The Age Of Zeus Read online

  It lunged at Sam again with all nine mouths gaping wide, claws propelling it up the beach, gouging furrows in the mud. In her ear Landesman was urging her to stay calm. "Take another head off," he said. "Drive it back. The others are on their way." More faintly she could hear Ramsay, further from the mic at mission control, giving much the same advice.

  Sam did as bidden, strafing the frontmost head and all but severing it below the jaw. Immediately another of the Hydra's heads finished the job for her, chewing the loosely dangling head free so that it fell to the ground. This left the way clear for a new head to sprout up from the stump of the neck, flesh and bone swelling and taking shape like a cunningly wrought balloon.

  Sam barely paused to register this small miracle. She removed another head. That too was swiftly replaced, as was a third. The Hydra found these decapitations agonising, but each succeeded only in stalling it briefly. It kept on coming up the beach, growing angrier with every step, keener than ever to reach the human who was tormenting it in this way and rend her limb from limb.

  Then the gun ran dry. Sam ejected the magazine and groped for a fresh one, and the Hydra, spying an opening, charged at her with redoubled ferocity.

  It was mere feet away, and Sam was still trying to slot the new magazine into place, when, to her left, a shotgun blast boomed. The Hydra, struck in the belly, staggered sideways. A Titan appeared from the palmetto thicket. The transponder sensor display in Sam's visor informed her this was Iapetus, although she knew anyway. Not only was Barrington fond of pump-action shotguns, but he was also yelling at the top of his lungs, hurling every insult he could think of at the Hydra, most of them relating to sexual organs, illegitimacy and, in true Ocker tradition, species of native Australian wildlife. "Gift from the Barracuda!" he cried as he unloaded three more cartridges into the monster, hacking fist-sized craters out of it. The wounds of course soon filled themselves in, but they diverted the Hydra from Sam long enough to allow her to reload, and then she joined in the assault again.

  All at once the Hydra was looking less enraged, more beleaguered. Its necks thrashed this way and that as it tried to respond to being besieged on two fronts at once. Sam sprayed away with her submachine gun while Iapetus gave the monster buckshot hell. The pair of them were far from repelling the Hydra, let alone killing it, but they were holding it at bay if nothing else.

  "Rhea?" Sam said into the comms. "Where the hell are you, Rhea?"

  Her gun ran dry again. Iapetus gave her covering fire while she smacked a full magazine into place, and just as she did so, Rhea came into view immediately to her left.

  "Finally," Sam said. "Ready?"

  "Ready," said Rhea. She sparked her flamethrower into life with its magnesium igniter. A finger of fire rippled out from the nozzle. "Let's do it."

  Briskly Sam deprived the Hydra of another of its heads, then Rhea stepped up and subjected the neck stump to a concentrated jet of fire. Meat crackled and sizzled, and eight Hydra mouths simultaneously let out eight piercing shrieks.

  The two Titans repeated the process again, and again. Hydra heads thudded into the beach mud. The severed ends of Hydra necks became ovals of charred, blistered flesh and bone. The odour of cooking reptile filled the air, oddly pleasant, certainly when compared with the smell of the Hydra itself.

  "It's working," Rhea said, slapping a fresh capsule of hydrazine into the flamethrower's reservoir breech. "Landesman was right."

  Landesman had theorised that the Hydra would have a much harder time repairing burns than any other kind of injury. "It was Hercules's method, in the myths," he had said. "Behead, then burn."

  The cauterised stumps did start to re-grow new heads, but at a greatly retarded rate. The burnt tissue had to be sloughed off first before the proto-head could bubble up and take shape. Now Tethys and Rhea were in a race against the clock. They needed to destroy all nine heads before any of them could renew itself completely. Entirely headless, the monster would surely not survive.

  Landesman had made Tethys and Rhea spend a whole afternoon rehearsing this move back at Bleaney. Iapetus was contributing now by taking potshots at the gradually emerging new heads, blowing them to smithereens while they were still just glistening, formless bulges.

  All the same it required concentration and nerve to keep the production-line decapitation and cauterisation going, especially as the Hydra was rearing up and all of its necks, beheaded and otherwise, were thrashing to and fro, presenting a set of confusing and highly unstable targets. The monster stood its ground, at least. It seemed fully aware that these humans had discovered a vulnerability which they were exploiting without mercy, but it was either too enraged or too stubborn to think of retreating. Perhaps it simply couldn't believe that after all these years spent at the top of the food chain, during which time it had got used to humans being slow-moving and almost willing prey, it could ever be defeated. It continued to hiss and snap viciously at the Titans even as they whittled its headcount down to three, then two.

  At last only a single head remained. Its features had a look of distress and resignation about them, and the baleful yellow glare in that final remaining pair of eyes was suddenly dulled. The Hydra knew the game was up. As if in pique, it swung away from Tethys and Rhea, turning its attention back to the human it had first spotted, the one it had been on the verge of attacking before another of them had so rudely interrupted. If it must die, the Hydra wasn't going to without taking one of these infernal creatures with it, the one it perceived as the weakest.

  Theia, however, was on her feet. She had only a few pieces of her armour on. She was, in fact, mostly naked. But clasped in her right hand was a combat knife with a ten-inch blade, and as the Hydra lowered its head towards her, teeth glinting avariciously, Theia said, "This is for Nanna," and she plunged the knife into the monster's throat. "This is for Hubert and Celeste," she said, twisting the knife once back and forth, its tantalum-carbide-coated titanium blade widening the jagged slash she had created. Blood gushed over her arm, sluicing out from both the wound and the Hydra's open maw. "And this," she said, "is for me." She jerked the knife upwards, parting two vertebrae.

  The head lolled sideways on the neck. A flap of skin held it on for a few seconds, but the weight was too much for it and it stretched and tore, and the head landed with a thump at Theia's feet.

  Nine truncated necks suddenly went limp, and the Hydra swayed for a moment, then slumped heavily into the mud. Its body convulsed, a shudder ran along the necks, and then it lay still.

  "Step aside," Rhea told Theia, and Theia numbly obeyed, and Rhea set about incinerating the Hydra, scorching the carcass until her last flamethrower capsule was used up.

  Barrington, thumbing his visor up, surveyed the smoking, blackened mound of ex-monster.

  "Now that," he said, "is one hell of a barbie."

  20. CHAMPAGNE

  During the flight home, a couple of bottles of Krug were broached and everyone partook except Barrington, who had beer instead - "Aussie champagne" - and Sparks, who didn't drink.

  "And even if I did," she said to Sam, "I ain't in the mood."

  Sparks felt ashamed, that much Sam knew. The Hydra had caught her with her pants down (in more ways than one) which was bad enough, but then there'd been further humiliation to follow. First, Sam had had to send Barrington off. He, not famous for his sense of propriety, had been openly leering at the half-dressed Sparks. Then Hamel had gone over to the Louisianan, offering to help clean her up and get her back into her battlesuit, only to be rudely rebuffed.

  "Don't you come near me, woman," Sparks had snapped. "Don't you touch me with your filthy hands."

  Sam had volunteered instead, and Hamel was now pretending to be indifferent about the incident, but her chagrin showed. She wouldn't even look at Sparks.

  Celebrating hardest on the plane was McCann, who soon became flush-faced and unsteady on his legs.

  "No cockups," he said to Sam, leaning too close, breathing winey breath in her face. "Clean b
ill of health for the TITAN suits. Who's the greatest engineer in the whole world? Only me!"

  When they got back to Bleaney Island there was more Krug to be had, and more celebrating, and although Sam felt leaden-headed from jetlag she couldn't not join in. The mood was boisterous and relieved, and in the midst of it all Landesman stood up to make a short speech, the gist of which was: this was the first Titan op that could be considered a truly unqualified success, congratulations were in order, but no time for resting on laurels, onward and upward from here.

  He concluded by saying, "Even now, back in the Everglades, I imagine alligators are busy disposing of the Hydra's mortal remains. I envisage them tearing the carcass to pieces and squabbling over the scraps. Perhaps, if alligators can think at all, they're thinking what an unexpected boon this is. A gift from the gods, one might even say. And perhaps also, somewhere in the dim recesses of their brains, they're feeling a satisfaction far deeper than the mere quenching of physical appetite. The tyrant who was slaughtering their kind is dead. The upstart, usurping emperor of their domain has been deposed. Their home is theirs again. They are free to enjoy it as before, to roam uncontested and unmolested. They are the rulers once more."

  "It's a metaphor," Ramsay murmured to Sam out of the side of his mouth, "in case you didn't realise."

  Sam laughed, until she remembered she was still pissed off at Ramsay. Then, thanks no doubt to all the pricey bubbly, she forgot why she was pissed off at Ramsay, and resumed laughing.

  "That's more like it," the Chicagoan said. "You did a good job back there, Sam, you know. You don't want or need my endorsement but I'm giving it to you anyway 'cause that's how conceited a motherfucker I am. You dealt with everything like a pro - way better than I could have. You knocked it out of the park. You played a blinder."

  "Picking up some of the local parlance there, Rick."

  "Hey, lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas."

  "I just think it's nice some of our Britishness is rubbing off on you. You could do with a bit of polish," Sam said.

  "Any Britishness I'm getting off you guys mostly comes from the techs, and I don't think 'polish' applies there. Still, I reckon I've absorbed enough to be able to pass for a native." He adopted the most appalling English accent Sam had ever heard. "'Ey, luv, fetch moy a cuppa, woodjer? I'm roit gaspin,' I am."

  "Please," she said. "Please stop."

  "Leave it aht, you muppet."

  She mimed being on the phone. "Hello, Dick van Dyke? You can relax. We've found someone worse."

  "Blimey, worra load of bonkers bollocks yer spoutin.'"

  "That's enough, Rick. Seriously. If you carry on, I will have to kill you."

  "Cheers, ta."

  "There is an arsenal of weapons not far from where we're standing. Don't believe that I am not willing to use one of them on you. For everyone's sake."

  "Yeah, mate, wha'ever, know wha' ah mean?"

  "Stop!" Sam cried, and the loud, mock-desperate plea happened to fall into a lull in the general conversation, so that everyone turned to see where it had come from and what had given rise to it.

  Ramsay downpipe-gurgled. Sam sniggered. Conversation resumed.

  "I knew it," Ramsay said.

  "Knew what?"

  "Knew you couldn't stay mad at me for ever."

  "And I knew," Sam retorted, "that you couldn't stay mad at yourself for ever."

  "Heh. Touché. So where do we go from here?"

  "Me personally, to bed. I'm absolutely knackered."

  "That an invitation?"

  "Only an idiot would mistake it for one."

  Ramsay made a goofy face. "I can be an idiot."

  "As we know only too well. Goodnight, Rick."

  "Goodnight, Sam. Sleep well."

  And she did. Better than she'd done in ages.

  21. OPERATION:

  THREE LIONS

  A day passed, two days, three, and nothing from the Pantheon, not a word about the Hydra, no official statement, not a peep.

  "They haven't noticed," said Landesman. "They don't care enough about the Hydra to be bothered to check up on it, so they've no clue it's dead and probably won't have for weeks. Just as I'd hoped. A lot of the time they treat their monsters as fire-and-forget missiles. Launch them, let them cause havoc, recall them maybe later, if at all, but maybe not. Hera has her favourites, that much we know. The Lamia, the Gorgons, Typhon. The slightly more sentient ones. Cerberus too. Any of those she'd miss if they were absent for too long. But the rest are, I think it's safe to say, regarded as expendable."

  "And it's those ones we're going to continue going after?" said Sam. The two of them were in Landesman's office, an informal strategy meeting. "The expendable monsters."

  "For the time being," Landesman said with a nod.

  "But if they're unlikely to be missed..."

  "...then what's the point? Why waste our time on them? The point, Sam, is that we can't afford to tip our hand just yet. Lower-profile targets first. Once we begin eliminating creatures from the menagerie that the Olympians actually have the time of day for, we run the risk of drawing their fire and our operations become exponentially more hazardous. I'd like to postpone that moment for as long as possible. Moreover the Titans need the practice, the battlefield experience, which the lesser monsters amply provide."

  "Agreed. I just -"

  "Keen to go after bigger game, eh? Already? Sam, Sam, patience. One victory does not a campaign make. Little by little we'll do this. It's the only way."

  "Did you ever consider, when you were planning all this, an all-out assault?" she asked. "Mass-produce the battlesuits, assemble an army and go at the Olympians that way?"

  "Besiege Olympus? Attack them in their mountain stronghold? The thought did occur, once, briefly, before I dismissed it out of hand. For a start, it's been tried, hasn't it? Remember the Raffles Syndicate and their paratroopers? What a botch job that was. But also, and more to the point, for me it isn't viable financially. Or logistically, for that matter. A few hundred troops, a regiment's worth - how would I recruit that many? Train, equip, supply, support, house that many warm bodies, all on my own? Not to mention the cost of constructing that many suits."

  "Make it an international effort. Get governments covertly involved."

  Landesman managed to smile and sneer at once. "Our beloved leaders, you mean? Pusillanimous nitwits like Catesby Baatlett? Engage their help? What do you think are the chances of that happening? And how far do you think I'd get, trying to get a bunch of politicians on my side? Since when do politicians ever agree on anything? No, Sam, almost from the outset I understood that, if this was to have any hope of success, I had to think small. Trust me, for a man as ambitious as myself, accustomed to thinking big, big, big, that was a very hard adjustment to make. But also, there was the appeal of making this a project that accorded with classical precedence, which meant keeping the numbers low - to twelve, precisely. Once I'd hit on using the mythical Titans as my template, any other approach seemed clumsy and inelegant. How better to fight the Olympians than with a group inspired by figures from the selfsame mythology? How more apt? I just couldn't help myself.

  "As a boy, you see, I loved books about the Ancient Greek gods and heroes. Still do. Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, Robert Graves, Mary Renault, Leon Garfield's The God Beneath The Sea - all terrific stuff. Homer as well, naturally, and Ovid, Aesop, Hesiod, Pindar, Apollonius Rhodius. And later the playwrights, Aeschylus, Euripides, that dirty-minded bugger Aristophanes. Even inane American superhero comics that used characters and motifs from the myths. Those old Technicolor movies too, with the gladiators and the rubbery-looking monsters. I devoured them all. There was such a grandeur about the stories, along with a sense that anything could happen and would.

  "And the way the gods behaved - just like human beings but with the bonus of power and immortality. They had unfettered freedom to do as they pleased, which was thrilling to me as an only child growing up in a strict Jewish household and
as a boy who knew from a very early age that he was a budding tycoon, destined to earn several fortunes, a Croesus or a Midas in the making. I instilled in my son the same love of classical lore. It was the one thing Xander and I both enjoyed doing together, poring over those old stories. The one thing that truly bound us. He'd badger me to read to him about the adventures of Theseus, Perseus, Hercules, Jason, whoever, any and all of them, and I did, when I could, when I had the time..."

  His gaze strayed wistfully to the framed photo on the desk - the beautiful and soon-to-be-dead mother and the four-year-old Alexander already looking aggrieved, as if he knew what lay around the corner, knew that in a few short months he was going to be semi-orphaned, the parent he could count on the most was going to be torn away from him.

  "And I didn't often have the time, or thought I didn't. And maybe Xander was only pretending to love those stories simply because he knew how much I loved them and it was a way of getting my undivided attention." Landesman's eyes darkened, and for a moment he looked much older than his fifty-odd years.

  "The Olympians must seem like, well, like sacrilege to you then," Sam said.

  "Oh yes. Oh yes. Absolutely. In fact I'd go further and say 'blasphemy.' Whoever - whatever - they are, they're corrupted versions of those wonderful, wayward beings that the poets sang about and the priests worshipped and sacrificed to and celebrated in their Mysteries. They're a travesty of the true Hellenic pantheon, that bizarre dysfunctional family with all their feuds and fancies and foibles."

  "And you've come up with a way of turning the tables on them that also restores what you cherish so much about the myths."

  "Yes, correct. So perceptive. In that respect alone, Titanomachy II is personal to me. In that respect and..."