A quick scan of the screens told Sam all she needed to know.
On the far right-hand side of the feed from Cronus, and the far left-hand side of Phoebe's, there was a tiny, pale shape in motion. Sam could make out arms pumping, legs flickering, the gleam of streetlights reflecting off a shiny silvery helmet.
"Cronus, Phoebe, it's you. He's on your tail."
"Dammit!" Cronus spat. "Dammit all to hell!"
"Just keep going, both of you. You can outrun him."
"No, we can't," said Cronus. He was breathing heavily already, and Phoebe had begun panting hard, perhaps in panic. "Hermes has a top speed of well over fifty. We can barely manage forty."
"The suit goes faster the faster you go. Pour it on. Run flat out. Sprint."
Cronus and Phoebe accelerated. Their tachometer readings crept up above 40 mph. 45, 46, 47…
But Hermes was still gaining.
"Why doesn't he just teleport ahead?" Ramsay wondered.
"He can't do both at once," Patanjali replied. "It's not safe for him. He can only teleport from a standing start. Otherwise, when he reappears his stored momentum could carry him slap-bang into a brick wall or whatever and splatter him to pieces."
"And that would be a shame."
"Quite."
"Base, I'm going to double back." It was Iapetus. "I've got a lock on their whereabouts. Maybe I can intercept."
To Patanjali, Sam said, "Where's the GPS map? Why's it not up? Pull it up."
"No sooner said than done," the computer programmer said, and did.
A blue-on-black street map of Manhattan winked into life, with four moving red dots tracking the four Titans' positions.
"All right, Iapetus, try," Sam said into the mic. "Judging by your relative locations, I don't think they should count on you making it, though. Cronus, Phoebe," she continued. "I have you headed along West Eighteenth Street. You've just crossed Sixth Avenue. Now, if you continue on that course, you're going to run out of city and hit the Hudson River in a couple of minutes."
Cronus groaned.
"No, it's all right. Just listen. You can't attempt evasive manoeuvres yet. All the turns here are right-angles and you can't afford to slow down as much as you need to in order to take one without wiping out. Hermes will catch up for certain if you do. But once you hit the edge of the island there's an expressway, the, er, the West Side Highway it's called, also known as the Joe DiMaggio Highway. There's bound to be sliproads onto that, or some kind of broader junction to help you get on it without decelerating too much. It'll give you more room to run and a bit of breathing space. At some point, though, you're going to have to stop and turn and make a stand."
"Hermes is too fast a target for us to — "
"No, Cronus, listen. This is not negotiable. This is just how it's going to be. I know we weren't planning on dealing with Hermes today, which is why no one's packing the relevant armaments. Yes, he's fast, he can teleport… but his only tactical weapon is that caduceus of his, and it's only useful at close quarters. You two have guns — long-range capability. That's your edge, and it's going to make all the difference. It's going to save your necks. So keep moving, keep running. I don't care how tired you're feeling, how much your legs ache or your lungs hurt. You can do this. Phoebe? Do you read me?"
"I read you," Phoebe said, between gasps.
"I'm going to get you through this, both of you, I promise. Your side of the deal is simply to keep listening to me and do exactly as I say."
She covered the mic with her hand.
"Fuck. How am I going to get them through this?"
"You're doing great, Sam," Ramsay said. He was reaching out to touch her, but remembered himself in time. "Stay with it. Don't lose your nerve."
"But look at him." Hermes was less than 50 metres to Cronus's and Phoebe's rear, although distances were hard to judge in the fish-eye distortion of peripheral expansion. "And Kerstin's flagging. Her speed's dropping."
"Keep talking to them. That's what they need the most — your voice, telling them to be cool, everything's OK. If they lose it, they're gone."
"Base, Rhea. Anything I can do?"
"Hold on, Rhea, let me think. Yes. Sorry, but I want you to go back to Gramercy Park and retrieve Coeus's body. It's not the pleasantest task but it has to be done, and now, before someone else gets to it. I'd be surprised if Hermes is the only Olympian in New York at the moment."
"Roger, base. I'm on it."
"Base, we've just passed… Ninth Avenue, I think," said Cronus. "How much further to the… expressway?"
"Quarter of a mile. Less."
"I'm really… getting winded."
"You're fine. You and Phoebe, you're both staying ahead of him. Although, Phoebe, you might want to pick up the pace a fraction."
There was no reply from Phoebe beyond rasping ins and outs of breath, but her tachometer registered a slight uptick in speed. Other readouts indicated that her suit's battery life was down to 25 % and the servos were hotting up, although their temperature remained within tolerable levels for now.
Her visor-cam showed Cronus in front of her, to her left, and Hermes now just a few paces behind her. Hermes ran with all the lean, sinewy grace of a top-flight athlete, the scissoring of his arms and legs sublimely co-ordinated, no part of him moving a millimetre further than it needed to. He seemed a thing designed to be at speed, furnished for it by nature, like a cheetah — biomechanical perfection. Every joint, every muscle, every tendon meshed precisely and for just one purpose: to propel him forwards, fast, without fail. It was something Sam couldn't help but admire even as she loathed the lethal intent behind it. The wild fixity in Hermes's eyes as he inexorably shaved the distance between him and his quarry, the bared, clenched teeth, the rhythmic flaring of his nostrils — these all spoke of a man who had never come second in a race and of a predator who was never unable to overtake his prey. Hermes the Luck-Bearer. Hermes the Ready Helper. Closing in.
Up ahead a four-lane road appeared, traversing 18th Street diagonally.
"That's it," Sam said. "The intersection. Take a right when you get there. It's a less sharp turn than left."
Traffic was flowing smoothly across from 18th Street. The lights were in the two Titans' favour. Everything was looking good, until they actually reached the intersection. At that moment green went to red, and WALK became DON'T WALK.
"Don't stop!"
Cronus burst onto the crosswalk just as vehicles on either side of him started to roll. He swung right in a wide arc which took him out past the median strip and head-on into the southbound traffic on the expressway. Luckily for him, it hadn't properly got going yet. He was able to insert himself between the two near-stationary queues and start to build up speed again.
Phoebe was not so fortunate. Coming to the intersection a couple of seconds later meant she wound up in the midst of traffic that was revving away from the lights in both directions, drivers impatient to make up for the half-minute delay that being stuck on red had just cost them. She dodged around a bus, then tried to skirt a UPS truck but clipped its rear bumper, lost her footing and went into a skid. From nowhere a yellow cab loomed. The karrrump! of impact nearly blew the speakers at Bleaney. Phoebe was sent sliding sideways across the asphalt, making helpless gurgling and grunting sounds as she went. She came to rest some ten metres from the yellow cab. Her visor now had a crack across it but was still functioning, giving a view of the world canted at an acute angle.
The traffic halted. Sam watched the cabbie, a turbaned Sikh, get out. Looking infuriated, he went to inspect the front of his car. The radiator grille was stove in, the bumper deeply dented, the bonnet crumpled like a piece of half-finished origami. He cursed, then straightened up and started rubbing the back of his neck. Either he'd suffered whiplash or he'd been in the taxi trade long enough to know that, in the event of an accident, it was vital to feign the injury for the benefit of witnesses, so that any later claim for compensation or sick leave would look authentic. Only then
, after he had taken care of these important formalities, did he think to check up on the person he had just run into with his cab.
"Phoebe," Sam said as the cabbie strode over to her, still busy with his neck rubbing. "Phoebe, you have to get up. You have to move. Phoebe! Do you read me? Over."
Phoebe gave a groan. " Ich bin… I'm OK."
"Good. Now on your feet. I don't know where Hermes is, but — "
She saw the cabbie falter in mid-stride, then start backing away. Hermes stepped into view at one corner of the screen. The peripheral expansion distended him, making him seem a giant — huge legs, narrowing torso, pin-sized head.
"Oh God, he's behind you, Phoebe, he's right behind you, right there…"
Shakily, Phoebe tried to rise. Hermes, with an almost solicitous air, extended one hand and helped her up, turning her around as he did so.
"He's touching her so he can teleport with her," Patanjali said. "Shit, he'll take her somewhere, anywhere. Olympus. They'll make her talk. She'll tell them everything."
"Phoebe, you can't let yourself be taken captive," Sam said. "You've got to get away."
The visor-cam image shuddered. Phoebe was reaching for a weapon. She pulled the pistol attached to her hip but Hermes swatted it from her grasp with his caduceus.
"Not quick enough on the draw," he told her, smirking. "And you never will be. To me, everybody moves in slow motion, and so clumsily, like an arthritic tortoise. So, out with it. Who are you, you people with your weapons and your fancy armour? What's your game here?"
"Our game is killing you, Schwanzlutscher," Phoebe replied.
"Ha!" exclaimed Hermes. He might not have known the German for cocksucker but, given how she'd spoken the word, no translation was necessary. Then, suddenly, Phoebe's head jolted from side to side, the visor image flipping crazily. Hermes was hitting her in the face with the flat of his caduceus, the blows coming as fast as a string of firecrackers popping.
"Cronus," Sam said. "Phoebe is in serious trouble. Turn back and help her."
No reply. Cronus kept on running north along the West Side Highway.
"I'm nearly there," said Iapetus, but his transponder told a different story. He was somewhere up past Madison Square Garden and still had a mile to go. It would take him at best a minute and a half to get to Phoebe. Far too long.
"Well, my little German hellion," Hermes was saying to Phoebe, "we'll find out all about you soon enough. Let's go on a trip to meet my kin, shall we? My great-aunt Aphrodite will get to work on you, and when she's done with you and you've spilled every secret you have she'll hand you over to my cousin Ares — a little gift to her lover. Likes a mortal woman now and then, does Ares, though I should warn you, he can get rather rough. Doesn't always know his own strength, if you know what I mean."
"Cronus!" Sam tried again, urgency fraying her voice.
"Maybe he can't hear," Ramsay said. "I hope to God that's it."
"Few mortals get the privilege of travelling with me, fraulein," Hermes said. "One moment we're here, the next — blink! — somewhere else. I understand it can be unpleasant if you're not used to it and not an Olympian. You'll probably feel rather sick afterwards. But a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime experience. Ready?"
He closed his eyes, summoning his concentration.
And that was when Phoebe struck.
She headbutted him, ramming the brow of her helmet onto the bridge of her nose. Hermes shrieked, and blood spurted from his nostrils. He didn't let go, however. He blinked, and then in retaliation he started to hammer at Phoebe's helmet with his caduceus again.
The blows coming rattlingly fast, like hail on a roof. Phoebe, it seemed, was helpless, with no choice but to endure the attack. But then Sam heard, distinctly even though it was a tiny sound amid all the commotion, the metallic tink of the pin being pulled from a grenade.
"Kerstin…" she sighed. Resigned. Knowing there was nothing she could do, and nothing else Phoebe could do.
Hermes ceased battering her. His nose had begun to swell, and a slick of blood coated his mouth and jaw.
"That really hurt, and it's going to cost you, bitch. One teleport? How about twenty? You'll be puking yourself inside out by the time we're done."
There was a blizzard of onscreen static, and then Olympian and Titan were on a high hilltop somewhere, perhaps New Zealand. Lush grassland below. Pasture, with maggot-sized sheep.
Another blizzard of static.
They were in a desert. Copper-coloured sand dunes. Magnesium-flare sun.
More static.
An icy waste. A howling wind. Endless whiteness. Bleached blue sky.
And all Sam could think was, The grenade. He doesn't know.
Static.
Some city. Not New York. The other side of the world. Broad daylight. A dusty marketplace. Vendors yelling. Flies swarming over foodstuffs. India?
Static.
A rainforest. Liquid jungle sounds.
And then a burst of sharp light.
And then just static. Constant sizzling static, filling the screen from edge to edge.
46. THE MYRMIDON PROTOCOL
"B ase, Iapetus. Is Phoebe…?"
"Just get to the rendezvous point, Iapetus," Sam said, voice sick and weary. "There's nothing you can do now."
"Shit."
"Base, Rhea. What happened?"
"Phoebe's gone. But I think she might have taken Hermes with her."
"For sure?"
"Don't know. Looks that way."
"Coeus and her. My God."
"I know."
"Then I don't suppose more bad news is going to make any difference." Rhea was speaking in hushed tones. "I'm back at Gramercy Park. Can you see what I'm seeing?"
Sam could. Coeus's decapitated body lay where it had fallen, the head nearby still staring skyward, not far from Hercules's remains — and standing over the Titan's corpse, with their backs to Rhea, were three Olympians. Rhea was some way off from them, lurking in the shadow of an awning of the kind the smarter New York apartment blocks often had outside their front entrances. Nevertheless, even at a distance, Sam had no trouble identifying Zeus, Poseidon and high-helmed Athena.
"Please don't tell me you want me to engage, base."
"Of course not. Get out of there, and try not to be seen."
"Roger that."
As Rhea loped away from the scene, sirens could be heard honking and caterwauling in the background. Blue and red light splashed off building facades to the rear of her.
"Cronus, base. Come in, Cronus," Sam said.
"Cronus here."
"Phoebe is down. Do you copy?"
His pace was slowing. He knew already. "I gathered."
"Were you aware that I asked you to go and help?"
"I… I must have missed that. I was running so hard — I assumed she was still with me."
Sam hesitated. No, this was not a conversation they should have on air. Later. In person. Alone. It would wait.
"Understood, Cronus. Make rendezvous as soon as you can."
"We got two of them, base," Cronus said. "That's not bad going for a day's work."
"Only one of the kills is confirmed," Sam replied. "And they've got Coeus's body."
"Yes, about that. Here's what you'll need to do. Implement the Myrmidon Protocol."
"The what?"
"One of you there knows what I'm referring to."
Baffled looks from Sam and Ramsay were met with a not so baffled look from Patanjali.
The IT wizard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Before I say anything else, it wasn't my idea. It's nothing to do with me. I didn't come up with it, I just made it possible."
"What is the Myrmidon Protocol, Rajesh?" Sam demanded.
"It's, er… It's preset remote reprogramming of the battlesuit nanotech. We send a command signal to the bots that reassigns their function from defence and camouflage to, um, to a process of intromittent erasure."
"In English," said Ramsay.
"It's a self-destruct mechanism," Sam said.
"In layman's terms, yes."
"In anyone's terms."
"And the body," said Ramsay. "Anders's body. That gets eaten too."
"Superficially," said Patanjali. "Enough to make identification difficult, if not impossible. It's pretty brilliant, really. Don't you agree?" Their faces told him they didn't. "In a cold-hearted way. I mean, obviously, from a certain viewpoint it could seem kind of callous. But to repurpose the nanobots like that — inspired. They become like ants, submicroscopic ants, munching their way through their environment. Myrmidons were a band of mythical Greek soldiers, led by Achilles. It's in the Iliad. Their armour made them look like ants. Myrmex — that's Ancient Greek for ant. Hence the…"
He trailed off.
"This is a problem for you, isn't it?"
"Damn straight it's a problem," said Ramsay. "You haven't been wearing those battlesuits. We have. And all along there's been a self-destruct mechanism in there no one told us about?"
"You weren't told about it," said Cronus, "because it's intended to be used only under these precise circumstances, when a Titan dies and his or her suit is about to fall into enemy hands. And the protocol needs to be implemented right now, for Coeus. That is an order."
"Just hold on a moment here…" Ramsay began.
" Now, base," Cronus snapped. "We can discuss the ethics of all this another time, if we must, but the protocol has to be put into effect while Coeus's suit remains more or less intact. Should the Olympians start dismantling it, the command signal could fail. You know what to do."
This was directed at Patanjali, who immediately opened an onscreen window, tapped in a password, and waited for a prompt to appear.
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