Prologue

 

Dr. Belladonna Cole trudged along a dirt path and mentally kicked herself in the ass. As if he could hear her, the leather clad man who came nearly to her shoulder smacked her rump with the bronze haft of his spear. The impact against her already bruised and aching buttocks set her staggering almost to a knee. Bella forced herself back to her feet and forced herself to walk forward, rather than glare backwards at the short man, or his friend, or any of the other heavily armed, swaggering sons of bitches that she had been stuck with for the better part of a week.

Come on, Bella. It is the chance of a lifetime, Bella. When will you ever got a shot like this again, Bella? Do you want to be in the history books Bella? She thought. If that air force son of a puke had sparkled, I’d have let me bite me. Well, I hope that he gets seven different kinds of STDS and dies in a freak acid-pit slash massively oversized garbage disposal accident.

The heavily armored figure at the head of their little column lifted a gauntlet that glittered in a fine spray of sunlight that managed to get past the thick leaves that spread outwards from the tops of alien trees. A few weeks ago, Bella would have been going ga-ga for the trees and she wasn’t even the team xenobiologist. She was a geologist. But even a geologist who had killed every single pet and house plant she had ever owned, from a canary to a goldfish to a cactus, could admire the beauty of the jungles of this place.

They were similar to Earth jungles in the broad strokes. But the details were filled in by glowing bioluminescence and shimmering, rainbow colors. It looked like the kind of day-glow dream brought to life by James Cameron or Guillermo Del Toro, with the occasional hint of shimmering crystals thrust through loam and underbrush. She itched to go and examine those. Instead, she swept her gaze around to try and spot what had gotten her current captor to stop walking.

The soldiers responded in kind. They were all armed with a mixture of spears and swords and primitive flint-locks which looked like they had come from the set of a pirate film – save that their barrels were made of glowing crystal, rather than out of metal. As they glared around, Bella was forced down to her knees by the man who had been smacking her butt every time she slowed down. His hand was grimy on her shoulder, and his scarred face was intent as he snarled her in the native language.

Some people here could speak English as fluidly as Bella.

Others spoke whatever language had evolved since humanity’s ancestors had been banished to this place. Bella wasn’t entirely clear on the history. Her captors hadn’t been eager to lay out history lessons to the science team. Instead, they had been more interested in beating anyone who didn’t bow before their leader…

Their…

Bella shuddered convulsively and tried to not think of their leader.

Their god, her traitor mind whispered. Everything in Bella’s heart rebelled at calling that swaggering tyrant a god. But he had introduced himself as Ares – and hadn’t that been a trip? And then he had demonstrated his power. She would remember what had happened to Marcus until the day she died. Marcus had been in the midst of explaining his job as a linguist as the rest of the science team stood by. Ares had snorted, quietly.

Useless, he had said, then flicked his finger.

And…

Fssst-Boom! The sound of powder cooking off was almost cheerful at the start. But it ended with a roar and with a spray of blood and bone as the man who had tormented Bella the whole trip’s head exploded like an overripe fruit being stepped on. He toppled backwards, his spear clattering to the dirt. Bella flung herself flat, her breasts mashing to the ground. The jungle sweat she was soaked in was joined by fear sweat as the leader of their group bellowed.

The bellowing smoke cloud that had emerged from the forest made it clear where the shot had come from. Bella could see figures withdrawing. They wore scant clothes, and she saw flashes of blue skin and white hair on the leader. The others were more human in their appearance. More human in their pain as one of the soldiers fired off his flintlock pistol. At this range, the shot was pure luck. Or...was it?

Before they had left, Ares had given a long spiel to the guards. He had placed his hand upon each weapon they carried, and each still glowed with that strange radiance that he seemed to control.

Whether it was luck or skill or technology so advanced and schizophrenic that it was magic, the first of the three bandits fell on the ground in boneless, unlovely death. The other two continued running. A bullet tore through a branch above one, showering them with splinters, but the rest of the musket balls struck dirt or whined harmlessly through the air to vanish into the distance. The two bandits were gone.

Bella looked down at the corpse next to her. His pistol was still thrust into his belt.

She grabbed it and scrambled to her feet – and turned right into two of the other soldiers. One knocked the pistol from her hand and the other smacked her across the face with a gloved hand. The impact sent her sprawling to the ground. Her head rang and she gasped in pain. Her hands sank into the bloody dirt and she saw one of the men lifting back a boot. Before the impact could smash into her gut and do who knows what to her artificial pancreas, though, the voice of the leader of the group barked out. The foot slammed back to the ground.

Bella looked up as the armored leader of the group stomped towards her. Her gauntlet clad hand grabbed onto her helmet, sliding the steel faceplate upwards. Her face was as cold and distant as the space between stars – but looking past it, she was beautiful. Her hair was dark black, and her skin was the natural bronze that only came from the Mediterranean. Her eyes, though, were a kind of warm, dark, black eye that looked more like it had come from the Middle East, and her curly hair bespoke a sprinkling of Africa or elsewhere. It was a mixture that Bella had never seen on Earth.

Which made sense.

She hadn’t been on Earth for...who knows how long now.

“Get up,” the woman said in clear English. Bella wasn’t sure what was scarier: that some kind of technology had filled the woman’s head with colloquial modern English within five seconds of being introduced to the science team, or if some technology was influencing Bella’s brain to make her think she was hearing modern English.

Bella stood.

“Never,” the woman growled. “Touch our weapons again. If you do, I will cut off a finger. If you run, I will cut off a hand. If you make us have to hunt you down, you lose...” She started to trace a line up along Bella’s arm. “A part for every hour we spent hunting. Do you understand?”

Bella’s throat felt dry. She almost wet her ragged, dirty shorts. Instead, she nodded.

“Good,” the woman growled.

The group walked along again. Bella looked back and saw that someone had left a tiny crystal on the dead man’s chest, his weapons now in the hands of another one of the soldiers. His body began to dissolve.

They continued into the jungle.

 

***

 

An eternity later, the reduced group emerged from the jungle and to their final destination. Sweat dripped from Bella’s chin and she panted as she looked down at the place, trying to understand what she saw. It looked like an open pit mine, cut into the dirt of the jungle. Trees had been cut down and shaved down into logs, then piled and covered with dirt to make defenses that looked pretty impressive from her perspective. A gently curving ramp led down to the mine itself. But rather than ore or veins of earth full of delicious precious metal, what sat there at the bottom of the mine was…

Was…

“Oh my god,” Bella whispered.

“Exactly,” the armored leader said, her voice reverent. She made a gesture above her heart as, for a moment, animosity faded in the face of awe.

The mine had broken into a massive sprawl of corridors. They were made of a solid black metal that shone in the sunlight that stabbed down from overhead and were laid out in a gridlike pattern that connected rectangular and square rooms together. Many of the chambers had been crushed under rock and rubble, but further from the center of the mine were intact hallways that vanished deep into the side of the mine. Hundreds milled about in the rubble, dragging stone and earth away up the ramp, to deposit it on the defenses.

Seeing those people took all excitement off the scene for Bella.

She didn’t know much about this world. But she recognized those collars. Any who wore them had to follow the orders of the person who controlled it. Thus far, the only positive light in this long nightmare was that she didn’t have one around her neck. Why that was remained an ominous enigma among foreboding mysterious.

Once the group had reached the bottom of the mine, a burly looking man came up to the armored leader. He nodded and the woman introduced herself. “Paladin Chastity,” she said – and at last, Bella had a name to hang on her. “Where’s the mage?”

The man jerked his thumb over his shoulder and Chastity and Bella walked through muck and mire and past slaves trying to get some shade from the murderous sun to a smallish tent that had been set up within about fifty meters from the entrance to the corridors that led into the side of the mine. The tent was really more of a gazebo, with a quartet of wooden poles that kept the angled roof of cloth and leather up and provided shade for the man within. And...what a man. Bella found herself gaping at him as she stood next to Chastity and started wondering how well the so called Paladin lived up to her name. Or title. Or whatever.

The man was an elf.

Like Legolas. Except his ears weren’t fake. That was only one of a bunch of tiny differences that all added up to his ‘elfness.’ It was the inhuman grace of his posture, the perfect stillness of his face as he looked down at a chunk of crudely shaped metal, the beautiful ruby red of his eyes. His skin was obsidian black and looked as if it had been polished, then slicked with oil. Which, she supposed, was another difference between him and Legloas. He wore nothing but a loincloth, and that meant that every inch of his exquisite, athletic musculature was on full display.

Bella forced her mouth shut as he looked over at the two of them, then bowed. There was a sardonic light in those ruby red eyes.

“Mage Xapanos,” Paladin Chastity said. “This is the Earth scholar.”

“Ah,” Xapanos said, his voice dry. “I see you’ve left her unbound.”

“If she runs, I am going to treat it as if you ran as well,” Chastity said, her voice flat. “Remember that.”

She turned and stomped off, leaving Bella next to the obsidian elf. Xapanos shook his head, clicking his tongue. “My apologies, honorable scholar. It seems we’re in the same galley on this.”

“Y-Yeah,” Bella stammered, then shook her head. “You’re a slave too?”

“All but for the collar.” Xapanos touched his neck. “Whatever magic Ares is using to create his personal collars, they interfere with the arcane magic of Purgatory. So mages and scholars have to be controlled through alternative methods.” He gestured to himself. “And Ares is both highly creative and strangely direct.”

Bella nodded as she stepped into the pavilion – and gasped in shock. The air underneath the shade was about thirty percent less humid and thirty degrees colder. Her skin prickled as her sweat began to chill away and she actually started to shiver. Xapanos chuckled, but she could see he looked chagrined. “My apologies. I should have warned you.”

“Thank god for AC,” Bella said, grinning. Her grin faded. “What does he have on you?”

“My family,” Xapanos said. “And my skin.”

“Your...skin?” Bella’s brow furrowed.

Xapanos held up his arm. “It looks like it shouldn’t burn under the sun. But it does...fast enough and fiercely enough that I am unable to walk after only a few hours. And my eyes-” He gestured to them. “Direct sunlight blinds me.”

Bella’s eyes widened. “He altered your melanin. With that skin color...maybe...it absorbs infrared and ultraviolet radiation differently.” She shook her head. “I wish Yancy was here, he was our xenobiologist.”

Xapanos’ brow furrowed – an expression that took his already shocking, movie star level beauty and added an appealing human edge to it that basically made Bella unable to do anything but think: Must. Rub. Cheek. Against. Abs. “Xeno. Bio. Logis. Fascinating.”

Bella managed to tear her eyes from his face. What she saw made her almost leap out of the pavilion. Sitting under the corner, shrouded by shade and nearly blending in with a pile of native Purgatorian supplies, was a heavy duty metal crate with the eagle symbol of the United States Air Force stenciled onto the side. The string of letters and numbers popped into her brain – thanks, endless memorization! And she felt even colder than the AC.

“Ah, yes, I asked the guard to gather up any of the Earth artifacts that arrived,” Xapanos said. “If you’re to help us, I figured you’d need tools.”

The team that had bee sent here through Earth’s first (and to her knowledge, only) faster than light wormhole generator hadn’t been sent in their shorts and T-shirt. The United States government had chucked enough arms and ammo to equip the entire twelve man squad of the military team, and enough high tech goodies to build an entire lab away from home. It had been ludicrously extravagant for their original mission of ‘find Liam Vanderbilt, come home.’

Huh.

She hadn’t thought of Liam Vanderbilt ever since she had dropped through the wormhole, far off course, and been captured by men on horseback, with nets and swords. She wondered if he had even survived the years he had been stuck here. His mysterious vanishing had led to the discovery of how to build wormholes in the first place – and the potentiality of his survival had pushed President Deinhardt to pushing forward on Project Orpheus.

But all thoughts of Vanderbilt scattered as she walked past Xapanos and placed her palms on the edge of the crate. It had been forced open. She slowly levered the lip backwards as her fellow captive walked over to stand behind her.

“Is it an arcane tool of some kind?” Xapanos asked, crossing his arms over his bared chest.

Bella looked down at the sleek, gunmetal gray of the Predator drone, its wings folded neatly alongside its bulk. Thrust into hardened packing material were several elongated arrow-shapes. Not being on the military team, Bella couldn’t say if they were high explosive or armor piercing. Whatever they were, they would change this place forever.

And they were in the hands of Ares. The god of war.

“...yes!” she said.

“One of the slave-masters thought they might be weapons,” Xapanos said, shaking his head.

“These?” Bella forced out a laugh that hysterical, even to her. “Weapons? Nooo!”

Xapanos arched a single white eyebrow. Then he smiled.

“Of course.”