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 shoulders correlate with late-twentieth-century machine-gun designs. Belt-fed rifle caliber,” Bry noted. “Grant recognized them, and utilizing the known dimensions of the weaponry, calculating the rest of the robot’s size was easy.”
Grant shuffled his deck of cards absently. “Brigid wants to go meet with the group that owns the robots. They seem fairly decent, according to this footage.”
“Decent?” Lakesh asked. “That’s a refreshing change. How did you determine that?”
“We caught a flash of an explosion while scanning the area. On image enhancement we saw that a trio of robots was assisting a line of local villagers against the mutants,” Brigid said.
Bry cued up the footage, and Lakesh watched the battle from above. He was surprised to see one of the mecha detonate an explosion at its own feet to stanch the tide of attackers. He was even more dazzled when the chest plate of the robot swung open. He couldn’t see inside the torso of the robot, but apparently there was someone inside.
“It looks like one robot is talking to the others about the friendly-fire incident at the start of the recording,” Kane noted.
“So they’re piloted craft,” Lakesh mused. “And they have rules of engagement to protect outlying communities.”
“You noticed the lack of industrial capability in the town, as well,” Brigid said.
“If they have only bolt-action rifles and pitchforks to deal with a mutant horde, I doubt that those people have a garage to tighten the nuts on a battle robot,” Kane interjected.
“Precisely. Indeed, there aren’t even any vehicles on the premises,” Lakesh added.
“I am fairly curious,” Brigid answered. “But Bry and I have been running comparisons between the one prone mecha being dragged back to base. Any pilot taller than five feet would be cramped inside even the most generous of compartments for the robots. Domi is well over the limit for riding in the chest, let alone operating the device.”
Domi tilted her head. “Maybe Sindri’s people?”
“The transadapts,” Kane agreed. “The tallest of them were just over four feet. And if you have a lab that can breed scalies, you can whip up a batch of transadapts, as well.”
“Trouble is, those strange little monkey men would be in conflict from the critters from the selfsame lab. And the transadapts we’ve encountered are hardly friendly and generous toward humans,” Grant said.
“You’re also talking about an abandoned people who had been slaves,” Brigid countered. “Not being oppressed and forced into submission to humans would have a good effect on them.”
“Rottenness isn’t a matter of genes,” Domi murmured. “Remember Quavell?”
The meeting room grew quiet as each of the Cerberus staff present remembered the Quad-Vee hybrid who had taken refuge along with them for several months while she was pregnant. The Cerberus explorers had initially believed that the infant had been sired by Kane when he had been captured and pressed into stud service to revitalize the frail, genetically stagnant hybrids. When it turned out that another had fathered the child, Kane and his allies continued to protect Quavell and her baby. Quavell died, however, due to complications of childbirth brought on by the genetic transformation from the slender, delicate hybrids to the larger, more powerful Nephilim, the servants of the Annunaki overlords who had also been awakened by Tiamat’s signal. Especially present in the minds of those around Domi was the albino girl’s shift from hatred and loathing of the panterrestrial humanoids to love and compassion for the hybrid woman.
It was a reminder that though they all had become open-minded, the nature of humanity was to harbor prejudices, something made very apparent by their encounters with the Quad-Vees and the transadapts.
“What’s powering the robots?” Domi asked. “Doesn’t look like it smokes like a Sandcat.”
Brigid looked back to the screen, and Bry, on cue, called up the image of the downed robot. “Kane, you remember the Atlantean outpost that Quayle had discovered?”
Kane nodded. “Yeah. You missed out on that. I’m sure you would have loved the place. All kinds of wall carvings, and a metal called orichalcum that blew up when sunlight touched