The Age of Zeus a-2

by James Lovegrove

  "Watch out, pal," said Ramsay. "Sam used to be a cop."

  "I know." McCann squirmed. "I mean, I know some of you were police. I just… You can't be arrested just for saying stuff, can you?"

  "Continue with the demonstration, lad," said Landesman. "You're doing fine. They're only teasing."

  "Oh aye. I see."

  "Show us the chameleon effect."

  "Yeah. The chameleon effect. Well, it goes a bit like this. The nanobots can colour-shift to match their surroundings. It isn't quite Harry Potter's Cloak of Invisibility but it's still a hell of an effective camouflage. Here we go."

  He stood against the black rock wall of the chamber. A quick prodding of his wristpad, and the surface of the suit began to darken. Soon the suit was as black as the wall, and with McCann standing stock still it was almost impossible to see him. He was a perfect silhouette.

  "It can also do break-up patterns," he said, as the suit lightened again to its default-setting grey. "Jungle, desert, mountain, snow, all the basic combat camouflage designs. Urban environments are harder to deal with, but by and large buildings in localised regions conform to a standard colour, so for a Mediterranean town, for instance, you could make the setting white to match the stucco. And speaking of Mediterranean, and hot countries in general, we've fitted a microclimate conditioning subsystem which'll keep you cool in hundred-plus-degree heat and toasty warm in subzero temperatures. Basically, you'll never roast or freeze. Whatever the weather, you'll be Baby Bear's porridge — just right."

  "Ah, bless," said Mahmoud.

  McCann squirmed again. He was a full-grown man and clearly some kind of genius, but acted like an awkward adolescent. It was almost too easy to embarrass him. And too tempting.

  "And now," said Landesman, "the piece de resistance."

  McCann made an imploring sound. "Do we have to?"

  "I'm afraid so, Jamie."

  "But it hurts."

  "Oh it's not so bad. Didn't you liken it once to getting shot with a paintball?"

  "Which hurts."

  "Stings."

  "Hurts stingingly. Oh very well then. Since you insist. You're the fella who signs the cheques, after all." McCann stationed himself at the wall again, while Landesman fetched a gun from the armoury.

  "You may want to step back a little," Landesman advised the eleven. "There shouldn't be a ricochet, but just in case."

  "What in the name of sweet baby Jesus's little holy halo is that?" Ramsay asked, pointing to the gun. "Never seen anything like it."

  The gun was shaped like a conventional rifle but had a long, thickly cylindrical barrel and an unusually stocky body. The casing was ribbed in several places, and a lightning bolt was stencilled on a small sliding cover on one side, suggesting a battery pack was contained within.

  "This," said Landesman, "is a handheld coilgun."

  "A handheld what now?"

  "Come, come, Mr Ramsay. Don't tell me you're unaware of your own Defence Department's current Holy Grail. A handheld coilgun. One better than a railgun — not so power intensive and producing far less excess heat. Unlike a conventional gun, a coilgun uses electromagnetic energy rather than explosive energy to launch a projectile. A series of coaxial superconductor solenoid coils switching on and off in sequence accelerate a bullet along a track until it emerges here" — Landesman tapped the end of the barrel — "at a speed of several Mach. The bullet is powderless, contained in a sabot case that separates free the moment it leaves the gun. In all, this has twice the range of the average rifle and five times the penetration and stopping power."

  He smacked a magazine into place, then pulled the cocking handle, raised the coilgun to his shoulder and took aim.

  "So you're going to shoot him with that sci-fi blaster of yours," said Ramsay, "at almost point-blank range."

  "I am. Why ever not?"

  "Shit, you can't. You just can't. Even if there's a whole bunch of Kevlar in that armour, there's still a good chance you'll — "

  The report from the coilgun was a tremendous percussive snap. As the ringing in everyone's ears faded, all gazes turned to McCann, who had staggered when the gun went off but who remained upright and appeared unharmed. He stooped and retrieved something that lay at his feet. He held it up between thumb and forefinger for all to see. It was a bullet, blunted to a mushroom shape.

  "The bots make the suit go rigid at the point of impact," McCann said, flipping up his visor. "They absorb and disperse the force of the bullet across the surrounding surface, wherever you're hit. Not pain-free," he added, with feeling, "but 'ow' is definitely preferable to, you know…" He made a gargling noise in the back of his throat, like someone fatally wounded. "And that, ladies and gentleman, concludes our demonstration of the TITAN suit. At least I hope it does, unless my boss has plans to break out the rocket launcher."

  "Would you like to give it a try, Jamie?"

  "Jesus no. I was only joking."

  "As was I." Landesman smiled paternally at the engineer. "Off you go. You've done well. Back into your civvies."

  McCann went over to the other technicians, who began helping him divest himself of the suit. Landesman, meanwhile, returned the coilgun to the armoury, then addressed his eleven recruits again.

  "So you've seen the battlesuit in action. What do you think?"

  "That's supposed to make us superior to the Olympians?" said Harryhausen.

  "What is the single greatest disadvantage an ordinary person has against the Olympians?" Landesman asked rhetorically. "Vulnerability. The TITAN suits do away with that. They compensate for the relative physical weakness of us mere humans by giving us a sturdy, almost impregnable exoskeleton. I'm not suggesting that wearing one would allow you to go toe-to-toe with, say, Hercules, trading punches. But it would afford protection from the worst of any damage he tried to inflict, and its stealth capability would allow you to sneak up on him, and night vision would enable you to do so under cover of darkness. And you've seen the kind of cutting-edge weapons available here. I'm not offering unqualified superiority to the Pantheon. What I am offering is a significantly levelled playing field."

  "But there's just eleven of us," said Barrington, "and how many of them?"

  "Twelve, not counting the monsters," said Chisholm. "The standard canonical Dodekatheon. Plus Hercules and Dionysus, who are in the Kos Dodekatheon but not the canonical. Hercules, by tradition, is a demigod, but he still counts. Then there's Argus. Nobody's quite sure which he is, mainly because nobody's ever seen him — god or monster or something in between. So, depending on how you look at it, you could say there are thirteen in all, thirteen and a half, even fourteen and a half."

  "And each of them, each of the main ones, is worth a regiment of soldiers at least," said Barrington. "I mean, Hamlet here fought with a whole army against just half a dozen, and look how that turned out."

  Sondergaard scowled at the Australian. "Hamlet?"

  "Only famous Dane I could think of, mate."

  "Hans Christian Andersen? Kierkegaard? Niels Bohr? Karen Blix-?"

  "Mate, you should be grateful I've heard of any Danes at all. I'm just saying, your country's entire armed forces took on six Olympians and lost. That's however many battalions, and the eleven of us wouldn't even make a company. Sorry, Landesman, super-suits or not, the maths just doesn't add up."

  "But it isn't just about the suits, Dez," Landesman said smoothly. "It'll be the tactics as well. I've a strategy mapped out that Athena herself would be proud of. A handful of Titan troops going up against the Olympians in a full-frontal assault would be, I grant you, futile. Tantamount to suicide. A series of low-key, guerrilla-style attacks, on the other hand, picking them off one by one…"

  Eto'o's ears pricked up. "They wander the world," she said. "They're not always to be found on Mount Olympus. They argue among themselves too often for all of them to stay there all of the time. They're often alone."

  "Precisely. And I'd be drawing particularly on your knowhow, Soleil, your experience
and expertise in the field of counter-Olympian insurgency."

  "I would be happy to share it."

  "I'm asking," Landesman said to all eleven of them, "for six months of your lives. That's how long I envisage this taking. Six months to rid the world of the Olympian scourge. Six months to restore humanity's control of its own destiny. In the ancient myths, it was the gods who rose up against the Titans. The Titans were the children of Uranus, powerful, primeval creatures he could not control. Their name itself derives from the Greek verb teino, meaning 'I strain,' because according to Hesiod in his Theogony they 'strained in insolence.' They rampaged around, uncontrollable. Zeus was the son of one of them, Cronus. Cronus had a habit of eating his offspring, swallowing them whole so that none of them could turn on him and depose him, but Zeus managed to escape that fate. He forced Cronus to vomit up his fellow gods, then enlisted their aid in attacking him. So began the Titanomachy, the War of the Titans. Sorry, am I boring you, Dez?"

  "No, mate, don't mind me. You carry on. I always yawn when I'm fascinated."

  "That war lasted ten years. Eventually the immortals overthrew the Titans and took their place as rulers of the world. The Titans were imprisoned in the bowels of the earth, and Zeus — well, he castrated his father."

  "Is that what's going on in that charming picture over there?" said Ramsay, indicating the mural. "Is that Zeus with that — that Batman scythe?" The blade of the scythe was black and curiously batwing-shaped. If Batman ever had need of a pre-technological farming implement, it would surely look like the one in the painting.

  "Ah, no," said Landesman. "There is no famous image of the castration of Cronus, unfortunately, so what you're looking at is a reproduction of Vasari's fresco The Castration Of Uranus. It's Cronus who's doing the testicular lopping off there and his father, Uranus, who's the poor fellow being deprived of his assets. In that respect Zeus, when he chose to remove Cronus's testicles, was simply following on in a patrilinear tradition. Apparently a lot of that sort of thing went on between the gods and their daddies. It's a recurring motif."

  "Paging Dr Freud," said Hamel.

  "Indeed," said Landesman.

  "Don't tell me," said Ramsay. "There's some kinda code hidden in the picture, right? Some historical message that reveals the secret of the Olympians. Dan Brown's working on the novel even as we speak."

  "I'm afraid the answer's no, although it's an ingenious guess. There's no code, no secret message. The painting is just a painting, albeit a splendid and rather beautiful one. Oh, and by the way, the blade of the scythe looks like that because it's supposed to be made of knapped flint. Most pre-Bronze Age tools used flint, Vasari's point being that the myth is ancient, even by classical standards."

  "So what's the mural up there for?" Sam asked. "If it's to cheer up the workplace, you'd probably have been better off with a picture of Daniel Craig or a kitten in a tree instead."

  "I had it painted there as a — you could say as a source of inspiration," replied Landesman. "A reminder of gods' natures. Their cruelty, their vindictiveness. What I'm actually intending to do, with the help of you people, is invert the Titan story. An act of symmetry. I'm proposing Titanomachy II, an uprising of Titans against the gods, or whatever the Olympians actually are. And just as Zeus and his Olympian cohorts succeeded in defeating the Titans, I fully anticipate that events in the real world will mirror myth — you, my Titans, will defeat the Olympians. If, that is, you're willing. Are you? Now that you've some idea of the resources you'll have at your disposal, the level of logistical and technological support I'll be able to provide, are you up for this? Half a year to eliminate the entire Pantheon and lay to rest the ghosts that haunt you. Come on, what do you say?"

  Nothing.

  "Tell you what," Landesman continued, unfazed, "I'll give you a week to decide. You start training with the battlesuits tomorrow, testing out some of the weaponry as well."

  "Tomorrow?" said Ramsay. "Isn't that kinda soon? Some of us have lives, you know. We can't drop everything and start working for you, just like that."

  "Is that so, Mr Ramsay? I daresay you, for one, could put everything on hold, close down your life, with just a couple of phone calls. I daresay all of you could. You've all come here with few burdens and even fewer emotional ties. That was intentional on my part. Be honest. Whatever you have at home, how hard will it be to leave behind? Even just for a week. And if after that week any of you come to the conclusion that this isn't for you, fine, you may depart without a stain on your reputation and with head held high. You won't be leaving me short-handed. I have reserve candidates. How about that? A fair deal, I'd have thought."

  8. PAIRING OFF

  By her second day trialling the TITAN suit, Sam was half convinced she would quit once the week was out. By her third day, she was fully convinced.

  She couldn't seem to get the knack of using the suit. She felt as if she were fighting it rather than wearing it. The servos made her limbs want to do things she didn't want them to. When she raised an arm, the suit tried to get her to loft it into the air. When she put a foot forward to walk, the suit urged her to leap. She spent a great deal of time tottering, almost falling over, and falling over, like a novice ice skater or a little girl trying on mummy's high heels. Out of the others, only Mahmoud was having similar problems. The rest got to grips with the suits relatively easily, and Sam watched with envy as they strolled around, performed feats of strength like the one McCann had shown them, and even learned how to sprint.

  The training took place almost entirely in the car-park-like area that formed the entrance hall to the bunker. It was open-plan and spacious enough to allow the recruits to move around without, on the whole, bumping into one another — although collisions did occur and Sam was the cause of more than her fair share of them. The lights could be doused, too, to create total darkness so that the night vision mode on the visors could be brought into play. Again, Sam found the ghostly green imaging difficult to get accustomed to. It was like wading through some blurry monochrome dreamscape, where anything that moved left a phosphorescent trail. Even more confusing, though, was the peripheral vision expansion mode, which stretched her field of view sideways in either direction like some kind of warped wraparound Cinemascope. Objects and people loomed from the left and right, baffling her sense of spatial awareness which was telling her they weren't where her eyes were reporting them to be. Yet further colliding went on whenever she activated the option.

  McCann kept telling her she would adapt to the suit. It would just take time. "It's like a sports car," he said. "Most folk think you can just climb in one and race off. They've no idea that in most of your modern sports models the gearstick is two paddle shifters on either side of the steering column, and that the steering wheel is super sensitive, the accelerator too, and that sometimes the accelerator pedal's in the middle, not on the right. First time out everyone nearly always stalls or just misses having a crash. You have to re-learn how to drive. And it's the same here. Think of the TITAN suit as a Lamborghini Murcielago and yourself as, I dunno, a Volkswagen Golf. Forget everything your body knows about walking and so on. The suit'll teach you a new way. Listen to it. Feel it. Trust it to do what it's meant to, and soon enough you'll find it becoming second nature."

  She attempted to follow this advice, and blundered headlong into the nearest support pillar.

  McCann helped her to her feet.

  "Aye, well," he said, "maybe it's going to take you a wee bit longer than 'soon enough.' But you'll get there, Sam."

  "You're talking to a woman who failed her driving test three times," Sam said. "But thanks for the vote of confidence."

  The eleven recruits ate meals together in the room with the table where they'd first met. The cuisine was good. Landesman did not scrimp on the small luxuries like that. A professional chef rustled up fine fodder from the supplies that Captain Fuller ferried over every other day.

  The recruits also bunked together, in pairs, in rooms that boasted clea
n, simple decor, neither Spartan nor flowery, and lacked only one thing: a view. The communal washing facilities were decent. There was a well-equipped recreation room with a pool table and a plasma-screen TV. There was a library. There was even a laundry. Lillicrap had undersold things somewhat to Sam and Ramsay, or perhaps had been deliberately lowering their expectations. His "perfectly civilised" had implied basic functionality, but the bunker on Bleaney Island was actually quite a pleasant place to be, the absence of natural daylight notwithstanding. Sam had stayed at worse hotels.

  Her roommate was Mahmoud, and the two of them quickly formed a bond, partly because of their background in the police but mostly because they shared the honour of being the least accomplished with the battlesuits. Each evening at bedtime they would go over the disasters of that day and compare fresh aches and blisters. Mahmoud remarked that the two of them would be completely covered in bruises if it wasn't for the suits' impact-absorbing abilities. Sam, in turn, lamented the sad irony that an invention designed to put her on a par with gods was making her feel more of a clumsy mortal than ever. She didn't confess that she doubted she was going to stay beyond the end of the week, but she had a feeling Mahmoud knew and was thinking much the same.

  They found another point of similarity in the fact that they were both bereft of immediate family. Sam was an only child whose parents had both passed away while she was in her late teens, her father of a massive coronary, her mother of complications from the type 1 diabetes that had dogged her all her life. At the end of a torturous period of hospitals, hospices and funeral parlours Sam was left with the freehold on a house on Kensal Rise, enough in the way of inherited savings to last her through university, and an abiding sense of the fragility and unfairness of life. Mahmoud's parents hadn't survived the deaths of her two brothers. Her father's despair had driven him to seek consolation in his religion, but neither the Qur'an nor frequent visits to the mosque and long talks with the imam had provided him with the answers he wanted. So he had turned to another common source of consolation, alcohol, and it, at least, had ended his torment — by killing him. A fatality on the M602 near Salford. A lone driver, late at night, in a head-on collision with the central reservation. Straight through the windscreen. Not wearing his seatbelt. DUI, judging by the shards of broken bottle and the reek of whisky all over the upholstery. No other vehicle involved. Mahmoud had been on duty that night, and a colleague, having identified the victim by means of his wallet and recognising the name, had called her to the scene. She wished he hadn't.