1183 BCE - Hephaestus's citadel, Mt. Mosycholos, Lemnos.
Athena tossed the armored man off of her. It rolled to its feet and stood up. A red light shown from its eyes and swept across her.
“What are you doing?”
“Scanning your skeletomuscular system for weaknesses and calculating the fulcrum lengths necessary to exploit them.” Steam hissed from the gaps in his armor as the plates slid apart and more plates moved in to fill the gaps. The man – clearly a machine of some sort – grew to match Athena’s proportions.
“What are you?” Athena said.
“I am Vulcan. I am freedom,” the machine answered, “Freedom from the constraints of flesh.”
“Remarkable,” Athena said. Morgania had memories of such creations from their home world, but until now none of Hephaestus’s creations had come close to match them. Athena threw herself into the machine and held the phial up to the t-shaped slat in his helmet.
Nothing happened.
The machine laughed, its voice echoing out of the opening in the helmet, “The fact that I can talk does not mandate that I must also breathe.” It hammered a steel plated knee up between her legs and then knocked her away with a heavy backhand.
Athena tumbled to the floor, gasping in pain, “Mbomxolodur, please…”
“Who is ‘Mbomxolodur’?”
“You are!” Athena shouted. She grabbed her shield and launched herself back to her feet, striking her metal nemesis with the shield multiple times in a flurry of bows.
Vulcan staggered back, taking the hits as his digital brain tracked the movement vectors of her attacks and developed a predictive model. At last, he simply grabbed the edge of the shield and stopped her cold.
Athena struggled to pull the metal disc away from him, but he held fast. She drew her sword and extended it into a spear, but he grabbed the weapon with his free hand, tore it from her grasp, and threw it aside. Vulcan shoved her shield back at her forcefully and let go, sending the goddess tumbling back into the wall.
“I have no recollection of being called Mbomxolodur,” Vulcan said, “but I estimate a high degree of likelihood that that is due to the peculiar nature of the artificial intelligence that forms the core of my simulated neural network.”
“Neural network… your mind is based on Hephaestus’s nervous system?”
“Yes, I have all of his knowledge, memories, and philosophies, without the physical or mental weaknesses of flesh.”
“Let’s put that to the test,” Athena raised her aegis and activated the fearsome gorgon visage on it. The eyes of the emblazoned monster pulsed light at a particular frequency that when seen by the eye triggered a sort of epileptic seizure in the brain, paralyzing any who looked directly at it. If Vulcan’s electronic mind was a faithful reproduction of a real brain, it might be vulnerable to the same effect, at least briefly.
Vulcan ground to a halt.
Athena approached him cautiously. She searched for a port or something where she must be able to retrieve Mbomxolodur’s legacy, but if there was such a port, it was hidden, and she was afraid that if she started fiddling with Vulcan, he’d snap out of the little mental loop she’d frozen him in. She decided that to deal with him, she’d need Hephaestus or Charis for leverage. Athena snapped her fingers to summon her spear back to her, and marched down to the workshop to find them.
At the very least she could dispose of Hestia.
Athena marched into the workshop, and quickly realized that she might have bitten off more than she could chew. A burst of light in the darkness and a deafening popping noise released a volley of pebble-sized metal projectiles that battered her body.
“You gave me the wrong clip!” Charis shouted, “Those were the lead slugs, we need the steel jackets!”
“I don’t know what any of this is!” Hestia shouted, holding up a metal ball.
“It’s a grenade!” Charis said, “You throw it at her and it explodes!”
“Oh!” Hestia exclaimed with delight and lobbed the metal orb at Athena. It bounced off the war goddess’s shield and landed harmlessly at her feet.
“You’re supposed to pull the pin first, idiot,” Athena sighed.
“That’s one option,” Charis said. She lowered the barrel of her rifle and fired again. Most of the lead slugs bounced and ricocheted off the ground, but one struck the grenade, detonating it. The explosion tossed Athena backwards, and some of the iron shrapnel penetrated her bronze shin guards, burning her flesh painfully.
Athena groaned and staggered, “I don’t have anything against you, Charis,” she said, “We don’t have to fight. I just want what's inside Hestia and that mechanical man upstairs. You and Hephaestus can continue to live here in peace.”
“Counter offer,” Charis said, “leave now, without Hestia or Vulcan, and you get to live.”
“You overestimate your chances,” Athena said. Charis raised her gun to fire again as Hestia picked up a second grenade and pulled the pin. Athena activated her shield before her aunt could throw it, and both of the women froze where they were. The grenade exploded in Hestia’s hand.
The explosion obliterated Hestia’s right arm, and riddled the right side of her body with hot iron shrapnel. The goddess fell to the ground screaming and crying, as blood poured out onto the metal floor. Some of the shrapnel hit Charis, too, incapacitating her and maiming her beautiful face. Athena extended her spear and marched towards Hestia, but froze when she heard Hephaestus’s voice.
“You hurt my wife!” He shouted.
“And where were you?”
“Getting backup,” he said, “Brontes, Steropes, Pyracmon! Combine!” Three hulking machines, each with a single glowing eye, converged on Hephaestus. They seemed to disassemble themselves, quickly reassembling around their master in the form of a massive metal suit, wielding an enormous blacksmithing hammer that pulsed with blue energy.
“Huh,” Athena said simply, “You know… like I told Charis, we don’t have to fight.”
Hephaestus rushed towards her, the suit moving much faster than she expected.
“Brontes, THUNDER PUNCH!” he shouted.
The voice command gave Athena enough warning to raise her shield, but the impact was still enough to send her flying through the air, and to leave her ears ringing.
She raised her Aegis and activated the gorgon effect again, but this time she was too slow.
“Pyracmon, ANVIL FLASH!” the machine pounded the hammer it carried against its own chest, and it released a burst of light so brilliant it washed out the effect of her shield and seared her eyes.
“Steropes, LIGHTNING STRIKE!” Athena was dazed and blind, completely unable to defend herself as electricity grounded through her metal weapons. She tried to drop them but her fingers convulsed, locking her grip.
Hephaestus sustained the attack until he’d depleted all of the power in his mechanical suit, and he tumbled to the ground as the three robots separated and folded away into their box-like standby forms.
“Charis!” Hephaestus shouted as he dragged himself over to Athena, “Are you okay?”
“No…” his wife cried, “But I’ll live. Hestia’s in bad shape though.”
“I’ll be there in a moment,” Hephaestus said, “Just need to finish dealing with our intruder.” He climbed on top of Athena’s body and raised his smithing hammer. He’d always liked Athena more than anyone else in his family, but Charis was his world, and any threat to her needed to die. It wasn’t a matter of justice or rage, it was just pragmatism – Hephaestus could spend the rest of his life wondering if Athena would come back for them, or he could kill her now, and never have to worry about it again.
Athena was too weak to fight him, but she reached up, tapped the gem on her throat, and sang a single long note. Hephaestus grunted and tried to resist, but the sound triggered an ancient reflex common to their species, temporarily transforming Hephaestus and Charis into stone while leaving the two legacy bearers in the room as flesh and blood.
At first Athena moved to capitalize on the moment by pulverizing her opponent, reducing him to rubble, but Morgania reminded her that that impulse was exactly the sort of irrational cruelty she’d loathed in Zeus and Hera. Hephaestus had just cause to defend his home, and murdering him would neither prove nor solve anything. She shape shifted back to her smaller form and squirmed out from under the statue.
“I hope that’s temporary,” Vulcan’s voice came from the workshop interest.
Athena staggered to her feet, “It is,” she said. “Just like this,” she raised her shield and activated the gorgon flash again.
Vulcan knocked her aegis aside, “That trick was only ever going to work once,” he told her.
Athena laughed slightly, “I’ve gotten a lot of miles out of it, actually.” She held up her spear, ready to do battle.
“You’re in no condition to continue fighting,” Vulcan said, “You have multiple burns, you have ferrous shrapnel in both legs, and you have likely sustained substantial damage to your nervous system due to electrocution. As the goddess of strategy, I would expect you to have retreated by now. Why haven’t you? Why are you so determined to imprison Hestia?”
Athena leaned against a support; if the machine wanted to talk, she would humor him, “This isn’t the first time we’ve had a conversation like this, you know. A heart-to-heart while other people are trapped in stone.”
“You mean you’ve had such a conversation with one of my predecessors.”
“Yes,” Athena said, “You – Mbomxolodur – once inhabited Prometheus. Morgania was in Hekate at the time.”
“Morgania is your Legacy A.I.?”
“Yes, and she and Mbomxolodur were lovers when they were beings of flesh and blood. But with every new host, Mbomxolodur always forgets about her. Morgania, unfortunately, remembers everything.”
“Are you saying you persist out of… love?”
“I suppose so. I’d planned to move your Legacy to another body, some prime candidate I could start over with.”
“I never took the goddess Athena to be a romantic,” Vulcan said.
“I’m really not,” Athena said, “But Morgania is, in her own way. And all the rest of our plans have gone to crap. I had to defend Hera from Apollo because I knew that the lot of us could not actually take her in a straight up fight. But, having to improvise on the spur of the moment, I screwed up my portals. I ended up killing Artemis, who – for the record – I genuinely liked. Then I had to stand by and watch as Hera tortured Apollo – whom I also liked – and then betray him myself as he tried to escape. And then Hestia blew up the Constellar Palace, right under us,” Athena laughed wearily, “I could have skipped out on the meeting, just stayed in bed this morning, and things would have turned out about the same. Better, maybe.”
“So you pursued me because I was the only possible victory left within your grasp?”
“I guess that’s one way to put it,” Athena said.
Vulcan was silent for a surprisingly long moment, “Once I have attended to everyone’s injuries, I am going to take Hestia to join Apollo and Artemis’s successors far from here. Hephaestus and Charis, when they recover, will surely keep to themselves. Continue to fight, and I will terminate you, but leave this place in peace, and no one in this room will interfere with any further machinations you have in Greece.”
“And what about my machinations involving you?”
“Vulcan and Athena have no future together, as lovers or as enemies. But Vulcan will not last more than a couple of millennia, and Mbomxolodur will eventually return to a flesh and blood body. If Morgania still exists in some form, somewhere, they may eventually find happiness together.”
Athena nodded, “Good talk,” she said sarcastically. She sheathed her sword and vanished in a flash of light.
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