Yet again, Zeus gave no response. Why the heck did the guy give telepathy if he didn’t answer? Par for the course, really; Zeus was an idiot, just like all the other gods, or extra-dimensional beings, or whatever they actually were. Zeus didn’t listen. Apollo didn’t listen. Oh, sure— sometimes they had the same ideas as Leif did, but otherwise they were too stupid and stubborn to realize they were wrong.
And now Tracy was probably dead and the sky was barf.
There wasn’t a thing he could do about it either. Not a single frelling thing. Except . . . maybe one.
He began hurling the potted plants off the roof patio into the parking lot below. It wouldn’t help a damned thing, but at least it gave him something to do.
“Stupid!” he yelled. A potted maple shattered on concrete three stories down.
“Frelling!” he screamed. Edelweiss and soil burst across the hood of someone’s Lexus.
“So-called gods!” he shouted, chucking some other kind of plant onto the lawn. (He had no idea what that one was. He wasn’t a botanist, after all.)
“Okay, Leif,” he tried telling himself while struggling with a larger maple. “Calm down. Get a hold of yourself. None of it matters. It’s just real life . . .”
It didn’t help as much as it usually did.
“Mortal!” Zeus shouted from behind him and through the telepathic link, startling Leif all but over the edge himself. He dropped the maple to the deck and barely avoided crushing his own feet. “Stop playing with gravity! Things are dire!”
Leif rushed at Zeus and stopped short of tackling him. (He was angry, not stupid.) “Where’s Tracy?” Leif demanded. He also flung an arm demonstratively at the sky for some reason. Tracy ostensibly was not in the sky; Leif could only guess his right arm wished to make an inquiry about that whole barf matter on its own behalf. For the moment, he let it.
Zeus rose up to his full height, one eyebrow cocked, as if giving Leif a moment to change his tone. Leif met him halfway with a meek inability to repeat his question, merely swallowing and waiting. He tried to force additional furious expectancy into the set of his jaw and succeeded only in making his chin quiver.
“Tracy is inside,” Zeus said at last. “She is fine.”
Leif dashed past him and through the doors to beat a path down the roof stairs.
“Where?” he thought to Zeus.
“Apologize for your earlier lack of reverence. You are a priest of Zeus; I command you treat your god with respect”.
Leif exited the stairwell and looked in both directions down an empty hallway. “Tracy!” he tried, fruitlessly. “Fine,” he sent to Zeus. “I’m sorry I got angry when you sounded like you left your own daughter to the wolves. Now, please, where is she?” His arm again flung outward, pointing to the sky this time through a window at the end of the corridor. He yanked it down.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it, Mr. Karlson? Now: status report. Is the collider prepared?”
Leif continued his search, rolling his eyes at the question. Zeus just didn’t listen. “No, the collider isn’t prepared! I told you they couldn’t do anything about it until you got here with the final bits! What did you expect?” He stopped short of telling Zeus that “they cannae change the laws of physics.”
He missed Thalia.
“Respect!” Zeus thundered.
“Okay, okay. What did you expect, sir! Sheesh!” Wait, did he just think the “sheesh” or actually send it? This telepathy stuff was a pain in the butt.
“I will see them immediately, as you are clearly too distracted. Tracy is at dinner in the commissary. I will join you swiftly.”
“Thank you,” sent Leif with genuine relief.
“Your gratitude is noted. And, Mr. Karlson? Do not get grabby with my daughter.”
Leif sincerely hoped the mental image that had thrust itself into his mind didn’t go across the link. As no lightning struck him immediately thereafter, he guessed it hadn’t.
He dashed down the hall, shot down another flight of stairs, and burst through the commissary doors to find a beautifully haggard- looking Tracy munching on a burger with a substantial banana split sundae waiting nearby. She glanced toward him, stopped chewing, and—perhaps surprisingly—smiled.
What truly did surprise him was the standing hug she gave him when he got to her table. He stood there in shock and only belatedly thought to return the embrace. Through his elation he couldn’t help but wonder what sort of tampering might have occurred in her brain since he’d seen her last.
“Zeus told me what you did,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Well, you know, just . . . trying to help.”
“I appreciate it.” She let go and sat back down. Burger in hand once more, she pointed it at him sternly. “But to be clear, that was just a gratitude hug, understand? I’m not running off with you to some chapel or anything.”
Leif took a seat. “Well, duh. We’ll start slow. Dating. You like bar trivia?”
“No. No dating.” Tracy chomped a bite. “Jusht friendsh.”
Leif cursed inwardly. At least he’d made progress. He grinned. “You hugged me.”
“Right. Don’t make me regret it.” She smiled wearily. “And anyway there’s worse things to worry about. Did you see the sky?”
“The sky?” He’d nearly forgotten. His arm shot outward, pointing for a third time. “I mean, yeah. I assumed something else horrible happened but was just so glad to see you.”
“Something else horrible did happen. The Titans got loose.”
“Oh,” said Leif. “Is that all?”
She gaped. “Is that all?”
“Well aside from the fact that every ‘sky blue’ color swatch in the world is now misnamed, it’s not really our problem, is it? They’re not some ultimate evil; they’re just the previous administration of—whatever the ‘gods’ are.”
“And they’re pissed!”
“I don’t blame them, but I didn’t shut them up in tartar sauce!”
“Tartarus.”
“I was being funny.”
She bristled at him. “You don’t think a bunch of god-level types duking it out is going to cause some problems for the rest of us?”
“Well, maybe, but—”
“And you know who they’re mad at the most? Zeus! I—we—just risked our lives to bring the guy back, to say nothing of how he’s my father—and now they’re going to come try to do I-don’t-know-what to him!”
“Are you mad because he’s in danger or ’cause you might’ve gone through all that for nothing?”
She chomped another bite, chewed all the way, and swallowed before she answered. “Both! And besides, Apollo, Thalia—you like them, right? They’re in danger too!”
“Okay, but there’s not really much we can do about it, is there?”
“You should at least be upset! Or worried. Or something!”
He grinned. “I’m still high on seeing you alive again.”
She sighed. “I think I envy you. Right now all I really want to do is just eat and rest. Ignore all of this, but . . . Geez, I don’t know. Maybe you’re right.”
“Sure I am. It’ll all work out somehow. We’ve done enough.” Another thought hit him before Tracy could respond. The grin fell. “Hey, you don’t think they’d do something to you for being Zeus’s daughter, do you?”
“Thanks, I was trying not to think about that one,” she answered. “But the other gods went off to fight them, so I figure I’ll be safe enough for at least a little while with Zeus around.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Leif grumbled.
“You’re not exactly being helpful here. What’s that supposed to mean?”
The commissary doors swung open again. Zeus made straight for their table, looking pensive in a way that clearly didn’t suit him. “Do not answer that,” he thought to Leif.
Leif hesitated to answer long enough to let Tracy notice before he turned to Zeus. “The Titans are out? Is that true?”
“It is.”
�
�And . . . ?”
“And what, Mr. Karlson?”
“More information would be nice. Ancient enemies, out of prison, probably pissed I’m sure. This is bad, right? Or is it some part of your plan? You let them loose?”
“Only a fool would let the Titans loose. Yet now that they are free, it may work to my advantage. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“Are you talking about the Titans or the other Olympians?” asked Tracy.
“Both. Either. Whichever. It depends on how things go. The struggle will weaken both sides.”
“Rather Machiavellian of you,” Leif observed, not without relish. He didn’t often get a chance to use that word. “You really didn’t let them loose yourself?”
Zeus scowled and pointed a stolen French fry at him. “What did I just say? The last I knew, they were safely hidden away in an antique shop in Swindon.”
“When I was in Hades, I saw Jason’s ghost. He said something destructive and angry was going to be released. Something to do with Swindon.” Tracy pointed her burger at Leif. “And that’s another reason I’m upset about this.”
“Well, you should’ve mentioned that.”
“Bite me.”
“The Titans were dealt with before,” Zeus assured them. “They will be dealt with again. But not yet.”
“Not yet?” Leif balked just a little. The threat the Titans posed to Tracy had begun to worry him, especially given how willing Zeus was to declare her an acceptable loss. And the whole “destructive and angry” bit bothered him more than he liked. “Shouldn’t you be out there now before they can do much damage?”
Zeus shook his head. “The others fight them now. They will keep them busy, for a time.”
“Yeah, but—suppose they can’t do the job fast enough without your help? What then?”
“I will make no move until I am ready,” Zeus declared. “In this my will is immutable.”
“But—” Leif tried.
“I command you to speak no more of this, Mr. Karlson,” Zeus warned. “Even now Dr. Kowalski’s team makes the final adjustments to the collider. Only once it is complete shall I enter this battle, on my own terms, and no sooner. Eat, then rest, both of you.” He pointed at Leif. “You especially.”
“Destructive and angry!” Leif repeated. “And anyway weren’t you going to put in a good word for me with . . .” He indicated Tracy with a nod that she didn’t appear to notice.
“Patience,” growled Zeus. “I command it.”
As Leif and Tracy slept, the Second Titan War raged. Out of the vortex had come the nine imprisoned Titans, and though their forms were weak from the transition to our world and millennia of atrophy, their power was nonetheless a force to be reckoned with.
(Go on, reckon with it a bit. There you go.)
While the Titans still lay in gasping wonder in the light of the Tartarus vortex, recovering their strength, Poseidon led the Olympian assault against them. They would hit the Titans when they were weakest, he’d declared; not a moment would be wasted.
There was barely time to get organized, almost zero time to form any sort of battle strategy, certainly no time to release Apollo and secure his loyalty, and not even time—Demeter and Hestia both lamented—for a good, hearty bowl of oatmeal. The Olympians had one objective only: force the Titans back into their prison through any means necessary.
Understand: the concept of god-level beings fighting is a tricky one. They bring cosmic energies to bear for both attack and defense, in manners both overt and involuntary. Battling gods trade supernatural attacks, parries, and counterattacks of increasing complexity and reality-rending power, building them atop each other at a frenetic pace. A mortal witnessing such events can neither discern every nuance nor truly comprehend the nature of what is occurring—so far is it beyond their understanding, their grasp of the universe, and very possibly their vocabulary.
The very same goes for trying to depict such battles in a text such as this. Even describing every intricacy of a brief cosmic arm-wrestling match would take pages—the reading of which would require hours beyond the fraction of a minute the match would take to complete. To describe every instant of an entire Olympian-Titan battle would require several carloads of text with at least thirty-seven supplemental appendixes. Simply reading such a depiction would likely take months. To comprehend even half of it would require a dozen doctoral degrees in the hard sciences, psychology, and—for some reason—fishery sciences. Such texts are a very hard sell for publishers (despite Ayn Rand’s success), and for this reason even the shortest god battles in this narrative, as alert readers have surely noted, are described in abstract terms that capture the general appearances and magnitude of the struggle. (A true description of every element relating to Apollo's earlier clocking of Ares would truly make Einstein weep.)
Yet even in abstract terms, the opening moments of the second Titanomachy were violently impressive.
The Olympians descended upon the Titans while cloaked in a field of darkness projected by Hecate. (Guilt-ridden over her part in the affair, she had volunteered her powers immediately when the time came, hoping desperately no one would discover the true reason behind her uncharacteristic cooperation.) They assailed the Titans, launching at them arrows, energies, and other baneful projectiles from the goddess’s flying mass of obscurity.
For a brief time, it worked. The Titans scrambled to their feet and sought to shield themselves from the Olympian’s strikes. Some struggled to cover; others hurled rocks, trees, and energies of their own into the blackness, unable to find a target. Yet, even though the Olympians succeeded in restarting the suction of the Tartarus vortex, they could not drive the Titans back into their prison. Instead the Titans fled en masse up Mount Parnitha with the Olympians at their heels until the Titans turned and sprang down into the darkness from the mountaintop. Flailing their arms blindly, one of them struck Hecate in the face by sheer luck. Stunned, she flew into the Aegean and sank for a time under the waves, her darkness dispersed.
The Olympians, suddenly vulnerable, scattered.
Then the battle began in earnest. The younger generation reformed into smaller groups, ganging up on individual Titans in an effort to weaken them one at a time so that they might be recaptured.
Athena, still holding Zeus’s mighty Aegis shield, gave cover to both Ares and Artemis, who flung death at the Titans. Artemis launched volley after volley of silver arrows, while Ares yelled in defiance behind his bucking cosmic-repeating-depleted-uranium gauss rifle.
Less organized were Aphrodite, Dionysus, Hephaestus, and Hermes. Unused to full combat, they eventually worked out a chaotic mix of flying about trying to get the Titans drunk, seduce them, and hit them in the face with a forge hammer. Though Hermes kept the four of them moving too fast to catch, the rest of that plan didn’t work particularly well.
With the exception of Demeter and Hestia—who worked together to weave and wield a huge hemp net that Hestia continually insisted would be better constructed if she could just work on it from home— the elder generation fought alone. Veterans of the first Titan War, they were no longer children, and long ago mastered the weapons they’d only begun to use in that original struggle. Hera wielded blades formed of sheer strength of will. Hades dived bodily upon the Titans with pure inexorable strength and pummeled them with fists of heavy metals. Poseidon, strongest of all, shook the Titans from their feet with earthquakes, assailed them with tidal waves, and punctuated both methods with signature trident thrusts.
Yet without Zeus’s strength, his lightning, his power, the battle was nothing but a furious stalemate. For every Titan stunned, another surged forward to beat off the attackers and regain lost ground. Devastating forces hurled Titanic bodies across the landscape, mighty blows pummeled the Olympians in retaliation, and collateral damage obliterated the city of Athens within minutes. The Olympians could not keep the Titans from straying from the vortex, and soon the war raged out of control across the globe.
As f
ar as the planet's mortals could tell, the very forces of nature were at war under a hideously colored sky. Only by the flash of Poseidon’s visage in a hurricane, or Hades’s booming whisper ordering the Titans back to their prison, could they infer a fraction of the battle that was underway.
This did not stop every single news media outlet, blogger, or pundit from reporting on it, of course.
CHAPTER FORTY
“Titans released! Can we fling enough blame to fix the problem?”
—Cable news ticker
TRACY WAS STARING IN RAPT ATTENTION at the news reports, absentmindedly munching a bowl of cereal in the room at CERN that Zeus had converted into her bedroom, when Leif arrived. Though she missed the details of his morning greeting, she managed to tear herself away from the screen long enough to nod at him and point at the TV with her spoon.
“This is insane,” she said.
He grabbed a bowl of his own and sat down. “How long have you been watching?”
“Got up half an hour ago.”
A blaring fanfare drowned out Leif’s response. With it, a news logo exploded across the screen in fire and lightning that read, WAR! Between the GODS!
“Not technically correct,” Tracy said.
“On a number of levels.”
It was better than some she’d seen so far, though. Every single channel was reporting on the struggle with the Titans, with each channel using its own unique catch phrase, title logo, and theme music. Differentiation was important, but there were only so many good titles to go around. (ENT!’s reports chose to call it Titan War 2: Olympic Boogaloo! It was rather catchy, she had to admit, but the accompanying disco-lyre music had forced her to find a different station.)
Leif snorted. “Nice logo, though. Their reporting must be top notch.”
“People always mock the logos,” Tracy mumbled. “Research shows they work.”
“What research?”
“Do you mind?” She pointed at the screen and tuned out Leif to focus on a live report from outside the White House. Nothing was occurring behind the reporter, and as it was evening in Washington, D.C., the altered color of the sky was barely discernable. Still, it made for a nice backdrop.
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