educated than a toddler, and she always looked like a frail wisp of a creature, but there was strength and intelligence in there.
It wasn’t the kind of phenomenal intellect as displayed by others such as Brigid Baptiste or Mohandas Lakesh Singh, who boasted unique scientific and mathematical acumen. It was more the wisdom and agility of mind showed by fellow former Magistrates Kane and Grant. It was knowledge that didn’t involve splitting atoms, but observation of her surroundings, instincts that helped her react and respond to danger at speeds beyond even the most trained soldiers that Edwards knew of.
Being under her command, even if it was a mere three people in the whole Cerberus Away Team, was no threat to his abilities, his prodigious strength and paramilitary Magistrate training. His teammate, the beautiful and bright freezie Sela Sinclair, was another sharp mind and strong woman Edwards had learned to respect.
The Magistrates had been a strictly masculine community, a group of men who were of similar size, similar strength, each picked and groomed from even before birth to become part of the hybrid barons’ elite enforcers. They had been forged as rough, macho and gung ho, their individuality limited by the stripping of their first names. Edwards had been born Edwards, as his father before him and that father before him. His mother had been a donor, a handpicked maiden chosen to bear a healthy child, to mix with the genes of a soldier and warrior to produce an ideal fighting man.
Edwards had been given very little of a normal youth. It was spent physically training, learning the laws and procedures of the Magistrates, not being a boy. For him, as well as Domi, the luxuries of childhood were absent, little chance of play or exploring and nurturing a sense of awe and wonder.
Now, in the wake of the barons’ evolution and shedding of their hybrid-human forms, Edwards was a lawman who found a new vocation as a warrior in the defense of Cerberus Redoubt, and an avocation as an adventurer, a hero to swoop in to the rescue and restore order.
Through this selfless assistance of others, Edwards felt awakened. Reborn even. In helping others, in traveling the world for the purposes of growing knowledge, for the effort of building a world, he was young again. He was alive whereas before he’d merely survived and existed. It was a lesson, a transformation, that Domi had also undergone.
Domi herself was a child of the wilderness. Later, in the Tartarus Pits, the hellish subterranean area in the shadow of the Administrative Monolith in the center of Cobaltville, she’d had to scrabble as a petty thief and was pressed into servitude as a prostitute. It was only her acceptance as an ally, the affection of Grant as a surrogate father and protector, the gentle love of Lakesh, that had turned her from a feral savage into an avid student. She’d gone from a slum criminal totally out for herself to someone who understood that love and affection were not necessarily displayed by sexual desire, as with Grant, and that intimacy could come with gentility, not cruelty, as with Lakesh.
Given such an environment that nurtured goodness, growth and intelligence, Edwards found himself only mockingly grumbling about “babysitting trips with nerds to ruins” and actually showing excitement about learning about the history of the strange planet they lived upon.
“Hey, you two!”
It was Sela Sinclair, who herself had not become involved in the ever-escalating sparring matches of Domi and Edwards. Sinclair’s preference for combat was not the close-quarters of knives and fists but rather the application of leverage and focused energy, usually in the form of the collapsible baton she had become intimate with in her pre-skydark life as an Air Force officer. It didn’t mean she didn’t lack for bare-handed skill, but when things came to a hands-on approach her preference was for the strength-amplifying qualities of an ASP telescoping fighting stick, the same way that Domi preferred a sharp knife. And even then, the ASP was only for situations where she didn’t necessarily require the killing of an opponent.
Sinclair folded her arms, leaning on one leg, hip tilted jauntily.
“Something come up?” Domi asked.
“The CAT teams are being called in for a briefing,” Sinclair said. “Something about a call from New Olympus.”
Domi perked up at the sound of that. Edwards and Sinclair had joined her in that prior mission, arriving later with armor kits meant for Sandcats and Humvees that would be adapted to the Olympian Spartans. They had also been present when Hera Olympiad had gone berserk with power, standing their ground against her madness and the ever-growing energies and mass of her corrupted command node.
Hera, a Cobaltville scientist who had been sent to retrieve Annunaki artifacts from Greece while the Overlord Marduk was still Baron Cobalt, had acquired a smart-metal control nodule when one of Marduk’s Nephilim drone troopers was captured. Using the knowledge she had gained from her exploration of the Crack, she’d manipulated the smart-metal pod to provide herself a new form of clothing. Because the pod was now reacting with an intelligent mind, it followed her commands rather than simply existed as a suit of body-conforming armor.
Of course, Marduk had known of her interference with the Annunaki electronics. He’d tried to take control of her and, barring that, his psychic assault had driven her insane.
Hera had bonded that module with another piece of Annunaki technology, a Threshold, and an electrical drone weapon on top of that. CAT Beta—Domi, Sinclair and Edwards—had been at the forefront of the battle against the out-of-control Hera as she’d continued to add mass and energy to her suit’s frame, assisted by Brigid Baptiste.
Despite the defeat of the superhuman Hera, the damage to New Olympus had been significant. There were sorties from Cerberus to the Grecian nation, teams mostly there to excavate and open up collapsed and damaged tunnels in the deep underground military base that had been the Olympian redoubt. The digging and rebuilding were necessary, as Hera’s destruction had cut off access to redoubt supplies of ammunition, food and medicine stored for the hundreds of years since before skydark.
Rebuilding had been going well, but for New Olympus to actually send out a call for help meant something big had popped up.
“Shower and change. You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Sinclair told them.
The two Beta Team members headed to the gymnasium locker room where Domi helped Edwards out of his bulky Magistrate armor, cutting the usual de-prep time by half, allowing Edwards to do more than just let the showerhead spit on him for a second. That both teammates were naked was not a distraction to either.
Domi had her devotion to Lakesh, and Edwards was uninterested in settling down and of no mind to steal the scientist’s woman. Indeed, Edwards was a man of personal
