The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "Again, I'll tell you some other time. So if the gate's breached..."

  "...there's about fifteen hundred armed troops waiting out there in the mist to come in."

  And as if to illustrate, a faint, far-off cry started up, a throaty bellow from hundreds of voices, a massed rallying call. Counterpointing it were shrill, indignant shrieks from the Harpies and a few sharp cracks of gunfire.

  "God, this is really it, isn't it? This is the day the Olympians finally get what's coming to them."

  "Don't jump the gun, Sam." Hyperion handed her a helmet. "It's looking good but it's far from decided. The Olympians are tough sons of bitches and shouldn't be underestimated."

  "But three of them have been taken out already."

  "Two of them. Two of the weakest. Hermes isn't out of action. He can still teleport, and if Demeter gets to him he'll be up and running again in no time."

  "We need to take out Demeter. She's their most valuable asset, in a way."

  "Hey, fearless leader, let's get you back in the game first before you start handing out orders again. How's the suit feel?"

  "Odd." But right. Oh so right. She snugged the helmet on.

  "Patanjali's reprogrammed the voice recognition to respond to your speech patterns rather than Fred's. Try it."

  "Options menu up," Sam said, and the visor HUD sprang to life. Again, oh so right. The beautiful familiarity of those glowing symbols and characters.

  She looked down at herself. The breastplate still carried the black-bordered "HK" that Fred had had put there, emblem of the Obliteration. A dead man's suit, but that didn't bother her. It was hers now, and she was Tethys once more.

  As if to confirm it, she heard a familiar voice in her ear.

  "That sounded like... Tethys? Is that really you?"

  "It is, Jamie. How's tricks?"

  "Not so bad. We're cooped up in some bloody wee Portakabin in the back garden of the boss's pad in London, me, Rajesh and a couple of the other guys. This is base now, and it's no Bleaney but it'll have to do. I'll be here if you need me."

  "Gotcha."

  She looked round at Hyperion and found him holding out a recoilless submachine gun to her.

  She took it.

  "Rick..."

  "Hyperion."

  "No. Rick. When this is over -"

  "When this is over, Sam, and assuming we make it, we're going to get roaring shitfaced drunk and have a damn good time. Right now -"

  "No."

  She flipped her visor up, leaned forward, flipped his up too, and kissed him. It was awkward, a case of angling her head over to the side as far as it would go and extruding her lips as far as they would go. It was also fleeting, because the position was impossible to maintain for long. But it was tender, and soft, and meaningful, and she relished it right down to the scrape of his day-old stubble against the tip of her nose.

  "And now," Sam said, flipping her visor back down and ratcheting her gun's cocking lever, "let's get out there and finish this."

  "That's what I want to hear," said Hyperion, and he and Sam hustled out of the temple - Hades's little haven of morbidity, his celebration of all things deathly, complete with corpse bride - and into the mist-draped tumult of battle.

  73. CERBERUS

  AND TYPHON

  One and a half thousand troops converged on the wrecked gate, with Field Marshal Armstrong-Hall leading from the front, putting both his life on the line and his money where his mouth was.

  They were a makeshift army, so it wasn't pretty, no breathtakingly well-drilled unit here advancing in formation, more like a rabble of men and women, most in uniform, some not, slogging upslope through the mist, sinking ankle-deep in scree, crunching through patches of thin-crust leftover snow, tripping, stumbling, colliding, and now and then, alas, accidentally discharging their weapons and winging a comrade. But still, up they went, on they came, feeding out of the treeline and streaming toward and into the stronghold.

  The Harpies descended as eagles on a flock of sheep, feet first, talons flared. Here, and here, and now here, somebody was hauled aloft, dangling from claws that hooked under the ribcage or clavicle or through the meat of the shoulder. Savage beaks went for throats or bellies, digging, rending, wrenching. A few of the bird-women's doomed victims, however, retained the presence of mind to use their guns even as their bodies were being lifted up and opened up. One Harpy spiralled to earth with a wing blown clean off, its slayer death-gripped in its talons. Another, dropping its burden, fell with the most of its head missing.

  This made their "sisters" more cautious but didn't discourage them from further attacks. Now they swooped on the soldiers in pairs and, once airborne again, played wishbone with their prey.

  But the Harpies totalled less than twenty, and the invading troops had numbers on their side. They could bear the losses the Harpies inflicted. They surged on, pouring in through the gate. Dozens of them entered the stronghold at other points, using ropes and grappling hooks to scale the walls. With the Harpies otherwise occupied, this was now a viable method of access.

  Within the stronghold, the ragtag army met with the Olympians' next layer of defence.

  In earlier days, before the Titans, Hera would have been able to assemble a daunting array of monsters from her menagerie. She would have gathered them all in beforehand from their various locations around the world and would now be countering the influx of mortals by unleashing a horde of nightmares - the Cyclops with its blunt strength, the Gorgons with their shrivelling stares, the Griffin with its naked viciousness, the Minotaur with its formidable rage, to name a few.

  As it was, all she had left were Cerberus and Typhon.

  Not that Cerberus and Typhon were anything to sneeze at.

  The three-headed dog, large as a wolfhound, stocky as a Rottweiler, cut a swathe through the invaders. It thought nothing of chomping on three of them at once, sinking teeth simultaneously into one man's arm, someone else's leg and a third person's privates. It accounted for nearly thirty fatal dismemberments before, at last, a British SAS lieutenant-colonel with a Minimi light machine gun was able to put the canine down.

  Typhon was an even more perturbing proposition. Half man, half serpent, it slithered sinuously among the enemy ranks, spewing out a hideously corrosive acidic secretion. Xander Landesman had tried his level best to engineer a beast that could shoot flames from its eyes as the Typhon of myth had done, but this had proved to be beyond even his considerable prowess, a fantasy attribute too far. He'd settled for the ability to eject organic acid, by means of a delivery system derived from the venom-squirting glands of the spitting cobra. The acid, aerosolised by a gust of breath, burned flesh on contact and could eat through clothing in a matter of seconds. Typhon, moreover, habitually aimed for the eyes, and a great many of the attacking army succumbed to the monster in just that fashion, blinded, their eyeballs turning opaque and bursting, aqueous humour dribbling down their blistered cheeks.

  Field Marshal Armstrong-Hall came within a hair's breadth of becoming one of Typhon's victims, but was saved by Rhea. The Titan threw herself between Sir Neville and the monster, taking the splash of acid on the back of her battlesuit. The nanobots raced to neutralise the acid's effects and managed to prevent it from doing any more than scarring the surface of her armour. Millions of them were sacrificed in this effort, however, and Rhea's visor display informed her that the suit's integrity had been compromised and its bulletproofing capacity reduced to 60%. Which wasn't so bad, in her estimation. She could live with 60%.

  Side by side with Sir Neville she blasted away at Typhon. He had his army-issue SA80 assault rifle, she her Landesman-issue flamethrower. Between them, at a safe remove, they were able to pin the monster down. It spattered acid in all directions, snake body lashing to and fro like an unsecured high-pressure fire hose. Soon, though, it was bullet-holed and ablaze, and not long after that it was a long, thick coil of charred meat, twitching and rolling as it burned.

  Sir Neville looked at R
hea. "You know," he said, "when your man Landesman got in touch, I had my doubts. I didn't think there'd be much to be gained by joining forces with a bunch of glorified amateurs."

  "I hope you've changed your mind," Rhea replied.

  "Too bloody right I have," Sir Neville said, and then the grizzled old veteran (DSO, DSC, MC, KCB, Gulf Medal) turned and waved his troops onward. "Come on! Fan out. Don't bunch up. Occupy any high ground you can find, and if you see an Olympian, do not hesitate, shoot to kill."

  The orders were relayed, translated into other languages where necessary, disseminated by walkie-talkie, and for the most part obeyed. Sir Neville knew he was in charge of too many people, and a great proportion of them weren't strictly speaking subject to him in any way. Discipline was at a premium and frankly, though he hardly dared admit it to himself, it was a miracle he'd managed to get all fifteen hundred of them up onto Olympus during the night, let alone been able to get them to follow him en masse into the stronghold.

  Working in his favour was the fact that he had become the figurehead for this latest and hopefully last act of anti-Olympian insurgency. Every single man and woman present here today knew who he was and had come largely because of him. That helped. They were willing to be commanded by him because he, in a single person, represented what they all stood for. Nevertheless it had been a hell of an administrative and logistical struggle. Sir Neville had hardly had a wink of sleep in seventy-two hours and was running on adrenaline and glucose-enriched power bars only. If he didn't have to fight, he was pretty sure he would collapse any moment through sheer exhaustion.

  On he trudged, though, with Rhea alongside him, and several hundred serving soldiers, further into the stronghold, wondering what the Olympians had in store for them next.

  74. TALOS

  The Olympians' next line of defence came courtesy of Hephaestus. He called it Talos, and this was only a slight misnomer. In the myths Talos, the giant guardian of Crete, had been made entirely of bronze, whereas Hephaestus's version was constructed from much less noble matter - car parts, old refrigerators and tumble dryers, lengths of discarded pipe and ductwork, sink drainers, industrial offcuts, countless bits and pieces of metal scavenged from the scrapheaps and junkyards of Athens and brought back to Olympus to be merged and plaited and moulded together inside his temple, all in anticipation of an incursion like this.

  Sam and Hyperion were among the very first to see Talos as it arose from within the temple. First they heard a series of stupendous creaks and groans, the sound of joints grinding as they moved. Next, they saw a colossal figure stand stiffly upright, rising above the temple rooftop. At full height it was close on 40 feet tall, and it was blockily humanoid, like some sort of cubist piece of monumental statuary. Patchwork too, its various different-coloured components thrown together with no overall aesthetic design, just fitting wherever they would go. A few freezers lashed together with cables served for one upper arm. The fenders and radiator grilles from several makes of car became a glittering chrome neck. Scaffolding poles and filing cabinets meshed to form the bulk of its chest.

  It had no face, which made it look even more imposing and sinister. Its entire head was just a bumpy mass of hubcaps, office chairs, hood ornaments, shopping trolleys, hi-fi equipment and anglepoise lamps shaped into a rough oblate sphere, multifaceted and featureless. Eyes, nose and mouth would have given it character, might even have softened its appearance somehow. This towering metal thing, however, was utterly inhuman.

  Now it clambered out over the entrance end of the temple, clumsy, crunching the roof underfoot and smashing tiles with its hands, which were the claw-tipped buckets from two Caterpillar excavators, and Sam and Hyperion looked on with equal parts disbelief and horror.

  Hyperion summed it up when he said, "That is one seriously fucked-up Transformer robot."

  No sooner had it set foot outside the temple than Talos began laying into the troops that were swarming around its legs. Bullets flew at it and pinged ineffectually away, the ricochets causing death and injury among the shooters. Even a rocket-propelled grenade did nothing much except put a dent in Talos's torso, and the damage repaired itself instantly, metal bending and buckling outward to fill in the smoking hole. The metal giant, barely impeded, swung its excavator-bucket hands left and right, scooping up soldiers and flinging them aside. Bodies fell screaming, limbs shattered and rubbery. Often Talos's sweeping hands severed its victims' legs at the shin, leaving booted feet standing on the ground while their owners flailed through the air gouting jets of arterial blood from stumps.

  Talos lumbered on, with soldiers now scattering in all directions to get out of its path. Wherever they took refuge, though, the metal giant could still get to them. A group of men, cowering beneath the portico of Artemis's temple, died as Talos pounded the support columns and brought part of the edifice crashing down on their heads.

  "We have to stop that thing," Sam said.

  "Of course we do," Hyperion agreed. "Only one small problem. Fucking how?"

  "Hephaestus is controlling it. Find Hephaestus, kill him, you kill it."

  "I don't see him."

  "He's got to be somewhere close. As I understand it, he has to be able to see something to manipulate it. He needs line of sight. His temple's as good a place as any to start looking. That's where the robot-whatever came from."

  Exchanging a grim nod, the two Titans accelerated toward the temple, making sure to steer well clear of Talos's thumping feet. Each of these was the shell of a Volkswagen Beetle densely packed with gym weights for solidity and stability, and was not something you would wish to be caught beneath, as more than a few of the invading troops had found to their great cost.

  Hyperion spotted Hephaestus first. The Olympian was lurking in the shadows of the temple entrance, hunched over, his whole body trembling with the strain of controlling his creation. Sam was reminded of an orchestra conductor swept up in the throes of a particularly dramatic section of a symphony. Occasionally Hephaestus even mimed Talos's actions. He jerked an arm to the side; Talos's arm ploughed through yet more soldiers.

  Hunkering down with Sam behind a pile of rubble from Artemis's temple, Hyperion lined up a shot with the coilgun. The range was less than 50 metres. He couldn't miss.

  "Come on, do it," Sam urged, as Talos crushed a fleeing soldier with the flat of one hand. The man was cut in two like a pinched ant. Both halves of his body squirmed for a few moments before settling into stillness.

  "Yeah, yeah, I'm going to," said Hyperion. "Only... Hephaestus is a person, you know. We should respect that."

  "What?"

  Hyperion's voice had thickened, becoming oddly husky. He swivelled his head from the gunsight to look at Sam. "Everyone deserves the right to live, don't they? We shouldn't be killing anybody. All life is beautiful."

  "Have you gone stark staring mad? What the hell's got into you?"

  "You're beautiful, Sam."

  "Really, this isn't the time. Go ahead and..." Sam stopped and thought about it. Yes, she was beautiful, wasn't she? And how nice of him to say so. "Actually, you're pretty damn good-looking yourself," she told Hyperion. "And I love your laugh. It drives me crazy but I love it."

  She had no idea why she was saying such things in the thick of battle. The setting could not have been more inappropriate. Yet they needed to be said. So many things needed to be said but never were. People, she realised, wasted their lives keeping in all the expressions of kindness and desire that they should be sharing out. They caged their feelings up when they ought to be giving them free rein. The world would be a far better place without all these inhibitions holding everyone back. If you loved someone, or even just appreciated them, why not simply admit it? What was there to be gained by being all cool and remote and sardonic?

  "Rick," she breathed, "this is crazy but... I want to kiss you again."

  "Yeah?"

  "And not just kiss you. It's been a while. Maybe we can find somewhere private and quiet, away from all t
his, and..."

  "Sounds good to me."

  In her mind, as if from some fathomless inner canyon, a tiny voice was shouting What is this? What in hell's name are you doing? It was, in fact, Jamie McCann's voice, but she didn't recognise it as such, and it was easily ignored. Her stomach was doing flipflops at the thought of getting naked with Ramsay again. Her craving for him was a low-down ache, a heat-filled tide. She was wet, goddammit, wet down there, and she wanted to rip the TITAN suit off Ramsay's body and leap on him, engulf him, on this very spot. More than that, she wanted to burrow into him, unwrap him like a birthday parcel, shred him to bits in a frantic paroxysm of lust. She imagined her fingernails scoring tracks down his back, her fists grabbing handfuls of his flesh and tearing them away in bloody chunks, her teeth biting into his succulence and devouring every hot inch of him until there was nothing left. It would be the last lovemaking they ever did, and the best. Ultimate in every way. The climax to end all climaxes.

  Something in the grin of the man beside her - the looseness of it, the ferocity - told her he was feeling the same way. He laid aside the coilgun.

  "That's right," crooned a soft, luxuriant voice nearby. "Give in to it. That emotion. That impulse. Take each other. Have each other. Fuck each other. Fuck each other up and over and under."

  Aphrodite stalked towards them like a catwalk model, hips leading the way.

  "And leave my husband be. He has work to do, and I'm here to make sure he can do it, uninterrupted."

  The loveliest woman in the world. Sam felt inadequate before her, and also gratified that so exquisite a creature was taking any notice of someone as ordinary as herself. Her ravenous hunger for Ramsay continued to sharpen under the gaze of Aphrodite's glittering, long-lashed eyes. With each step the Olympian took closer to her, Sam's arousal grew. What she would do to Ramsay, she would do to appease the goddess - and goddess this was, make no mistake about that. It was the only word that suited a being who belonged so clearly, supernally, majestically to a higher order of existence. Sam was her slave. She would do anything Aphrodite demanded, anything this living angel asked of her. It was that simple. If it was Aphrodite's will that she consume Ramsay in a frenzy of passion, and be consumed herself at the same time, so be it. What else was love, after all, but a sacrifice, a surrender, a submission to a force greater than oneself?