the old gods of Italy—Charun.”
“That sounds like the ‘mythological guy who has a boat on the river of the dead’ Charon?” Kane asked. Brigid acknowledged that Kane got the pronunciation and identity correct. “Any relation?”
“Charun, it is believed, was a renamed chooser of the slain in Etruscan mythology. He was a winged god of death,” Brigid explained. “An invulnerable fog or a wave might be in reference to the river Styx’s alleged properties of making anyone dipped in it invulnerable, like Achilles.”
“You’ve been hitting the research hard enough,” Kane mentioned. “Sometimes, it’s best to put speculation aside and put feet on the ground.”
“And hope that we’re not stumbling into a trap,” Sinclair added. “You want us to come with you?”
“In general, we rarely send both teams into the field together, but in this instance, it would be beneficial to have you along. My ankle still isn’t at a hundred percent, so my running and jumping will be impaired, and DeFore still wishes to make certain Kane hadn’t received anything permanent in regard to the crack he received on his head. I’m under the presumption that the reason the expedition encountered such a powerful surge was due to the size of the intrusion,” Brigid said.
“So if we show up with three to six people, we can slip under their radar, so to speak,” Edwards concluded. “I can figure out why you want Beta with you.” He glanced toward Domi as if to provide clarity.
“Indeed. We’ll also be heading to Olympus in two groups. One via traditional mat-trans, and Edwards and Grant in the Mantas,” Brigid added. “We’ll see if our jerry-rigged weapons systems for them might prove sufficient to deal with a superhuman threat.”
“If we have a target that we can use the Mantas against,” Grant added. “Who knows if the thing generating that weird black mass will be out in the open.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Kane said. “The first thing we need to do is get to New Olympus.”
“And since we’re taking the Mantas, we’ll catch up to you in a few hours,” Edwards pointed out. “Don’t drink all the hospitality before we get there.”
Kane chuckled. “It’s not the hospitality you should worry about.”
Edwards didn’t say it out loud, but looking at the concerned features of Brigid Baptiste in the wake of the briefing, he knew that something out there was going to be a terrible challenge.
Then again, that was the reason for the existence of the Cerberus Away Teams, he added grimly and silently.
The arrival of the strangers was nigh, as the radio signal came through from across the gulf of land and ocean that separated New Olympus from the Bitterroot Mountains. Diana Pantopoulos was at once relieved at the response, and guilty for having drawn the Cerberus warriors back into their continent.
Diana had inherited the role of “queen” of New Olympus, an unenviable task alongside Aristotle Marschene stepping into the “boots” of Z00s, in the wake of that last visit. As of now, Greece was actually working on a charter and constitution allowing a representative government, but also allowing Diana and Ari to act as “ranking managers.”
The two were 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