still commanders of the Gear Skeleton forces, having risen in rank with the loss of Z00s—the Magistrate formerly known as Thurmond—and Hera Olympiad—Helena Garthwaite, the scientist sent by Baron Cobalt to uncover ancient technology that the baron recalled on a genetic level. Those two, and another Magistrate, had been sent on an expedition to find the tools of Marduk, Cobalt’s original Annunaki form, and in the process, they had built Greece into a fortress-like society with remarkable Spartan Gear Skeletons as the backbone of their mechanized military force.
It was an empire built upon clay feet. Through the use of clone production facilities, Helena Garthwaite had initiated a program of terror to unify the Greek countryside.
It was the effort of Kane, Grant and Brigid that ended that deception, the years of death and violence, but in such a spasm of destruction that it had left New Olympus heavily damaged and many of its heroes fallen on the battlefield. Diana didn’t want to think if they had not showed up. The true evil behind the whole society, Marduk, the former Baron Cobalt, arrived to claim his storehouse in the Tartarus Crack.
Though teams had come and gone, assisting in the reconstruction of New Olympus in the wake of that war, this would be the first time the men and women of the Cerberus teams would be returning as a group.
Diana smiled at the thought of her friend, the small, feisty Domi among them.
“Incoming mat-trans event at the old Oracle Temple,” came the announcement from her wheelchair’s built-in comm panel. Diana pressed Send.
“Alert received. Reporting to command center,” she answered.
“Shall we get your suit ready?”
“No. Let the new Artem15 meet them,” Diana said.
And with that, the wheelchair-bound administrator of New Olympus felt a pang of regret at her promotion. She’d loved being the armored suit named for the goddess of the hunt, Artemis. But as Aristotle had been promoted to Z00s, a new “queen” was necessary for the rankings. Now, she was H34a, as Zeus and Hera were the king and queen of Mount Olympus. Whereas the previous Hera was petty and manipulative, Diana tried to be a little nobler, a little more righteous. She’d learned from the mistakes of the past.
Or had she? Wasn’t she just buying into the same level of hero worship? Hadn’t she and Ari just taken the place of a manipulator and a man who, up until his final battle, had been happy to deceive others for the sake of his own power?
Rolling herself into the command center, she noted that Aristotle was there, along with the rest of this shift’s personnel. They were watching the progress of Artem15 and two other suits as they bounded across country, taking enormous strides that ate up terrain at great velocity. Diana held a wistful moment for the days when she’d needed to bolt across countrysides on emergency missions. Artem15’s long legs allowed her to easily top 100 miles an hour, and those speeds were necessary in defense of the people under New Olympus’s protection, townsfolk who’d easily be outnumbered and slaughtered in the assaults made by deadly hordes of Hydrae.
That kind of rapid response gave Diana a little wear and tear as she sat in the control couch of the mighty Gear Skeleton, but the hero suits and the Spartans were often ridden hard, beyond acceptable limits. Now, they were only on their way as a means of ferrying the Cerberus visitors from the parallax point atop the remains of the temple of the Oracle to New Olympus itself. There was still a lot of digging to be done to get to the mat-trans buried during the old Hera Olympiad’s rampage.
Those damaged tunnels and elevators themselves were made all the more inaccessible by the fact that there was little way for the fifteen-foot armored titans to fit into the redoubt and dig. Smaller conventional exoskeletons, one of which Kane had utilized during his “infection” by Ullikummis, had provided some ease. But they were not based on a frame constructed of alien technology alloys, nor were their charged energy modules able to operate at maximum capacity due to the conventional human-designed metals not being up to Annunaki-level snuff.
“Queen on the deck!” announced First Officer Orestes, standing to attention, clicking his booted heels together in a sharp salute.
“As you were,” Diana said, waving off the show of respect. She’d earned her place as an officer, but she didn’t feel that she warranted all of this attention or adulation. Even so, Ari gave her a wink from across the room where he was watching the main screens that displayed drone camera views of the countryside.
“ETA to their arrival?” Diana asked.
“They’re a half mile out, sir,” Comms Officer Kindalos said, looking back over her shoulder. As always, Diana felt a little self-conscious. Whereas Helena Garthwaite/Hera Olympiad was beautiful to the point of perfection, the former Artem15 pilot had more wrong with her than merely amputated legs below mid-thigh. The same battle that had taken her lower limbs had left scars spider-webbed across her forehead and right cheek. Diana’s pride forced her to wear her hair flipped over, her blond locks masking her deformity with a curtain of tresses.
Unfortunately, since her ascension, she’d been forced into a more face-to-face role. Hiding her features, no matter how insecure she was about them, would not do when it came to projecting her authority. Ari had tried to tell her that she did not appear bad-looking, even with the crisscross of healed flesh patterned on her face. Diana didn’t believe him. Even though he was in love with her, she still didn’t trust his opinion.
Ari rolled around to her, gave her a clap on the shoulder. “Honey.”
Diana smiled, resting her hand atop his.
“You ever get tired of all these snap-to’s?” she asked her king and lover.
Ari shrugged. “Occasionally. But it reminds me not to mess around with my power.”
“What power? We’re stuck with all the decisions but none of the fun,” Diana told him.
Ari looked to the trio of running and jumping robots. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”
Diana gave him a pop on the biceps, but laughed. “I’m too young to be nostalgic and shit.”
“Just keep smiling. You look prettier,” Ari told her.
“Liar,” Diana called him, but she still leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
The two returned their attention to the screens. Mounted on tiny motorized planes, the pursuit cameras enabled the New Olympians the ability to keep their eyes, remotely, on things without endangering the cameraman. The unmanned drone concept was still in its earliest developments when, in 2001, the world had been blown to hell by a global nuclear cull, all caused by a renegade dimension traveler by the name of Colonel Thrush. But, thankfully, in the postwar era, more than a couple survivors had come to Greece from Israel, which had been extremely active in such technological development.
The tiny airplane zipped ahead of the trio of welcoming robots toward the ramped natural obelisk upon which the Oracle Temple had been built. There were four people visible atop the clean-cut “table” at the peak of what had been a spire of granite. The structures atop, walls formed from a henge of natural-appearing stones and a long-gone roof, wood and thatch rotted away by the passage of history and impact of storms a millennium ago. It bore more recent damage; burns from ASP blasters striped the massive, lithic columns, evidence of a more recent battle between the heroes who had arrived back then and Marduk’s ASP-armed Nephilim. At the base of the ramp was a golden puddle, a mirror made of the molten remains of Hera Olympiad and Z00s, and the metals surrounding their bodies as Z00s had
