The Age Of Zeus (13 page)

And then, come early March, they were ready.

They knew it, without having to be told. They were now moving in synch with one another, each instinctively understanding what his or her place was in any given manoeuvre. All of them were able to handle the weapons comfortably, although each had developed his or her own preference for and aptitude with a particular one. They had discovered that sense of quiet, deep-seated joy that comes from being part of a cohesive unit, the satisfaction that a wolf might feel in the sinuous ebb and flow of a pack on the hunt. They weren't perfect. Now and then one or other of them could still slip up. Nor were all the interpersonal relationships within the group in harmony. Barrington and Søndergaard continued their two-way sniping, which would sometimes escalate into out-and-out insults; Sparks and Hamel had started to get on each other's nerves, for reasons no one, perhaps not even they, could quite fathom; Chisholm had become ostracised since the rocket launcher incident (which he had self-deprecatingly dubbed his "Poseidon Misadventure"), although he was doing his utmost to ingratiate himself back into the group; and Sam and Ramsay remained on frosty terms, the initial affection each had felt for the other in the early weeks having now become submerged, leaving no trace of itself on the surface.

Nevertheless, they were ready. They were beginning to get impatient, wanting to know from Landesman when they were going to hit the Olympians, pestering him to be allowed to put theory into practice. If that wasn't a sign that they were ready, then nothing was.

And then one morning they arrived in the command centre to find that their battlesuits now sported names. Each of the Titans had adopted a particular suit as his or her own. The straps were permanently adjusted to fit just so, the visor display configured how each of them wanted it, and in the case of southpaw Barrington the control pad had been transferred to his right wrist. A few of them had even added customising details, having asked Patanjali to reprogram the nanobots to form particular patterns or images when the suits were in their default colour setting. Eto'o, for instance, had the green, red and yellow stripes and yellow star of the Cameroonian flag on one shoulder of her suit, Hamel had a rainbow on one shoulder of hers, Barrington had facsimile beer labels on his helmet, and Tsang's breastplate was ornamented with the symbol of the Obliteration - the letters HK surrounded by a black border.

Every suit now had a single word on the front as well, just above the heart: the name of one of the mythical Titans.

"Phoebe," said Harryhausen, reading hers.

"Rhea," said Hamel.

"Oceanus," said Chisholm.

"Hyperion," said Ramsay. "I like how it sounds. Hyperion. Yeah, I'm cool with that."

"Yer wot?" said Mahmoud, frowning at hers. "Mnemo... Memonsy... Flipping 'eck, I can't hardly read it, let alone pronounce it. Mnemosyne. Is that right? I think that's right."

"Iapetus," said Barrington. "Just what in flaming fuck is a Iapetus? Can anyone tell me?"

Tsang was Crius, Søndergaard Coeus, Sparks Theia, Eto'o Themis.

Sam approached her suit.

Tethys.

She spoke the name aloud, trying it on for size.

"I am Tethys."

It felt strange, to be rechristened in this way, without consultation, without anyone asking whether she wanted it or not. Strange but also intriguing, as though she was being invited to exchange one identity for another.

"Your callsigns," Landesman said. "Out in the field, this is how you will refer to one another and address one another. You are Titans. From now on, once you don your suits, that is what you become. Titans. Theocides. God killers. Today is your final day of training. As of tomorrow, you are on active duty. Our campaign begins."

"What about that other suit?" Ramsay asked, pointing. "'Cronus' over there. Still haven't got someone to wear that. You had trouble finding your twelfth guy, Landesman?"

"The position will be filled, don't you worry," said Landesman. "All in due course."

Putting on the suit, this time, felt ceremonial. As Sam fastened each section into place, she was conscious of taking on a role. Encasing herself in armour was, perversely, like shedding a skin, sloughing off a dry, worn-out old self to become someone gleaming and new.

I am Tethys, a Titan
.

It surprised her how much that suddenly seemed to mean. And she could see it in the others' faces, the same sense of shock, the same joyous realisation.

We are Titans.

We are here to kill gods.

15. BLUE EROS MYTHOPORN

L
andesman announced that their first target was going to be the Cyclops.

"A giant, yes," he said, "quite strong, very violent, but its great advantage, from our point of view, is that it's none too bright. Positively stupid, in fact."

The monster had turned up recently in Wales, where anti-Olympian sentiment was rife. The Welsh National Assembly, and in particular its Plaid Cymru members, had taken a vociferous stance against Catesby Bartlett, mocking him for his views and calling him the worst and most misguided appeaser since Neville Chamberlain. The people of Wales were broadly behind their government in this, and hence the Olympians had dispatched the Cyclops to that country so as to re-establish a sense of the proper order of things. The monster had wrought havoc in various suburbs of Cardiff and Swansea, and had since then retired to the rugged climes of Snowdonia, where it had taken up residence in a nice cosy cave from which it ventured out from time to time to catch a sheep for its supper.

The proprietors of businesses in and around the area that relied on tourism for their livelihood saw a sudden, steep drop in income and were incensed, and even more so were the local hill farmers whose livestock was being depleted. They lobbied their leaders to take action. The National Assembly, however, was in a chastened and somewhat less gung-ho frame of mind than before. They had, after all, just seen Wales's two main cities sustain considerable damage at the Cyclops's hands, with attendant loss of life (although, blessedly, the fatality figures were in the low teens). If the monocular beast wished to hole up for the time being in a remote rural spot, well away from major population centres, then let it. For an absence of human casualties, the loss of a few sheep was a small price to pay.

"I'm sending a group of you to Snowdonia," Landesman informed his Titans. "Three of you should do it, I think. The objective is simple: kill the Cyclops. Make it look like an accident if you can. That way, we'll lessen the likelihood of Olympian reprisals against Wales."

"And if it's not possible to make it look like an accident?" said Harryhausen.

"The Olympians aren't any too fond of the Cyclops. It's a messy and malodorous thing. I doubt they'll miss it, and if they do want to hold the Welsh to account for its death, the punishment will be a token gesture at best. That's why I've chosen it as the object of our opening salvo in Titanomachy II - that and the fact that Wales is a convenient hop, skip and a jump away."

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.