The Age Of Zeus (29 page)

There were demonstrations, of course. Protest marches on the streets of Ajaccio, Bastia, Corte and other major towns. The girl, Ghjuvanna Venturini, became a martyr, her death leading countless hitherto unaligned Corsicans to rally to the RCDC's cause.

The Olympians' solution was the typical one: send in a monster. The Minotaur was relieved of its duties in Crete, where it had been busy stamping down on unrest in the aftermath of the tidal wave - the wave which took the lives of Deborah and Megan Chisholm among many others. The Cretans' anger had more or less run its course, so Hermes took the man-bull from its spiritual homeland and transported it northwest across the Mediterranean to the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte where, for almost a year now, it had been carrying out a similar function as it had on Crete. The mountains that occupied most of Corsica's interior were where the RCDC could be found. Heavily forested on their lower slopes, dotted with nigh-on inaccessible villages, riddled with clefts and caves and secret valleys, the mountains were a great place to hide. Through them wound a labyrinth of goat paths and narrow rocky defiles, the solution of which, if it had one, was known only to the locals.

The Minotaur, however, if legend was to be believed, had form when it came to things labyrinthine. No maze fazed it. It stomped along the mountain passes, trekking from village to village, and anyone who challenged it, anyone who got in its way, anyone who so much as looked at it funny, it attacked. No warning, no hesitation, the Minotaur just put its head down and charged. Few could outrun it. Fewer still could survive being tossed or gored by its horns.

Once or twice an RCDC member might manage to get off a lucky shot at the beast before, inevitably, becoming its next victim. Bullets, however, barely pierced the man-bull's thick black hide, and the sting of their impact was an irritant rather than a deterrent. A surefire way to get the Minotaur angry at you was to take a potshot at it.

Landesman told the Titans that this should be borne in mind when it came to killing the monster.

"Nothing short of a rocket or a coilgun is going to put the thing down," he said. "Lesser weapons will simply annoy it and draw its attention. You'd be waving a - No, I shan't say it. Too trite."

"A red rag to a bull?" said Barrington.

"I was so trying to avoid the simile."

"You want the obvious said, Landy old mate, you can always rely on me."

"I know, Dez. I know."

That was during the pre-op briefing. Now, two days later, five Titans were in the field - Tethys, Mnemosyne, Hyperion, Iapetus, Crius - and they had just spent a hot, dusty, and ultimately fruitless nine hours combing the area where the Minotaur had most recently been sighted. They'd found tracks that could only be Minotaur tracks, the imprints of bare human feet far larger than any normal human feet, but the monster itself had proved scarce.

Base camp was a half-dozen tents clustered around a van. Divested of their suits, the Titans gathered wood for a fire, and for their supper Tsang barbecued chicken breasts coated in a marinade that he had prepared specially for this cookout, a sticky, sinfully sweet concoction akin to toffee.

"An old family recipe," he said. "The trick is to boil the soy sauce down to the consistency of tar, then add the chilli, ginger and the other spices and ladle honey on like there's no tomorrow."

"Eat enough of it and there
will
be no tomorrow," said Mahmoud through a mouthful. "I can feel my arteries furring up."

"You won't be having second helpings then?"

She held out her plate. "I never said that, duck."

Soon everyone had retired to their tents, the two techs included. Only Sam and Ramsay remained up.

"Not sleepy?" he asked her.

"Tired but wired," she replied. She stared into the dark, insect-throbbing landscape around them. The scent of heather was strong on the breeze. "The Minotaur's out there somewhere. Not far. And I don't have my suit on, and, to be blunt, I feel naked without it."

"And here's where I don't make some wisecrack about you being naked."

"Absolutely you don't."

"'Cause it wouldn't be right because you hate me. Again."

"No, it wouldn't be right because it would be inappropriate. If you said that kind of thing in any normal workplace, they'd have you up before a disciplinary tribunal and off on a sexual harassment awareness course before you even knew what hit you."

"So you
don't
hate me," said Ramsay. "Is that what I can take away from this?"

"Rick, frankly I'm not sure how I feel about you," Sam said. "Let's turn it around. How do you feel about you right now?"

"Honestly?"

She twitched her shoulders -
what else?

Ramsay gazed into the fire for a time. "Honestly, what I feel is... empty. I feel I've done it now, I've killed the thing that killed my son, but all that's left me with is this sense of: is that it? Now what? I was expecting to have this great swelling in my chest of triumph, satisfaction, completion..."

"Closure?"

"Oh yeah."

"You Americans are big on your closure."

"We are. And it ain't there, or maybe it is but it doesn't feel like I was hoping. It doesn't feel solid. There's no 'Oh, OK, so that's that chapter done with, let's turn the page and start the next.' Ethan's still dead. Ain't nothing going to change that. Ain't nothing going to bring my little boy back. The Lamia being dead as well kinda balances up the scales but somehow not all the way, not even near. I'm glad it's dead, but mainly I'm glad because that's a whole bunch of other kids who won't be sucked dry by it now, a whole bunch of other parents who won't have the light taken out of their world like I did. So that's something. But it's not everything."

"Ethan's mother. I don't even know her name."

"LaVonne."

"Is she around any more?"

"Why d'you ask?"

"You just never mention her, that's all."

Ramsay shook his head a fraction, just enough to convey regret, regret of the mildest kind. "We'd already split up by the time Ethan was two. LaVonne didn't make a good military wife. Didn't like it when I was off on tours of duty. Didn't like being on her own and me being away for long periods and in danger. Wasn't what she'd married me for, she said. That stopped after the Olympians came. President Mayhew, as it then was, called the troops back home once she realised the Olympians weren't going to let us keep on with our police actions in the 'Istans. Most sensible thing that woman did. Lost her any chance of re-election, of course. She said she was a realist, the other party called her a coward and un-American, although the guy who got in and replaced her hasn't been any more proactive or 'American' than she was, has he? Stavropoulos has even hinted he thinks the Olympians might be actual gods, which gives you some idea where he's coming from. Plays up his Greek ethnicity like anything, that man. Says belief in the Pantheon is in his blood.

"Anyways, Mizz Mayhew got me home permanently, is my point, and then I got laid off in the personnel cuts that followed. Half pension, not enough to live on, so I found myself a job as mall security, would you believe, and I thought that'd make LaVonne happy, me in a safe job, clocking on and off like a regular Joe commuter, only it was too late for us by then, unfortunately. There hadn't been enough of a marriage to start with, and it turned out that Vonnie didn't like living with me there every day any more than she'd liked me being off in some desert hellhole for months at a stretch. We were bickering like crazy, and then Ethan came along and I thought he'd be the saving of us. But all he was, poor kid, was the final straw - a baby on top of all the other frustrations in LaVonne's life. So she bailed. Just packed a bag one day and went. I got sole custody, and Vonnie became visitation-rights mom, only she hardly ever exercised those rights.

"We didn't see or speak to each other much, and then after Ethan was gone, we didn't have a reason to see or speak to each other at all any more. She moved back to be with her folks in Gary, Indiana, where, far as I know, she still is. Short question, long answer. How about you, while we're on this subject? No other half? No, of course not. Would you be here if there was? But were you ever married?"

"No. I was... not quite engaged. My partner and I lived together. We'd talked about marrying. We were definitely going to. It just didn't have a chance to happen."

Ramsay waited. Sam didn't offer anything further.

"That's all I'm going to get, isn't it?" he said drily. "All anyone's going to get out of you, Sam. You know something? This enigmatic schtick, this whole keeping-it-all-to-yourself thing - I tell you, it's getting real old. What you don't appear to realise is that, whatever you're holding inside you, not talking about it doesn't make you heroic, it just makes you seem..."

"Seem...?"

"Like not a normal person. Normal people talk about stuff. Normal people open up."

"Just because I don't yammer on all the time about -"

"No." Ramsay stopped her with a jabbing index finger. "It ain't yammering. It's being human. It's accepting that bad things have happened, not trying to act as if they never did. It's being the same as everyone else, not imagining you've somehow had it worse than everyone else and that that somehow makes you superior in some way, privileged 'cause life took a bigger shit on you than it does on most folk and it's beyond your ability to express how much you've been hurt. Hell, we all get shit on, and us Titans got shit on particularly heavily, but I don't believe your pain is worse than the pain I've suffered or Fred has suffered or Dez has suffered or any of us has suffered, and I dare you to prove otherwise."

"You're trying to piss me off, aren't you?"

"Figure I've got nothing to lose."

"Goad me and I'll lose my temper and drop my guard and blurt everything out?"

"That's the general idea."

"And then what? I'll feel better? I went to a counsellor twice a week for nearly a year, Rick. I talked and talked with him. And after a hundred hours of that I didn't feel one ounce better. What makes you think it'll be any different, talking to you?"

"Because, Sam Akehurst," Ramsay said, chidingly, "I'm your friend."

"Oh, right. And maybe you're hoping I'll confess all and then fall sobbing into your arms and you can comfort me and next thing you know, hey presto, we're shagging like rabbits."

"Yeah, that's always been my technique with women. I only sleep with the crying ones. Distraught's such a goddamn turn-on. Those puffy eyes, that runny nose..."

"Ha!" said Sam. It was both a laugh and a victory cry. "Watch this, then. No tears. Dry-eyed, Sam Akehurst delves deep and comes up with the goods. This is what happened. You want to know? I'll give it to you in two sentences. My boyfriend was killed at Hyde Park, July 25th, coming up for three years ago now. I was pregnant with his baby and I miscarried. There." She looked at him, hard. "What do you think? How does that rate on the 'life shit' scale? I'm thinking it's a good nine, maybe even a ten. You would probably downgrade it, though. Not as bad as Fred, who lost everybody he knew. Not as bad as Nigel, who was actually married and whose daughter was, you know, a child and not just a foetus, which gets him extra points. But better at least than Kerstin - husband but no child. And way better than Anders, because it wasn't even relatives of his who died, just comrades, fellow soldiers."

Her voice was a low growl. She could hear the throb of resentment in it, resentment that was simply pain that had taken a wrong turn.

"You just don't get it, do you, Rick? You can't compare tragedies like they're scores on Top Trumps cards. Everyone feels grief in their own way. What I lost was... was everything. Everything. Ade getting killed, the baby - it destroyed me. It was apocalypse. Does it matter to me how well or badly I got off next to other people? No. All I care about is me, what happened to me and how huge it was, how unbearable."

"Ade. His name was Ade," Ramsay said gently.

"Adrian Walters." Sam couldn't recall the last time she'd spoken his name aloud and in full like that. It felt strange, like trying on a pair of old boots from the back of the cupboard that were once comfy and snug but had stiffened with disuse. "Constable Adrian Walters."

"Cop, like you."

She nodded. Damn him, how was he managing to get this stuff out of her? More to the point - why was she letting him?

"Uniform," she said. "Beat copper. The best kind of beat copper. He enjoyed it. He actually enjoyed getting out there, being on the street, being visible, high-profile, wearing the tit-shaped helmet, trying to make a difference in the community he served."

"Nice guy."

"Through and through. Too nice, I sometimes thought. We girls aren't supposed to fall for the good boys. We're supposed to like a bit of grit in our oyster. That's how you get a pearl, after all. But after the crap and slog of work I liked coming home to a stable, dependable, reliable man. Ade wasn't dynamic in any way. He was my antidote to the poison of the world, and not only that but he could understand what I went through on a day-to-day basis, because he went through something similar, so we were on a par in that respect. Only, he always dealt with it better because he was just... better. A better person than me. Sometimes I'd have it up to here with all the sleaze and the wrongness that I had to deal with, and I'd start bitching and whining, and he'd talk me down, all quiet and calm. And - and he always brought me tea in bed in the mornings. Every morning, without fail. Even if our shifts were different and I had to get up at sparrow-fart and he didn't, he always made sure he was awake and could bring me my cup of Earl Grey, milk, one sugar. Such a small thing, but it meant so much."