The Age Of Zeus Read online

  The chosen three were Ramsay, Eto'o and Tsang.

  "Not me?" said Sam.

  "A leader," said Landesman, "need not always lead from the front. And on a first operation like this, I'd rather not risk losing you. Not that I believe the op to be an especially dangerous one. I'd just like to keep you in reserve for now."

  Landesman owned a private jet, a Gulfstream G550, which was kept at an aerodrome on the mainland, five miles inland from the coast, and which sported the Daedalus Industries logo, the letter "D" sprouting a pair of wings, on its tailfin. Piloting it was a man called Gray whose demeanour was so dour and imperturbable he might as well have had NO QUESTIONS ASKED tattooed across his forehead. His co-pilot and navigator, Greene, was much the same. The plane took the three Titans - Hyperion, Themis and Crius - plus two technicians and several flightcases full of equipment to Caernarfon airport, from where they travelled by rented van to Snowdonia.

  The command centre at Bleaney, meanwhile, was abuzz with activity. The flatscreens were set up to display images streamed in realtime from the Titans' helmet visors. The visors doubled as integrated digital lenses. What the Titans saw, those back at base saw too.

  Everyone clustered around the screens as the operation got under way. It was night, and the three Titans were moving in on the Cyclops's lair from the reconnaissance positions they had been holding all day, on a ridge overlooking the rockface into which the cave was set. Hyperion took point. Themis and Crius followed, the rear corners of a triangle. A topographical map of the region showed them as three red dots moving across the contour lines, the suits' GPS transponders pinpointing their locations to within one metre.

  Sam concentrated on the trio of night-vision visor-cam images. Rugged, grainy green landscape juddered and jerked. Now and then an armoured figure would come into view, ghosting in and out of a fellow Titan's sightline. Comms chatter was at a minimum, although the mics picked up the sound of three sets of breathing, rapid with nervousness.

  "How are we getting this?" Sam asked Landesman. "Via satellite?"

  "Correct," came the reply. "And I know what your next question is going to be, and for the answer I shall refer you to Mr Patanjali here."

  "The signals we're receiving are bounced across a number of civil telecommunications satellites before reaching us," Patanjali explained to Sam, "making both their points of origin and their point of receipt less easy to trace. But our main protection against Argus noticing what we're up to is that the signals are buried inside another signal, like parasites inside a host. Basically they're wearing a disguise. There's a primary transmission, which is tricked out to resemble a cable channel feed - to all intents and purposes is a cable channel feed. Embedded within that are secondary transmissions, ours, encrypted so that without the correct decoder they register as just static and white noise. Secret services have taken to using a similar method to send messages, stuff they don't want the Pantheon to find out about."

  "Doesn't always work," said Sam.

  "Agreed, but it does more often than it doesn't. Argus is fallible. He can't monitor and analyse every single scrap of data traffic that's out there. At any given moment there's trillions of bytes of information zipping around between mobiles, computers, TV and radio stations and so on, and he's just one person. Or god, or whatever, but still just one person. He's almost omnipresent in the electronic noösphere - almost, but not quite. Law of averages, some of it's got to slip past him, and it's likelier to do so if it's masquerading as something else. Especially if, as in this instance, the something else is as distracting as..."

  He tapped a keyboard.

  "This."

  An image appeared on one screen in an inset window: a pair of naked men contorted together, writhing and moaning passionately.

  Laughter, and one or two appalled gasps, echoed through the chamber.

  "Is that...?" said Sam.

  "It is," said Patanjali, "Mythoporn."

  The two men were styled in the manner of Ancient Greek heroes. Their hair was curled and entwined with laurel wreaths, and their pumped-up physiques glistened with oil. The backdrop to their lubricious thrusting, tugging and tonguing was a set of cheap polystyrene Ionic columns, a badly painted diorama of an Arcadian glade, and a few olive trees. The musical soundtrack that played insistently in the background consisted of lyre, flute, cithara and cymbal twanging and clashing in time to a cheesy disco beat.

  "We've set up a fake subscription channel called Blue Eros," Patanjali went on. "Beaming nothing but twenty-four-hour mythoporn to the world. This little man-on-man extravaganza is called... erm..." He turned to McCann. "Blue Eros was your idea, Jamie. What's this one?"

  "Jason And The Arse-onauts," said McCann, adding, with a blush, "I think. Or it could be The Labias Of Hercules. No, wait, that's not a gay one, that's transsexual. Maybe Homo's Odd-ass-ey? I honestly can't remember."

  "Strewth!" exclaimed Barrington. "Doesn't matter what it's called. Just switch it off. I don't want to watch a pair of Vegemite drillers doing the dirty with each other. It's downright disgusting."

  "Although you wouldn't mind watching a pair of women 'doing the dirty with each other,' I bet," said Hamel.

  "Course not. That's a whole different thing. Sheilas going at it together - it's only natural, and a thing of great beauty. And I think you'd agree with me on that, Thérèse." Barrington gave a leery grin. "If I'm not mistaken."

  Hamel said nothing, although her usually tight-pursed lips did seem to twitch at the corners.

  Patanjali clicked off the inset image. "Hopefully Argus won't look twice at Blue Eros, and if he does, hopefully all the hardcore shaggery will be so diverting he won't suspect there's anything else lurking beneath."

  "It's not known what Argus's sexual proclivities are, or if he even has any," said McCann, "but we've programmed Blue Eros with a wide mix of genres - straight, gay, lesbian, orgy, S and M, gender bender, bestiality even - so that either he'll find something we show so fascinating that that's all he notices or, like Dez over there, so repellent that he can't bear to look. Win-win for us."

  "You can both feel justly proud of yourselves, gentlemen," said Landesman, "but for now I think we should focus our attention on the matter at hand."

  The three Titans had got to within 100 metres of the cave. On the screens there were now three slightly different views of the same steep-sided opening, a crooked black fissure in the rockface like an inverted lightning strike, with an apron of scree at its base.

  Ramsay's voice came over the speakers. "Base, this is Hyperion. We are in contact range of objective. Target has not re-emerged since we saw him enter this afternoon with a fresh kill. Target assumed to be sleeping off his meal. Please confirm that we are go for next stage. Repeat, please confirm we are go."

  Landesman bent to the microphone in front of him. "That's affirmative, Hyperion. Proceed to next stage. You might want to make sure first that target is asleep."

  "Understood, base."

  "And Titans? Best of luck."

  "Luck is for the ill-prepared," said Hyperion. "That's a Schwarzenegger quote, by the way. 'Course, it happens to be from Junior, so I don't think it really counts. Crius?"

  Crius's visor-cam image panned left, centring on Ramsay/Hyperion. Hyperion hand-signalled, touching the side of his head then pointing to the cave.

  Tsang/Crius stole up to the cave entrance. His head-up display registered a maximising of aural scanner input gain, and the speakers relayed speleological sounds: the drip-drip-drip of water, the drift of breezes in a confined space, the hissing echo of depth and hollowness. In the midst of it all, clearly discernible, was a noise like a sheet of canvas being slowly and repeatedly ripped in two, little by little.

  "That's..." said Sam. "That's snoring."

  "Certainly sounds like it," said Landesman.

  "Base, Crius. Are you getting this?"

  "We are, Crius," said Landesman. "Target does appear to be deep in the arms of Morpheus. Hyperion, Themis, move up to Cr
ius's position. Start laying the charges."

  "Roger that," said Hyperion.

  Off-mic, Landesman said, "We're clear for all surveillance satellites, aren't we?"

  "We have an Indian RISAT-2 synthetic aperture radar spy satellite currently mid-Atlantic," replied one of the technicians, "and an Israeli Ofek-7 infrared job just south of Iceland. Nothing's scheduled to pass directly over north Wales 'til just after 10pm, and nothing to our knowledge has been retasked or repositioned in the last couple of hours. We have a clear sixty-minute window."

  "Excellent."

  Just inside the cavemouth, Eto'o/Themis got busy inserting charges into clefts in the walls. She wasn't using ordinary explosive material but a substance of Landesman's devising, a chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant derivative which he'd dubbed "frostique." Normally of a tacky, putty-like consistency, frostique underwent spectacular molecular alteration when subjected to an electric current. The charge reduced its core temperature to absolute zero and the frostique in turn flash-froze everything it was in contact with. Whatever it touched, up to a radius of 5 metres, became brittle and would break up into fragments. For covert work like this, frostique was ideal, in as much as it was remarkably effective but left little evidence of itself behind other than a few minute battery-powered blasting triggers that could easily be overlooked by anyone scouring the rubble for clues.

  The plan was to set off a quickfire chain of discharges that would bring the entire cave crashing down in on itself. Themis chose the sites for the wads of frostique with precision, inserting and priming the radio-controlled blasting triggers carefully. As she moved deeper into the cave, the atmosphere in mission control became quieter and more tense. Sam had to force herself to unclench her hands; she was digging her fingernails into her palms so hard it hurt. Hyperion and Crius, weapons drawn, covered Themis's every step.

  "Boy, this place stinks," said Hyperion, and about 50 metres into the cave the source of the stench became apparent. There was a litter of bones on the floor, interspersed with ragged scraps of fleece and hunks of rotting offal. Sheep skulls leered up with hollow eye sockets and inane death grins.

  The three Titans continued on. The scanner-enhanced snoring grew louder and more vibrant. Somewhere in the darkness up ahead a five-metre-tall monster slumbered on a full belly, blissfully unaware that its remaining lifespan could be measured in minutes. These rumbling stentorian inhalations were its few final breaths.

  "Done," said Themis softly, as she finished setting the last charge.

  "Then let's get the hot holy fuck out of here," said Hyperion.

  They trod warily back towards the cave entrance, stepping over or skirting round the carcasses of the Cyclops's prey. A sliver of night appeared ahead, glimmering bright green against the darker greenness of the cave interior.

  "Almost there," said Hyperion. "Themis, you all set to remote-detonate?"

  Themis raised her left arm to check her wristpad. "One touch, and adieu Cyclops."

  "Soon as we're a dozen paces clear of the cave, bring the house down. Don't wait for instructions, just do it."

  "Roger."

  In mission control the tension began to ease. Things were looking good. A minute from now, perhaps less, the Cyclops was going to be buried beneath thousands of tons of rock. Mission accomplished.

  Then Sam said, "Do you hear that?"

  "Hear what?" said Landesman.

  "Exactly. The snoring's stopped."

  Everyone listened.

  Barrington said, "Oh shit."

  Landesman grabbed the mic. "Titans, base. Target is awake. Repeat, target is awake. Go. Get out. Run. Now!"

  Immediately, the three screen images started to shudder and veer crazily as the Titans launched into sprint mode.

  At the same time the speakers were filled with a terrible roaring.

  16. THE CYCLOPS

  Hyperion and Crius reached the cavemouth first, hurtling down the short scree slope and out onto the rock-strewn grass beyond. Themis was close behind, but suddenly the image from her visor whirled upwards, then stuttered and was almost lost in a blizzard of interference. When the image resumed clarity, it showed the apex of the cave roof.

  "Themis," said Landesman. "Themis. Come in. Do you read me? Themis!"

  "She tripped over," Sam said. "She's lying on the floor. Probably hit her head as she fell."

  "Themis!" Landesman said again.

  There was a groan, then Eto's voice replied, thickly, "I read you."

  "Get up, Themis. You have to move."

  "Sure. Yes. D'accord."

  The image swung from side to side.

  "My chin hurts," Themis said. "And my suit... I think... a malfunction. Legs heavy."

  "Servo might've been knocked out of commission," said McCann.

  "That can happen?" said Hamel.

  "It's not supposed to, but aye, it can. That or a connection's come loose somewhere."

  "You can still walk," Landesman said into the mic. "It'll feel ungainly but you have to. Hyperion? Crius? Themis's down."

  "Copy that, base," said Hyperion. "We know. We're on our way back for her."

  Themis was staggering to her feet. Something loomed in the green haze of her vision. Sam glimpsed a vast hairy hand tipped with nails that looked like talons, a barrel chest covered in dark stains that could only be patches of dried blood, and then a face - a lantern jaw, a mouth lined with tent-peg teeth, a crop of shaggy, matted hair, and an eye. A single, central eye the size of a tennis ball. Narrowed in confusion, then widening in comprehension, then narrowing again as it fixed Themis with a look of hungry malevolence.

  The hand reached for Themis. She screamed.

  Crius was first back into the cave. His visor-cam showed the Cyclops hoisting Themis off the floor by the head, bearing her entire weight with just one arm. Nearly three times as tall as her, the monster's head brushed the ceiling of the cave. Themis latched onto the Cyclops's wrist with both hands to support herself and take the pressure off the join between her neck and skull. She kicked out. The Cyclops extended its arm to full length, putting its body out of range of her feet.

  Crius opened fire, strafing the monster with assault rifle fire. Ricochet sparks dazzled emerald-bright off the walls. Hyperion arrived and joined in with a semiautomatic pistol. The Cyclops recoiled, letting out a howl of affront.

  "What are they doing?" McCann cried. "Mr Landesman, what are they doing?"

  "Obviously they're trying to scare that thing into dropping Themis," said Landesman. "At the very least wing him. With luck, kill him. Why?"

  "They might hit her."

  "So? She's in her battlesuit."

  "But the suit's integrity has been compromised," said McCann. "There's every chance she's not bulletproof any more."

  Landesman swore under his breath. Into the mic he said, "Hyperion, Crius, hold your fire."

  "What the - ?" said Hyperion. "Say again, base."

  "Hold your fire. Themis is vulnerable."

  "Shit. You're kidding. What the hell else are we supposed to do, then?"

  "Charge him. Use stun-dusters on him."

  But it was too late. The Cyclops had tightened its grip on Themis. Her helmet started to crack and crumple in its hand. Over the comms link came the desperate gasps and grunts of someone whose abject helplessness was almost as agonising to her as the sensation of her own skull being slowly crushed. The creaking of bone under pressure was all too crisply relayed back to base by the helmet's inbuilt sound sensors.

  As Hyperion and Crius stowed their weapons and prepared for a close-up assault, all at once Themis stopped struggling. She let go of the monster's wrist and made a very deliberate show of raising her left arm and moving her right hand towards it.

  Landesman understood. White-faced, grim-lipped, he said, "Hyperion, Crius, fall back."

  "What?" said Hyperion. "No way."

  "Themis is going to detonate."

  "We can get to him before -"

  "There isn't time.
Fall back."

  Sam commandeered the mic. "Hyperion, Crius, do it. Themis has made her decision."

  Themis's right index finger was poised over her wristpad. She managed to choke out a few words. "This is good," she said. "I am happy with this."

  "Go!" Sam shouted at Hyperion and Crius. "Move or die!"

  "Aw fuck," said Hyperion, and he and his fellow Titan turned and fled.

  The Cyclops raised Themis's face level with its own. A gaping mouth filled the screen, each tooth like an elephant tusk. The look in the monster's eye was now one of curiosity. What was this little human female up to? She wasn't dead yet, so why had she stopped writhing in distress?

  Themis - Eto'o - spat out a curse at the monster in French. Then she said, "Maman, papa, je viens pour vous voir de nouveau..."

  Hyperion turned back to look at the cave just as the dozen or so frostique charges went off in swift succession. There was a ripple of reports from within, like the sound of ice cubes cracking but magnified a thousandfold, and then the entire cavemouth seemed to implode, sucking shut and taking a section of the rockface with it. The boom was tremendous, overloading the speakers. At the same instant, Themis's visor-cam image went blank.

  Hyperion and Crius, and all at mission control, were left staring at a shattered, sagging indentation in the rockface, from which a thick swirl of dust, like a soul released from a body, billowed up and dispersed into the starry sky.

  17. THE PROTHERO STARE

  "Just what the fuck happened last night?"

  This was Ramsay, to McCann, early the next morning, minutes after he set foot back on Bleaney Island. He had McCann backed up against a wall in the command centre, with a forearm pressed to the engineer's epiglottis and a section of his shirtfront bunched around the other hand. McCann looked terrified, as well he might be. The Chicagoan's expression was pure murderous rage. Others - technicians, Titans, Sam - looked on, startled. It had happened so quickly. Ramsay had marched in and grabbed hold of McCann before most of them knew he was even in the room.