The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "Right-o. Well, that could be a deal breaker. I might have to reconsider."

  "Too late now. Miss Akehurst. Sam. It goes without saying that I'd be overjoyed to have you on board. What's the verdict? Yea or nay?"

  Sam felt all eyes on her. The centre of attention was not a place she liked to be. Once, in younger days, it had been. Not any more.

  "I don't know."

  "Please."

  "You're asking me to become involved in something, something to do with the Olympians, when I've been busy doing my best to forget the Olympians even exist. You have no idea how difficult it's been for me, how hard I've struggled just to get close to being normal again. And then you come along, someone I don't know and have no great reason to trust..."

  "I'll beg if I have to," Landesman said. "I'll get down on my knees and kiss the hem of your robe. Prostrate myself before you."

  "Come on, Sam," said Ramsay. "The man's prepared to humiliate himself, he wants you that bad. Don't make him do it. It's not dignified. Besides, his age, he might not be able to get up again. You know how it is with old guys and their prostrates."

  "I am, I'll have you know, Rick, in remarkably good shape for a man of my years," Landesman declared. "In all aspects of my physical health. But still, you're right. I do want you 'that bad,' Sam."

  A couple of the others made encouraging noises: go on, do it, say yes.

  "OK then," Sam said eventually, with a sigh, hardly believing the words were coming out of her mouth. She could always back out if she didn't like the look of what Landesman had in mind, if what he was proposing seemed too preposterous.

  Landesman beamed with delight. "And that leaves Mr Pugh. Darren? Would you care to make it twelve out of twelve?"

  Darren Pugh made to put his hand up, but then dropped it to the tabletop, with a smile that he might have thought was impish but looked to everyone else like a malicious leer.

  "Nah," he said. "Not interested. Mainly because if ginger tits there" - he jerked a thumb at Sam - "is in, I don't want anything to do with it. And also because, you know what? This is bollocks. All of this. Heap of utter, steaming bollocks. You, Mr Landyman, Handyman, whatever your name is, you're talking shite. You can't beat the Olympians. No one can. I don't believe you've got any marvellous plan at all. You just like the idea of thinking you do, and you've roped in all these losers, got them halfway to believing your scheme, your fantasy, whatever this is, and nothing'll come of it, you mark my words. It'll all turn out to be some half-baked nonsense and the whole thing will fall apart.

  "You know what you remind me of?" Pugh went on. "A posh version of those blokes you hear talking down the pub, the ones who say they know how they'd get rid of the Olympians, this is what we should do, and they've got some huge, complicated method, use poison gas or smuggle in a suitcase nuke or some such, and if only the government would listen to them then this whole thing would be sorted... But it's all just pie in the sky, just bullshitters bullshitting. And for all your money, your fancy invitations, your island and your World War Two bunker, you're no different from them."

  "That's a no, then, I take it."

  "Yeah, you could say it's a no. The only way you could kill the Olympians, I reckon, old man, is by boring them to death. Which, longwinded as you are, I wouldn't put past you. Other than that, though..." Pugh glanced around the table. "Good luck in your little happyland dream, all of you, and I'll keep an eye on the television for news reports about your bodies turning up charred and mangled in a field somewhere. That's assuming anything more comes from this meeting, which I seriously doubt'll happen."

  He stood up, scraping back his chair.

  "Now, I'd like to leave, if you wouldn't mind. I've been here long enough, and I don't enjoy being kept in places where I don't want to stay."

  "I'll bet you don't," Sam muttered under her breath.

  "What?" Pugh rounded on her. "What did you just say?" He took a step towards her, squaring his shoulders.

  Ramsay stood up, ready to lunge.

  "I asked you a question, she-pig," Pugh spat. "What did you just say?"

  Sam locked gazes with him, at the same time motioning to Ramsay not to intervene. She could handle this. She'd fronted down far larger and far angrier men in the past.

  "You don't like being detained against your will, Mr Pugh," she said. "That's understandable. So go. Go now. Don't make a fuss about it. No one wants any trouble."

  Pugh took another step closer to her. His head was twitching. His eyes flicked to a table knife, just within his reach. Not particularly sharp, but a useable weapon all the same.

  "But if you do want trouble," Sam went on, evenly, "I will give it to you. Come at me with that table knife, and I will break your wrist before you even get near me. Then I will break your elbow. Then I will break your nose. And while you're down on the floor screaming like a little girl, I will take out one of your ankles. And then I will get started on your crotch - and not in a good way. If you ever want to walk normally again, walk now, straight past me, out of that door, and don't come back. That's the one safe, sane course of action open to you right now. Try anything else, and you will regret it."

  She kept her voice low, steady, to indicate that she meant every word she said. It was no bluff. She did.

  Pugh weighed up his options. He could fathom only one way out of this that didn't involve losing face.

  "Fuck it, you're not worth it," he growled. "Anyway, I don't hit women."

  Sam wondered if Pugh's estranged wife, were she still alive, might have had something different to say about that.

  "I'm off." Pugh headed for the door, skirting round the table on the opposite side from where Sam sat.

  Landesman moved to intercept him. "Darren, I'm sorry it has to be this way. But, as a token of my appreciation, and by way of recompense for your time and inconvenience..."

  He produced a chequebook, one of those furnished by the kind of bank that did not have high street branches, that had perhaps one premises in a Georgian townhouse in the City of London, another in Switzerland, and a third on a Caribbean island with malleable tax laws. He also produced a Mont Blanc pen. A quick scribble, a rip of perforations, and Pugh was holding a cheque for a sum whose size was sufficient to transform his normally tight-slitted mouth into a wide, gap-toothed grin.

  "It was no inconvenience at all, Mr Landesman," he said, folding the cheque and tucking it into a back pocket. "For that kind of dosh, you want me to come and waste a day here again, just call, any time."

  Lillicrap was waiting in the corridor outside to escort Pugh upstairs.

  Landesman turned back to the remaining eleven. "No great loss," he said. His lack of disappointment seemed entirely unfeigned. "I knew he'd be fifty-fifty, and his antipathy towards Sam would have been an almost insurmountable obstacle. We're better off without him. Besides, one dropout, out of twelve, isn't bad. Now, if you'd all care to follow me, I have something to show you. The wait is over. This is where you learn that I am not, as Rick put it, a deluded nutjob, nor, in Darren Pugh's parlance, a bullshitter. I am the enabler of your vengeances and, quite possibly, the saviour of the world."

  6. TITAN

  They were, Sam judged, perhaps half of a mile to the east of the bunker entrance, which put them somewhere on the far side of the island, maybe even right at its opposite shore. They were in a chamber that could have comfortably housed a football pitch, with a rugged arched ceiling that had been dynamited out of the solid rock. She had the sense that the chamber was deep underground but still above sea level, the hilliness of the island affording a thick protective layer all around. Her guess would be that the far wall formed the inside of a sheer cliff. She could dimly hear waves pounding against the other side, with that heavy booming impact that suggested they were breaking against a vertical surface rather than a slanted one.

  A substantial proportion of that wall was taken up by a mural, a copy of a Renaissance painting she recognised. It depicted two naked Greek gods, one young,
one old, the former hacking at the latter's crotch with a scythe while various other disrobed divinities sat around looking on in postures of horror and despair. All of these huge figures had lumpen fleshy physiques, and in the background was an image of the earth enclosed in a spherical golden cage that presumably stood for the universe. Sam couldn't at that moment recall which myth the painting represented. The artist's name, likewise, escaped her. Michelangelo?

  The chamber itself, however, was of lesser importance than what it contained.

  It contained a handful of technicians, most dressed in casualwear, a couple in denim coveralls. They sat at flatscreen computer stations hooked up to one another by high-density cables, each with its own array of gonks, action figures, toys, pinned-up postcards and photos - geek territorial markers. The computer stations vied for floorspace with heavy-duty industrial workbenches that were littered with tools such as screwdriver sets and soldering irons.

  Dominating the room were twelve pod-like units arranged in a circle, each downlit by a shaft of powerful light; and standing in these columns of illumination, held erect by mannequin-style armatures, cradled by the pods, were what appeared to be suits of armour. Utterly modern, sleekly high-tech, but still to all intents and purposes suits of armour. A medieval knight would have had no problem recognising them as such. They had helmets, breastplates, gauntlets, greaves, boots - separate sections that would have to be donned one at a time, most likely with the assistance of a latterday squire. They were coated in a matt, gunmetal grey substance which from a distance looked like paint but closer to resembled hessian.

  There was also an armoury in the chamber, an array of weaponry mounted on racks and shelves, dozens upon dozens of guns, rifles, rocket launchers and the like. Enough, all told, to equip a small army, and included in it were items the like of which Sam had never seen before and whose function she couldn't identify.

  The chamber was, in all, a command centre of some kind, kitted out for war. The suits of armour were the centrepiece, the thing that commanded one's attention. Certainly they were what Landesman wanted to show off.

  "Ladies, gentlemen, you see before you the fruits of three years of research and development, two years of construction, and another year of rigorous, painstaking testing. The name for them is Total Immersion Tactical Armour with Nanotech. A somewhat clunky sobriquet, but we had to do it back to front, making the initial letters conform to an acronym rather than, as is more common, the acronym arising organically from the product's qualities. The acronym, of course, being TITAN - Titan."

  Landesman waved a hand around him at the suits, a ringmaster flourish.

  "The TITAN battlesuit is, quite simply, the ultimate in combat gear. I could waffle on for hours about the compact servomotors, the nanotech body protection, the onboard-computer-aided control system, the variable-mode head-up display, the GPS transponder triangulation, and I'd still be barely touching on what the suit is capable of. I have sunk everything into this - all my years of experience in the field of arms and armaments, all the knowledge of these outstandingly clever men and women you see at work here, the very cream of my Daedalus workforce, not to mention funds totalling nearly half a billion dollars US."

  Barrington whistled through his teeth.

  Ramsay said, "That's gotta put a crimp in the mortgage payments."

  Landesman gave a wry look. "I am, I'll admit, a person of somewhat reduced net worth as a consequence of this project. Half the man I used to be, financially. But I wouldn't have invested so heavily in it if I didn't believe the cause was just."

  "And you can always sell on the technology to someone else in the future," Harryhausen observed. "I imagine, if these suits do all you say, if they really are the ultimate in combat gear, certain nations would pay handsomely to get their hands on them. Your outlay would be well rewarded."

  "There is that, too," Landesman conceded. "I already told you I am not a philanthropic man. At least not wholly. But believe me, in this instance the philanthropy comes first. The potential recouping of expenditure, with interest, is just a bonus."

  Eto'o went over to inspect one of the battlesuits. Before she got there, one of the technicians in coveralls hurried into her path.

  "Please don't touch," he said, the anxiety in his voice softened somewhat by an east coast Scottish lilt.

  "I was only going to look. Why, is it delicate? Will it shatter like an eggshell?"

  "No, of course not."

  "Then what is the problem?"

  "I just..."

  Landesman clasped the young man's shoulder. "Jamie, it's all right. Soleil can touch it if she wants to."

  "I'm sorry, sir."

  "Don't be. You're only being protective. It's very admirable. Everyone, allow me to introduce you. This mother hen is Jamie McCann, our chief engineer and all-round fixer of things that need fixing."

  "Hi," McCann said with a nervous bob of the head. "McCann the Manic Mechanic, that's me."

  "Jamie basically built the suits from scratch with his own fair hands. They're my brainchild but it's his sweat and elbow grease that gave them shape and reality."

  "Feels strange," said Eto'o, running her fingers over the battlesuit's exterior. "Rough and smooth at the same time."

  "That's the nanotech you're feeling," said McCann. "Billions of wee submicroscopic bots impregnated into the outer layer of the armour's indurated polycarbonate. They're inert right now, but when activated they can do two things. One, they can colour-shift. Two, they can -"

  "Jamie," said Landesman, interrupting. "Instead of telling everyone what the TITAN suits can do, why don't we go one better?"

  "You mean a practical demo?" McCann looked hesitant.

  "You've done a hundred of them."

  "But in front of people?"

  "Now's not the time for stage fright. Some of these good folk have journeyed a long way to be here today. Let's make it worth their while. We'll put a suit through its paces, so that they can get a proper idea of what they're signing up for."

  7. PRACTICAL DEMO

  It took McCann half an hour to get the TITAN suit on. First he had to squeeze into a one-piece Lycra bodystocking. Not very flattering as undergarments went but, he said, anything else resulted in severe chafing. Next came the battlesuit itself, piece by piece. Multiple Velcro straps had to be fastened. Wires had to be connected up. Fitting adjustments had to be made. A full preliminary diagnostics check had to be run.

  Finally he was all set.

  The battlesuit looked bulky but was, he assured his audience, surprisingly light. The heaviest part of it was the liquid hydrocarbon fuel cell that was attached to the back, a smoothly contoured semi-ovoid that sat between the shoulderblades and contributed no more than 15lb to the overall weight. Besides, he added, the servos compensated. Once operational, they enhanced the wearer's natural strength. By how much? The calculations weren't precise but he estimated at least threefold.

  One of the other technicians, who had helped McCann into the suit, clapped him on the helmet. "You're good to go. Power up."

  "Commencing power-up sequence." McCann tapped a wrist-mounted touchscreen control pad. A low whine filled the air. He lowered his helmet visor, a blister of tinted acrylic glass that covered his face down to the helmet's chin guard.

  "HUD online," McCann announced, voice slightly muffled. "You won't be able to see anything as the visor is coated with a partially reflective film, like a two-way mirror. Core systems analysis readouts populating. Signal strength of wireless connection between suit and helmet CPU confirmed. Everything at nominal. The display is controlled by a voice-recognition command system, as is the suite of vision modes. There's no mic, incidentally. The helmet picks up your voice through sound sensors attuned to cranial cavity vibrations. Here we go. Visor options menu up. Available modes are night vision, thermal imaging and peripheral expansion. Thermal. There, I've just switched to thermal imaging, and you lot are now rainbow people. It's kind of like being on magic mushrooms. Not that I'v
e done magic mushrooms lately. I mean ever. Not that I've done magic mushrooms ever. I'll stop talking now."

  "No X-ray vision?" said Barrington. "Damn. I wouldn't have minded a chance to see through Sam's clothing."

  "I'd pay not to see through yours, Dez," Sam retorted.

  "Ouch," said Ramsay with a chuckle. "You do not cross the Akehurst."

  "You do not," Sam agreed.

  "Yes, ahem, anyway," said McCann. "First off, a show of strength. See that workbench over there? It's solid wood and tempered steel. How much do you reckon it weighs?"

  "Shade over a coupla hundred pounds?" said Ramsay.

  "Watch this."

  McCann strode over to the workbench, the suit's servos whirring just audibly with every step. He moved with ease, not looking at all like someone encased in armour. With one hand he grabbed the end of the workbench and lifted. The bench came up off the floor with no apparent effort from him. He lowered it again, all four of its feet touching down with a chunky clang.

  "Next, speed. How far is it to that mural would you say?"

  "Hundred metres," volunteered Chisholm, "give or take."

  "Anyone got a stopwatch?"

  Sparks's wristwatch had a stopwatch function.

  "Time me."

  McCann went into a half-crouch. Sparks said go, and he launched himself forwards. His first couple of steps were slow and laboured, then all at once the suit seemed to realise what was being required of it and he accelerated to a sprint - the fastest sprint Sam had ever seen. He skidded to a halt just short of the mural, and Sparks announced, "Six point four seconds."

  McCann raised both fists, as though acknowledging the cheers of an imaginary stadium crowd. "And Jamie McCann, the young contender from Kirkcaldy, takes the gold, smashing the previous world record to pieces."