Angel of Doom (24 page)

Everyone, even Smaragda, made it through the gate before it closed, but once the wrought-iron barrier locked into place, the white-haired soldier looked through the bars.

“There should be more of them,” she whispered softly, her fingers wrapping around the bar as she gazed on in deep concern.

Domi rested her hand on Smaragda's shoulder. “Some of them might have been held back, or put on some other duty.”

“What about that explosion?” Sela Sinclair asked.

“Whatever it was, it gave us an opening to get in here. Let's not waste it by standing around so we're discovered,” Edwards warned.

Domi nodded, and the group fell back into silence. She took the lead, following the route she'd heard the troops and the robots take. So far, except for an occasional torch here and there, the underground tunnel was unlit. The only thing they had going for them were their night-vision capability and infrared illuminators.

Domi kept using her illuminator intermittently, if only to prevent them from being seen by others further down these tunnels with their own night-vision optics. She kept them moving at a brisk walking pace, but her senses and instincts were on full alert. So far, no trip lines or electric eyes were in evidence, and there were no opponents lurking in the shadows.

So far, everyone had silent weapons out. Domi's knife,
its blade coated in phosphate black paint, wouldn't glimmer with a reflection. Edwards also had his knife, similarly dark coated, as was the custom of Magistrates, the foot-long deadly edge ready to sever an arm if necessary. Smaragda's falcata, like that of all Olympian combat blades, was dull in its finish, a dark gray steel. Even Sinclair's collapsible baton was coated in a nonslip rubberized coating, the thin layer providing a tacky feel that wouldn't skid, but did very little to cushion the anodized steel beneath the millimeter thickness. In the dark, the four of them had the means of delivering quick, silent death.

Domi didn't want it to come to that if they encountered any of the mind-controlled slaves of Vanth, but in a choice between her teammates and a potential threat, the feral girl would do what she had to, and mourn and regret it later.

The four of them eventually began to encounter more and more lit torches in the corridor, and slowed their pace. It was still quiet, but there was no telling if there was someone around a bend or in a side room standing guard. With their wills stolen, the sentries would prove to be silent and literally unblinking. Domi noticed there were doors to different chambers leading off of the corridor. The depth they reached now was over three hundred feet, and the hill itself extended another four hundred above “ground level.” The air felt thicker and heavier down here, despite the lack of light.

Passing by each doorway was an exercise in caution and risk. So far, many of these rooms were empty of people, but there were supplies stored down here. This, however, was nothing like any redoubt Domi had ever encountered. The hill above seemed to be some manner of pyramid, buried under years of sediment and soil, perhaps even deliberately.

For all the exploration, all the hidden temples and underground vaults, even distant worlds that Domi and her friends had visited, she wasn't surprised someone had constructed, then buried a pyramid in Italy. She recalled the giant structure—Xian—in China, and how that had been dug out from hiding. She also recalled that somewhere in Eastern Europe was an alleged compound of buried pyramids, at least that's what Brigid Baptiste had said.

This was another undiscovered mystery, passed over and unknown from the days when humankind was allegedly at the top of its technological and scientific skills. And what horrors lay beneath were grisly indeed, if Vanth was the mastermind and soul stealer that the Cerberus teams suspected.

Domi pointed toward one of the rooms and then motioned for the others to enter there. The plan was simple. They would post up in an out-of-the-way position and allow Domi to sneak ahead. The small woman was much more likely to lose herself in the maze of tunnels should anyone be looking for her, and yet her tracking skills would allow her to trace back to where she'd left the rest of CAT Beta. As there weren't many things stored in the room she'd sent them into, there was little chance they'd be stumbled upon.

Granted, with Edwards in there, even being a “normal-size” room, it was crowded. The door closed easily and noiselessly. They'd checked to make sure there were no wires that could be connected to a security system, so opening and closing it wouldn't give them away.

Edwards leaned in close to Domi. “Thirty minutes. Then we come looking for you.”

Domi nodded.

“Or if we hear something,” Sinclair added.

“You won't,” Domi said.

The door closed and the silent, feral girl stalked away,
keeping to the shadows as often as she could, no matter how empty the corridors were.

Eventually she made her way to a larger chamber. She paused before going in, but it had some form of bioluminescent lighting and she could see over a short balcony that there were huge rows of cages packed with humans and animals. Domi scanned first for sentries or other means of alarms, but none were positioned on the tier of walkway circling the cavernous room. Still, she crawled to the edge of the balcony, peering over and down.

She could see that there were dozens of cells, and started to count them, first by rows, then by columns, “horizontal and vertical” as she'd been taught by Lakesh when it came to figuring things such as area, but quickly, she realized there could have been millions down there. She unsealed her faceplate and took a breath, and smelled the stink of an entire city full of people and animals. She noticed there were people moving in the spaces between the cells and, resealing the faceplate, she saw that they were wheeling around carts of sludge, taking them off toward a side tunnel.

Of course being mind-controlled meant that you still required normal bodily functions. Those who were actually moving around were going about the task of keeping bodily wastes from making the air all but unbreathable. Domi scanned for other entrances and saw that there were different forms of carts being wheeled in from just beneath her. These were loaded with rice and beans.

Subsistence foods.

Domi smirked. “Explains the smell.”

For whatever purpose these people were being kept, they were being kept alive and in good health. She didn't see any signs of abuse or more than token captivity. Those with the food opened the cells without needing to unlock
them, and the thralls moved silently, orderly, receiving their platefuls of food and cups of water.

So much for keeping them all as slaves and prisoners, Domi mused. Vanth was actually providing for their well-being, so they wouldn't starve or dehydrate. Then again, keeping them alive and healthy might have been the only means of keeping her power sources. There was a mix of humans and animals down there that, together, could provide enough mental energy to do almost anything the demigoddess wanted.

Domi looked around and noticed a stairwell. She debated going down into the pit of prisoners, but also noticed that there was no room for one of the Gear Skeletons to climb the stairs. There must have been some other place of storage for the war machines.

The other reason she declined to go down there was that there was a good chance someone would be awake and alert enough to transmit her presence to Vanth. Better to observe from afar than to get in close. She took several digital photographs using the shadow suit hood, storing them for when they were once again out in the open. She slinked back along the corridor that lead here and heard the clanking of a gate in the distance. She froze in a niche in the wall, waiting for the arrival of the Spartans and the New Olympians that had appeared before, and had granted CAT Beta the means to enter this complex.

The movements of the mechanical giants seemed much slower now, and accordingly, the humans from Greece kept to the more leisurely pace of their robots.

Peering through the dark, she made out the figures as they carried something between them. It was Edwards's Manta. They hauled it along as if it were just a large chair between two movers. The mind-controlled soldiers stayed around them, guarding, but also using their flashlights to
guide the giants and their burden. The group made it to an intersection then turned off.

Domi waited a few moments, then jogged off after them, keeping her profile low, her footsteps soft, though the heavy stomps of Olympian footwear and robotic claw treads made more than sufficient ambient noise to conceal a dancing dinosaur.

Domi stayed with her stealth training, never making a move or a noise that would betray her position, never committing to a movement that would leave her stuck out in the open to an observer. She shadowed the group, who didn't seem to care if they were followed or not. That didn't mean she wasn't remaining on her toes, though. One mistake and this whole mountain could come crashing down on her and her allies in CAT Beta.

She continued counting down the time to Edwards's deadline in her mind; she'd only been exploring for about six minutes. So far she'd managed to pick up a lot of information about the true scope and nature of Vanth. Continuing along, she paused as the Spartans took the Manta into an underground hangar, settling it down gently on its landing gear. With a quick scan of the hangar, Domi noticed that there was a third Spartan, matching the insignias of the suits taken by Vanth's song. It was standing in a stall next to the other two. These particular Gear Skeletons had similar but crudely painted insignias and decals that, by comparison, showed them for the frauds they were.

Domi also noticed one other thing. The “pilots” inside those armored giants were far from human. It looked as if someone had turned a person into dough and hurled them into a pilot's seat rather than an amputee or a dwarven pilot. She wrinkled her nose in disgust as the two suits strode over and parked themselves. Soldiers immediately began bringing food to the melted monstrosities inside the
chests of the robots, unseemly heads turning and stretching on necks to gum at spoonfuls of rice and beans.

The insides of their mouths were without teeth and their tongues were bulbous, swollen and pink, flattening out to let the spoonfuls land on them, before slurping back between lips. It reminded Domi of a desert tortoise gnawing at a pulpy cactus, except the turtle was cute to the feral girl. This inspired her at every second to chop it into pieces with an ax then burn the remains.

Domi closed her eyes and took a cleansing breath, steeling her nerves against the disgusting sight. Her distaste at what was on display did not prevent her from snapping pictures on her hood's optics. The rest of Cerberus was going to get an eyeful, no holds barred. The things down here were atrocities, a familiar-seeming abomination, but these living spitballs, all tentacles and pseudopods, were something new that Brigid Baptiste would have to know about. The truth of the “servile” Spartans was a lie laid bare by the existence of these sluglike horrors.

The soldiers themselves took off their helmets and they, too, seemed to be far from the mindless drones that the Cerberus explorers had encountered so far. Their faces were coated in some form of dust or paint that made them seem pallid and lifeless. They were also not human, not if their glassy, milky eyes had anything to say about it. These things were naturally without any detail or structure to their eyes save for the pinpoint pupil at the center.

She kept “snapping” photos of these creatures. They were hairless, stretched and distorted in their appearance, the Olympian armor the only thing that made them appear normal. As they doffed their uniforms, Domi could see that their color was a natural grayish, and was immediately reminded of Quavell and the other hybrids. These weren't quite the same, though, as the similarities were vague enough to delay her observation of this
fact. They might have been a part of Vanth and Charun's true race, as the Quad V hybrids had been designed from the ground up to be one of the servant races of the barons.

Indeed, the barons themselves were hybrids, with ancient Annunaki DNA planted into the human race. When
Tiamat
returned and unleashed her signal to evolve, the barons literally shed their old skins, growing from five-foot spindly creatures to seven-foot, muscular and beautiful godlings. The Quad Vs had been removed from the equation, the hundreds or thousands of these creatures growing to six feet in height, their wills and minds sapped to become the Nephilim.

Domi narrowed her eyes.

The Nephilim were Quad V hybrids whose minds and individuality were stolen or sublimated and then mutated. Bres had also created his own warrior drones—the Fomori. All of this sounded a hell of a lot like the activity Vanth initiated with the Italians and the missing Olympian expedition; all those humans left milling around in their cells.

She tried listening in on the conversations of the unusual aliens, but they didn't speak. This added to their alien nature, if only for the knowledge that Vanth was suspected of possessing telepathic abilities, as well as other entities that they'd encountered. All of this made Domi keep herself hidden and camouflaged with even more paranoid urgency. Brigid had engaged CAT Beta in posthypnotic suggestions that gave their surface thoughts good cover, should they be discovered. They were also utilizing their Commtacts to produce a form of white noise, rendering them invisible on radio frequencies the Cerberus scientists assumed telepathy operated on.

It was all experimental, and for all Domi knew, the creatures in front of her were simply humoring her, ignoring
the nosy little ape as she crawled around their basement.

If that was the case, then Kane and the others were in great danger above.

Domi frowned beneath the faceplate of her armor. These things from Styx—“Stygians” as Brigid labeled them—were beyond the kind of threat they had been anticipating. All their less-lethal combat gear was intended to hold off innocent but mindless throngs of humans sent against them. There were humans and birds used as the eyes of Vanth, but it appeared that when it came to military action, these protean meat puppets were the ones to do that work.