The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "We're no one," said Hyperion. "Ghosts. We don't exist. Got that? Now run home and forget you ever saw us."

  "Ghosts..." A light of comprehension dawned in the teenager's eyes. "I know! I know it! You are them!" he exclaimed. "The ones. The monster killers. That is right, no? The ones who do the Griffin, the Sphinx... The Sirens also, I think. It is on the news today. And now the Lamia. You're here to kill her too."

  "It," Hyperion corrected him. "Kill it. Now what part of 'run home' did I not say clearly enough for you to understand, son?"

  "Please, I must shake your hands. You are heroes to us. We Agonides, we are talking about you the whole time. We love you. Many people love you. You are big buzz online. Go to the chat rooms, the forums, you'll see. Our leaders do not like you. They say you are bad. You are too much making waves. But the people, they know you are doing good thing. And the Olympians next? First the monsters, then the assholes who say they are gods but are not? That is the plan?"

  "I'm not going to tell you," said Hyperion. "And I'm not going to be shaking any hands either. Just scram, kid. I mean it."

  The teenager produced a mobile phone from his back pocket. "A picture. So I can post it online and show everyone who you are. Proof that you exist. The world needs to see you."

  "For God's sake don't let him," said Landesman.

  "Gimme that." Hyperion reached for the phone.

  "Um, Tethys, Hyperion..." came Oceanus's voice, quaverily over the comms. "Help."

  They turned.

  "I'm sorry," Oceanus croaked. "Came up from behind. Didn't see."

  The Lamia had him. A glistening trail of canal water led from the parapet of the bridge to where the monster now was, draped around Oceanus. Its snakelike lower half enveloped him to the waist like the coils of some immense boa constrictor. Its womanlike upper half clutched his torso, pinning his arms to his sides in a muscular embrace. He was helpless. The Lamia had torn off the rubberised gorget which protected his neck. Now its mouth was latched onto his exposed throat, and its venom was already taking effect. Oceanus writhed feebly in its clutches but, even with the added strength from his battlesuit, his efforts were in vain. The Lamia's head bobbed slightly as it drank deeply from his jugular.

  Without hesitating, Hyperion sighted the rocket launcher on the monster.

  "Hyperion!" Sam snapped. "What the hell are you doing?"

  "What needs to be done," Hyperion said, off-comms. Launch lever down. Finger on trigger. "He's as good as dead already."

  "No he is not." Sam raised her submachine gun. "Back off and leave this to me."

  "The Lamia's mine, Tethys. You can't have it."

  "That isn't your decision to make," Sam replied. "And besides, I don't recall asking your permission."

  She darted towards the Lamia. Hyperion was yelling at her, pleading with her - she ignored him. The situation being what it was, his choice of weapon had put him out of the running.

  "Hey!" she shouted at the monster. "Hey! Over here! Look at me!"

  The Lamia broke off from its feasting and looked up. Its mouth was round and fringed with needle teeth like a lamprey's. Gore trickled from the puckered, sphincter-like orifice, dribbling down the monster's chin onto its bare flaccid breasts. Orange-irised eyes fixed Sam with a look of gluttonous glee. Oceanus now hung slack in the Lamia's clutches. His jaw drooped and his head was starting to loll.

  Sam drew a bead on the Lamia's face and fired. Quicker than she'd anticipated, however, the monster swivelled. The shot ricocheted off Oceanus's shoulder, zinging into the stonework of the bridge. Next moment, the Lamia relaxed its hold on Oceanus, loosening its coils, but not completely, and not for long, only for the couple of seconds it took the monster to slither to the bridge parapet and over the side. It dived headlong into the canal, taking its victim with it.

  Sam was at the parapet before the Lamia was even fully submerged. The canal was shallow, no more than a couple of metres deep. She switched to thermal imaging. Within the water a dim red blob appeared, roughly the shape of Oceanus and the Lamia entwined. Sam fired and fired again. The Lamia flexed its tail and lanced off through the water, dragging Oceanus along. A turbulent wake swelled up from below.

  Then a rocket pierced the surface of the canal, its small splash followed swiftly by a tremendous subaquatic detonation that flared white in Sam's visor and raised a ten-metre-diameter blister of water. Hyperion reloaded and fired the launcher again. A second blister of water overwrote the tumultuous ripples left by the first.

  "I got it," Hyperion breathed. "Tell me I got it."

  The canal churned, waves slapping and slopping against its embankments. Gradually the tortured water subsided to calmness. Moments passed. Then, with a slow, sinister grace, two bodies broke the surface. They bobbed up side by side like a pair of synchronised swimmers, Oceanus face down, the Lamia rolling over onto its back, its thick tail uncoiling. Outwardly both looked more or less intact. The blasts hadn't killed them directly, the hydrostatic pressure had.

  "Ah goddammit." Hyperion sounded sick and weary all of a sudden, drained of all energy. "Shit."

  "Yes," said Sam. "Quite. Shit."

  "I didn't... I mean, he was a goner the moment -"

  "Save it for later. Police'll be here soon. Those bangs will have woken up half of Belgium. Let's get down there and retrieve Oceanus's body, then scarper."

  "Sam, I -"

  "Later. And if you ever call me anything but Tethys again while we're on an op, I will smack you in the mouth. The way I'm feeling right now, I've a good mind to smack you in the mouth anyway, so don't give me an excuse."

  "Do as she says, Hyperion," said Landesman, "and make it quick. We can't leave Oceanus. We need him home - him and his suit. We can't leave any trace of ourselves behind."

  On a nearby jetty Sam found a boathook which she used to draw Oceanus over. His head-up display was still lit; the suit was still functioning, even though its wearer was not. She left Hyperion to haul the body out of the water and sling it over his shoulder. As he did so, she spared a glance for the Lamia, which floated serenely, eyes open but unseeing, lamprey mouth agape. In spite of herself, Sam thought that the monster looked at peace.

  Oceanus's death had been a mercy killing. She was angry about it but deep down she knew Hyperion had done the kindest possible thing, if not necessarily for the noblest possible motive. Slow drowning versus instant oblivion? No contest.

  But the Lamia's death - it occurred to her that that might be regarded as a mercy killing too. An end to a repugnant, unnatural existence.

  God help her, was she actually starting to feel pity for these creatures?

  The siren of an emergency services vehicle skirled in the distance. Hyperion bounded up the jetty steps and started running towards where the van was parked, accelerating to his top speed, barely impeded by the bulk of Oceanus. Sam followed suit.

  31. THE AGONIDES CLIP

  Nigel Chisholm was laid to rest at Bleaney. His grave was dug on a windswept slope looking out to sea. His headstone was a cairn which Sam and Mahmoud built painstakingly and to which Landesman and all of the Titans ceremonially added a small rock on top, a way of paying their respects. There was no funeral service as such, just this silent piling-on of rocks followed by a few minutes of sombre reflection. Each Titan was acutely aware that he or she, too, might one day be killed in action. Chisholm's death brought home that fact even more forcefully than Eto'o's had. Each foresaw the possibility of being interred next to him on this very stretch of hillside and of the single burial site soon becoming a cemetery, the number of graves increasing as the number of mourners dwindled. Here, in that six-foot-long rectangle of spaded-over turf, that waist-high stack of small black stones, was irrefutable evidence of the risks they faced and the extreme price they might have to pay. It would be fair to state that the Titans' thoughts were more on themselves, that blustery April morning, than on their fallen comrade. But then, wasn't that often so with funerals? There but for the grace of God go I.
Or rather, in this instance, of gods.

  Tsang delivered a brief, muted elegy. He said he'd been glad to have Nigel Chisholm as a colleague and as a friend. Then, to round off the proceedings, Sparks led everyone in a prayer. She extemporised much in the manner of the Baptist preachers whose services she regularly attended back in New Orleans, stitching gilded strands of scripture into the plain cloth of more colloquial phrasing. Her loud "ay-men" at the end was echoed by the others with degrees of enthusiasm ranging from sheepish to none at all. Only Ramsay put any real effort into it, almost as if he had something to prove.

  Ramsay had been testy and on edge since coming back from Bruges. He wasn't a man who often felt the need to defend anything he did or answer for his actions to anyone but himself. He was anticipating criticism, though, and so was ready to meet even a hint of it with a counterblast of self-justification.

  "You'd have fired too," had been his refrain whenever anyone even looked like mentioning Chisholm. "The Lamia was going to get away. Nigel didn't have a hope of surviving. I weighed it up and I made a call and I can live with that call and if I can then so the hell can you."

  For Sam the problem was not so much that Ramsay had sent rockets into the canal but that he'd been willing to send them at the Lamia moments earlier, while the monster was still on the bridge, mouth fastened to Chisholm's neck. He had held off from pulling the trigger, but he'd wanted to, and probably would have if she hadn't stopped him.

  She'd challenged him on this during the van ride out of Bruges, and Ramsay's answer had been: "Nigel's suit would have protected him. Ain't that right, McCann? A TITAN suit can withstand an indirect hit from a rocket, yeah?"

  "Uhh... maybe," McCann had replied, his tone implying But I wouldn't bet on it.

  "It would have," Ramsay had said, staring down at his gauntleted hands. "It would."

  Will I be like that? Sam had asked herself, looking across at the Chicagoan from the other side of the van's rear cab. Chisholm's body lay between them, rocking with the van's motion, lent a jerky semblance of life by every bump and pothole in the road. Will I be the same as Rick when I come up against Apollo and Artemis? When I'm facing them, will nothing matter except my revenge, not even the safety of others?

  She couldn't know, she supposed, until the actual moment arrived.

  Ramsay's behaviour in Bruges wasn't, at any rate, of primary importance just then, and even the shock of Chisholm's death took a backseat when it emerged that phone footage had been recorded of the Titans' attack on the Lamia and uploaded onto the internet. The Agonides wannabe in Bruges had filmed everything that had occurred from Sam closing in on the monster to Ramsay lobbing rockets into the canal. Ramsay hadn't had a chance to confiscate his phone, and the teenager had fled the scene while Ramsay and Sam were preoccupied with fishing Chisholm's body out of the canal, and now the clip was all over the Web. It was a worldwide sensation, pinging to and fro across the globe as an email attachment, copies of it cropping up on countless blogs, homepages and networking sites, link leading to link. It proliferated so far, so fast, that by the time Argus became aware of its existence and set about the business of suppressing and erasing, he was too late. The clip was digital ivy, and for every tendril that the Hundred-Eyed One pruned another three sprang up elsewhere. There was hardly a crevice of the internet it didn't take root in, hardly a website that didn't give it a purchase to affix itself to.

  The footage itself wasn't much to look at - less than a minute's worth of shaky, murky playback. All the figures in it were fuzzed at the edges, their outlines dissolving into a haze of blocky pixels as they moved. At times the low ambient light rendered the four participants little more than indistinct grey silhouettes. Nonetheless the muzzle flash from Sam's gun and the backblast from Ramsay's rocket launcher were spectacularly bright and dramatic, white rips in the darkness, and, for all the blurriness, it was obvious what was going on. It was obvious, too, that the three military-looking individuals in the clip were not conventional soldiers. The Agonides' own website, where, naturally, the footage first appeared, made this point in the accompanying commentary.

  "They have no insignia," someone had written, in excitable and somewhat stilted English. "They belonging to no country. Their battle armour is like nothing anyone has seen before. Who are this people? We donot know. But they are kiiling Olympian monsters and so we salute them and are offering them our every support. GO, STRANGERS! THE WORLD IS WITH YOU!! FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT!!!"

  "It's an unmitigated disaster," said Lillicrap. He, Landesman and Sam were in the command centre, channel-hopping. The international news networks had picked up on the phone clip and were airing it over and over again for the benefit of, presumably, the last half-dozen people left on the planet who'd failed to catch it online.

  "Is it?" said Landesman.

  "Isn't it?" came the plaintive reply, Lillicrap no longer sure of his opinions, no longer sure if he even had opinions of any value still.

  "I admit that I'd have preferred not to go public quite so soon," said his boss. "A little longer in the shadows would have been no bad thing. But this was inevitably going to happen. The Titans were inevitably going to be spotted and, yes, filmed by somebody. And now that it's happened, we should be thanking our lucky stars that, one, you can't see anyone's face, so we've managed to keep our anonymity from being compromised; and, two, the footage makes it abundantly clear what the Titans are about. Agreed, Sam?"

  "It doesn't leave much room for doubt as to who the good guys and the bad guys are," Sam said. "You've got the Lamia biting Nigel's neck. You've got us - well, me - trying to save Nigel. You've got Rick taking no prisoners once the Lamia's in the water. To the average punter we look compassionate but seriously hardcore. I think that sends out the right message. We were fortunate, too, that the Agonides got the footage up first, them being naturally inclined to be sympathetic to our cause. They put the most positive spin on it that we could hope for, and that may well have influenced how others feel about it. First impressions count."

  "Although not everyone, it seems, is happy." Landesman toggled the screens to show a broadcast of live proceedings from the House of Commons. "Bartlett's in the middle of making a statement to Parliament. Look at his face. No prizes for guessing what tack he's taking."

  "...inexcusable and unforgivable," the prime minister rumbled. The Honourable Members around him nodded and lowed like cattle at milking time. "The Olympians have done nothing to provoke these fiendish, murderous attacks on their prodigies, Mr Speaker, nothing to invite such wilful, premeditated acts of slaughter. Nothing whatsoever."

  "Did he just say 'fiendish'?" said Sam.

  "It's 'prodigies' I'm having difficulty with," said Landesman. "I daresay someone on his speechwriting team was handed a thesaurus and charged with finding the most euphemistic synonym for 'monster.'"

  "These people, whoever they may be," Bartlett continued, "may think of themselves as agitators. Liberators. Freedom fighters. But let me tell you this." He thumped the despatch box with a statesmanlike fist. "They do not fight for my freedom, nor for the freedom of the Great British public."

  This elicited plenty of "Hear! Hear!"-ing from his cabinet and backbenchers, and from across the floor as well.

  "Great British public," Landesman echoed. "Words that always get a cheer in the Commons, regardless of what's actually being said. It's a political Pavlovian bell, and my, how it makes the dogs salivate!"

  "No," said Bartlett, "what they are, Mr Speaker, what they so abundantly and incontrovertibly are, are terrorists."

  Landesman heaved a theatrical sigh. "And there it is. The T-word. I knew it was coming. Didn't I say, Jolyon? Didn't I predict it?"

  "You did, Mr Landesman."

  "The minute we emerged into the limelight, some political stooge or other would get up on his hind legs and call us terrorists. I knew it would happen. And I'd have laid good money on it being Capitulating Catesby, too. We should have had a wager, Jolyon."

  "I would
have been foolish to take on that wager, sir, knowing I would surely lose. Rashly dispensing money is not something I'm too fond of."

  "Yes, yes, no need to remind me. King of the purse strings. Master of the budget. We all know how diligent you are at your job."

  "Or try to be. When I get the chance."

  "It wasn't a complai- Oh, now hold on. What's this?" Landesman flipped to a different channel, an inset picture expanding to fill the entire screen. It was an American local news affiliate, and the words "Live From New York" were emblazoned across the top. Reasonably steady handheld camerawork showed a brawny, thickset figure staggering along a Manhattan street. The time was approaching noon, EST, and the person onscreen looked horribly drunk. He pinballed from lamppost to shopfront to parked car.

  Which would have been unremarkable, perhaps, were it not for the fact that the figure was clad in a loincloth and a lion-skin cloak and that each time he collided with something it bent or broke. Behind him he had left a trail of damage - shattered plate-glass windows, tilted streetlights, splintered tree trunks, deeply dented car wings. Burglar alarms were whooping. Car alarms were wailing. Manhattanites could be seen peering out from office windows above or looking nervously on from the opposite side of the road.

  "Hercules," Sam said, and sure enough, it was the ultra-strong Olympian, and the only conclusion to be drawn from his behaviour was that he'd just come from enjoying ample hospitality at some downtown bar, probably one of his favourite Chelsea or Greenwich Village hangouts.

  A reporter, off-camera, was providing a breathless, blow-by-blow commentary.

  "So, yeah, Hercules has been on the rampage for maybe half an hour now," he said, "and we have these amazing scenes of carnage that we're sending you, I mean look at him, he's out of control, totally blotto, got to be, and you can probably hear him, the guy's shouting, through it's impossible to make out what he's actually saying, it's all just kind of a incoherent howl, but - holy cow! Did you see that?" To the cameraman: "Did you get that, Chuck? Hercules just, just, he just walked into a mailbox, and he seemed to hurt himself, stub his toe maybe, and so he just kicked the thing, kicked it clean across the street, and now it's, well, it's embedded I guess is the word, embedded in the side of that building over there, jeez, that was some kick, dude should think of trying out for the NFL, 'cause that mailbox is well and truly stuck in the wall of that building, like a dart in a dartboard, and now - whoa! Somebody's SUV is taking a pasting. Zoom in on that, Chuck. Got it? Herc is really not pleased with that car, he's real ticked off with it, maybe he doesn't like four-by-fours, you know, gas guzzlers, maybe there's some kind of eco thing going on here..."