The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "Any other features of the suit you haven't told us about?"

  "Probably," Landesman replied with a grin. "But discovery is all part of the fun, isn't it? Nobody buys a computer and reads the manual from cover to cover. The best way to find out what a complex machine can do is by putting it through its paces and experimenting."

  Lillicrap gave a polite, meaningful cough. "Mr Landesman?" he said, with a glance at his watch.

  "Yes, yes, Jolyon, I know."

  "Nagging's what you pay me for, sir."

  "And you earn every penny. Sam, I'm afraid I must ask you and your colleagues to head inside now. The mist is lifting, and you know what that means."

  "Sunshine?"

  "Come, come, Sam. Argus? Satellites?"

  "Oh. Ah."

  "Yes. We run a software program that plots the course of every known manmade object in earth orbit. It's alerted us that a US military Key Hole optical reconnaissance satellite is due to pass overhead within the next few minutes. Discretion is necessarily one of our watchwords at Bleaney Island. Last thing we want is the Hundred-Eyed One spotting what we're up to. Crimps in plans don't come much more serious than that."

  "Then we'd better get under cover," Sam said. She relayed the message over the comms link, and the eleven recruits converged on the bunker entrance.

  Ramsay flipped up his visor. "What's this I see? Can it be Sam Akehurst? Miss I'm Never Going To Get The Hang Of This Shit? Look at you now, strolling along all smug and ooh-la-la. I'm guessing someone's made a breakthrough."

  "That she has," said Landesman.

  "Good news," said Ramsay. "So, you on-side now? You with the program?"

  Sam shook her head noncommittally.

  "Come on. The ten of us here, I think it's safe to say we're all of a like mind. Isn't that so, guys? We want to keep at this. We want to keep working with the suits and get our hands on some of that ordnance as well and pull together as a unit and then, when we're ready, go out and kick some Olympian butt. Yeah?"

  The others voiced their assent.

  Ramsay fixed Sam with his gaze. "We want to be Titans," the Chicagoan said. "We want to put the smackdown on those sick, self-righteous sons of bitches, and get ourselves a little payback into the bargain. Any way you slice it, it's a worthy cause. But - and I'm speaking for all of us here, and I'm not afraid to admit that we have been discussing you behind your back, Sam - we're keen for you to come to the party as well. In fact, not just come, but we're kinda hoping you might agree to be the hostess."

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Dumb analogy. Didn't work. What I mean is, how about you running the show? Being the top dog. El jefe. The big kahuna. Numero uno. I'm going to have to spell it out, aren't I? Our leader."

  Sam recoiled. "No. Oh, no, absolutely not. Me? Lead? No. I'm not the right material. Far from it."

  "I'd beg to differ."

  Lillicrap started making desperate ushering motions. "We really don't have time for this. Everyone, please, into the bunker. Now. You can carry on your conversation in there."

  "Nope," said Ramsay, not moving. "This brother's not going anywhere. Not 'til Sam says yes."

  "Me either," said Mahmoud.

  "Likewise," said Hamel.

  The rest agreed.

  Lillicrap threw a pained glance upwards. The mist had almost completely gone. The air was getting clearer by the second, the blue of the sky less pale, the cold sunlight stronger.

  Landesman, for his part, appeared highly intrigued by this turn of events, and not a little gratified.

  "What's it gonna be, Sam?" said Ramsay. "What's the answer?"

  "It's going to be thanks but no thanks. Why not you, Rick? You should be in charge. Everyone pays attention to what you say. They're doing it right now."

  "One, I'm a grunt, a jarhead, a born footsoldier. And two, I'm just a loudmouth. Folk may listen to me but they don't respect me."

  "Too bloody right they don't," said Barrington.

  "You, Sam, are respected," Ramsay said. "I know this. Granted, it's early days for all of us. We've only just begun. But if we don't get the top slot filled now, we maybe never will."

  "I don't want the job."

  "Want it or not, you're the only one suitable."

  "I implore you..." Lillicrap said. He was hopping from foot to foot like a child with a full bladder.

  Sam looked at the ten faces before her. They were firm-set, adamant, unanimous. How had this come about? Until today she'd been the least competent among them, unlikely to last. Not only that but she had minimal experience of giving orders. As a detective sergeant her role had been to follow her DI's lead and do much of his legwork for him. The rank carried authority but mainly that of someone else, in her case Inspector Dai Prothero. Uniformed officers had done as she asked but really only out of courtesy, deference to the man under whose aegis she sheltered. DI "Do Or Dai" Prothero had been a grave, commanding presence. A guv'nor. A natural boss. And thanks to him, Sam had realised she was not. It was a skill she hadn't yet developed and had been hoping to learn from him by example.

  And here, now, was this thing, zooming in at her utterly out of the blue, this weird mutiny-in-reverse, where ten people were united, militantly refusing to budge, their complaint not that someone had misgoverned them but that someone was reluctant to govern them.

  What could she do? She could, under the circumstances, only give in.

  "All right," she said. "Under protest, and on condition that if it turns out that I don't meet up to expectations I can step down any time - I'll do it."

  Lillicrap puffed out his cheeks in relief, and the Titans let out cheers.

  "Good choice," Ramsay muttered to Sam as they went into the bunker.

  "Was it?" she replied brusquely. "Was it even a choice?"

  11. SUPERIOR

  FUCKED-UP-NESS

  Days passed, merging into one another, and became weeks, which also merged into one another. The majority of the training was conducted underground, and was rigorous and intensive, so that come evening the Titans were so exhausted, it was all they could do just to eat supper and crawl into bed. Lights out, lights on, and then another few hours of suit practice and weapons drill, and then to bed once more, over and over, ad infinitum. Sessions in the upper world, the land above, were infrequent. Not only were reconnaissance satellites an issue but there was always the possibility of, as Landesman put it, "eyeball observation" - people on a passing yacht or the crew of a trawler or freighter catching sight of men and women roving across the rugged slopes of Bleaney Island in bizarre armour.

  There were the locals to consider as well. People on the mainland were aware that something out of the ordinary was going on over on Bleaney. A few years back they'd seen construction crews travelling back and forth to the island from the harbour, plus heavy equipment getting transported across. Rumour was that the old bunker had been converted into some kind of top-secret government research facility where they were investigating alternative fuels, cold fusion, something along those lines. Lillicrap primed Captain Fuller with a flow of titbits of information that supported this rumour, without ever revealing any of the truth to him, and the captain of course was only too happy to spread the insider knowledge around after a pint or three down at the pub. It wouldn't do, therefore, for the battlesuits to be glimpsed in action, which would be just conceivable for someone on the mainland with a decent telescope, and it certainly wouldn't do for the noise of weapons fire to be overheard, particularly as sound carried a long way across open water.

  Sam found this largely subterranean existence, this involuntary hibernation in a manmade cave, hard to cope with. She pined for daylight, vistas, fresh air. Any chance she could get, she sneaked up out of the bunker, just to be able to spend a few minutes on the beach watching the breakers pounce on the shingles, smelling the brine, and examining the detritus washed up on the foreshore - tangles of kelp, empty crab shells, plastic bottles and six-pack holders and scraps of fishing net. Even at night-time,
even in rain, it was good to get outdoors. It was a relief to be away, however briefly, from battlesuits and guns and scrutiny.

  Scrutiny, because her fellow Titans were looking at her, judging her every word and deed, trying to gauge how well she wore the mantle of leadership and whether in electing her they had chosen wisely. She didn't know what they wanted from her, so she behaved as she thought a leader should, offering commendation and condemnation wherever either seemed due and otherwise remaining aloof. It put a strain on her relations with Mahmoud, their friendship settling into a more formal mode, still cordial but no longer quite as warm.

  With Ramsay, things were somewhat stickier.

  He came up to her one evening at the end of training. Sam was sitting on the floor, having just divested herself of her suit. She wanted to get up and go and hit the showers but she was worn out from the day's efforts and her muscles, for now, refused to do anything but lie inert and ache.

  She was in her oh-so-flattering Lycra bodystocking, and so was he. They both looked ridiculous and Ramsay knew it. That, most likely, was why he had chosen this moment to approach her.

  "So, you and me," he said, "are we cool?"

  She didn't turn to look at him. "What do you think?"

  "Wild guess: you're still mad at me."

  "No shit, Sherlock."

  "I appreciate I blindsided you with the whole leader thing. Maybe I could have handled it a bit better."

  "Or not done it at all."

  If Ramsay had been waiting for an invitation to join her on the floor, she didn't offer one. He went down on his haunches next to her anyway. "You've got to understand, Sam, it was the right time. The matter needed to be raised. And you really shouldn't hold it against me. I was only a spokesman, saying what we'd all agreed on."

  "Why me?"

  "Well, that's the million-dollar question, ain't it?" He blew out air. "Why you? Apart from your brains. And everything else."

  "But I have no combat experience. I've been in the odd brawl, had to subdue the odd villain, but that's it as far as fighting goes. You've been in war zones, seen actual action. So have Anders and Soleil and Nigel and Dez. You know what's involved, what to expect. When we're out in the field, I could be hopeless. I might not have a clue what to do."

  "It isn't about combat experience," Ramsay said. "It's about taking charge. Responding decisively to events. Keeping a cool head under pressure."

  "And if I cock it up royally and wind up getting everybody killed?"

  "Then we'll all be dead and in no position to care. But you see, Sam, there's another reason why we want you as boss."

  "Because no one else would do it?"

  "No." A short burst of downpipe gurgle. "Well, yeah, maybe a little. But the truth is, what folks are looking for in a leader is somebody who's like them, only more so. Somebody who represents what they are in its purest form. We, us Titans, we're all... we're all broken. We're broken people. Life's picked us up in its jaws and given us a long hard shake and dumped us back down again all busted up and twisted. We've all been changed by something the Olympians did, and we can never go back to being who we were before. We've lost something. And you..."

  "I'm the worst of the lot. The most broken. The most changed. The one who's lost the most."

  "You won't even tell us what happened to you. You can't even bring yourself to talk about it, that's how deeply it's affected you. We all can sense how hurt you are inside, how damaged."

  "So let me get this straight. I got voted in on the grounds of being the most fucked up? That's my main qualification?"

  "Bingo." A grim grin. "Screwy, ain't it? But that's how it works. That's what gives you authority over us. Your superior fucked-up-ness. We've all of us got an axe to grind with the Olympians but the one you're carrying over your shoulder is way the biggest."

  Sam thought for a moment.

  "Rick?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Piss off and leave me alone. That's a direct order from your commanding officer."

  Ramsay rolled it around inside his head for a few seconds. Then - saying, "Yes, ma'am," gravely, without a trace of humour or irony - he hauled himself to his feet and left.

  Sam put her face in her hands.

  No crying, though. These days, Sam Akehurst did not cry. Not ever. Her tear ducts were bone-dry.

  12. POSEIDON PASSING

  It had been trailed on the BBC and the cable news channels for days. Poseidon was making a state visit - paying a courtesy call on the new Prime Minister, who had been swept to power last autumn on the strength of a platform of policies that included pensioning off a third of the nation's already substantially depleted armed forces, siphoning yet more tax revenue away from defence and towards education and social welfare, and decommissioning the very last of Britain's nuclear submarines. Five months after taking office, Catesby Bartlett was still enjoying a huge groundswell of public support, his approval ratings hovering around the 70% mark, a level unprecedented in modern political history. To his critics Bartlett was an Olympianite of the worst, most craven kind, and it was certainly true that he made no secret of his admiration for the Olympians and all that they had wrought, even if he had been known to cavil over some of their methods. His ovine devotion to the Pantheon had prompted a political sketch writer to dub him Baatlett, and the sobriquet had stuck. But his victory in the polls had proved, if nothing else, that he was a man in tune with the mood of the electorate, even though his party had scraped in with only a tiny majority.

  "I'm not blind," Bartlett had told reporters outside Number 10, shortly after his swearing-in. "I realise there are things the Olympians have done that are, y'know, not quite the done thing. I wouldn't for a moment condone, say, the Obliteration, or the regime change they carried out in certain countries. I mean, human rights, you know what I'm saying? Due process of law - I'm all in favour of that as well. As an ex-barrister, why wouldn't I be? But on balance, weighing up the pros and cons, you've got to hand it to the Pantheon. They made some tough choices. They took the bull by the horns and did what needed to be done. They took responsibility for humanity's security, because they had the power to. Full credit to them for that. So let's accept the status quo, shall we? Let's be pragmatic. Let's live in the world as it now is, not as some people might wish it to be. That's my take on the situation. Thank you."

  For Poseidon to come by, for him to agree to make a personal appearance at Westminster and thereby put the Pantheonic seal on Bartlett's premiership, was a terrific coup for the Prime Minister. He was playing it down, though, modest as ever.

  "Look at me," he said in a TV interview on the eve of the great event, "I'm just an ordinary chap, and tomorrow I'm going to step forward and shake the hand of the god of the oceans himself. Poseidon the Wide-Ruling, the Securer, the Cleaver Of The Rock. I'm as thrilled at the prospect as anyone would be. It's like meeting a superstar, one of the all-time greats. Elvis, or Frank Sinatra."

  "A junkie and a gangster," Barrington muttered at the screen. He and a handful of other Titans were watching the interview in the rec room. "That'd be about bloody right."

  "Both dead, though," Søndergaard pointed out.

  "There is that," said Barrington.

  "What I want most to come from this meeting," Bartlett went on, "is for people to see - not just here in the UK but around the world - that we can get along with the Olympians. We don't have to fear them. All we have to do is give them our complete co-operation, and they'll leave us be."

  "Co-operation," said Harryhausen. "From his lips it sounds like another word for cowardice."

  "That," said Bartlett, "is the Catesby Bartlett philosophy."

  "Beware the politician who starts referring to himself in the third person," said Ramsay.

  Sam felt obscurely embarrassed at Bartlett's performance and the reaction it was provoking from the non-Britons in the room. She didn't, as a British citizen, like being associated with Bartlett. She didn't want to be tarred with the same brush. He wasn't speaki
ng for her, he didn't represent her, and she didn't want anyone to think he did.

  For reassurance that she wasn't alone in this, she looked to her only compatriot present, Chisholm. He was staring fixedly at the television, his jaw clenched hard, the tendon below his ear taut and twitching. Irked by Bartlett too? No, the source of his tension wasn't, she realised, the Prime Minister. His jaw began clenching even more tightly as some library footage was aired showing Poseidon sailing majestically across the sea, riding the crest of an immense wave. Tomorrow the Olympian would be making a complete circuit of the British Isles, a kind of lap of honour before sweeping up the Thames into London for his rendezvous with the PM at Parliament. A map appeared onscreen, tracing the route of his circumnavigation and marking out the best vantage points along the coastline from which to see him go by. He would, it turned out, be passing Bleaney Island sometime around 3pm.

  And so, sometime around 3pm, the Titans assembled on the island's highest hilltop, armed with binoculars - and not in their battlesuits, naturally - to observe the godly transit. This was Landesman's idea. "Know your enemy," was his reasoning. "Take the opportunity to see him in the flesh when you can." He himself was out there, as were Lillicrap, McCann, and all the technicians. There was only one absentee.

  "Any of you guys seen Nigel?" Sparks wondered.

  "He said he preferred to stay below," Tsang replied. "He has no wish to be here."

  "Why not?"

  "His family, as you may remember. It was Poseidon who..." The rest was left unsaid.

  "Oh. Oh yeah."

  Poseidon came into sight somewhat later than scheduled. His progress was attended by a swarm of news helicopters, flying flat out to keep up with him. Through her binoculars Sam beheld a powerful, muscular physique that was running to flab, like a retired wrestler's. Long aquamarine hair and a long aquamarine beard flowed backwards from his face. A necklace of clamshells nestled on his hairy chest, while shiny fish-scale longjohns clad his lower half. He brandished his trident in one hand like a royal sceptre. His feet were lost in the foam of the wave that was supporting him and bearing him along. The wave was four or five metres high at its peak, and cut a white chevron half a mile wide across the sea's surface.