The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "If it doesn't finish me off altogether."

  "Quite. Death: the most irrevocable change of all." Landesman leaned back. "Very well, let's get to it then. No need to ask me twice. Back in the saddle and on with the hunt!"

  28. MONSTERCIDE

  Move fast, hit hard, get out quick.

  That was the Titans' mantra for the next phase of the campaign. Each act of monstercide had to be conducted at optimum speed. There was no room for lingering and no margin for error. The Olympians were on the alert now. Every attack could bring them running and therefore had to be as swift and clandestine as it was in the Titans' power to make it.

  Tellingly, all but one of the monsters still roved freely. The exception was Cerberus, Hera's pet, her triple-headed lapdog, who seldom left her side. The rest continued to skulk or rampage in set areas as before, unchecked, unabated. Zeus had not summoned them to the safety of Mount Olympus.

  That, according to Landesman, revealed two things about their adversaries' frame of mind. One: the Olympians were positive that their recent retaliation would have the desired effect. Two: the Olympians were overconfident, indeed complacent. Both of these were flaws to be taken advantage of.

  The Gulfstream covered huge distances, circum-navigating the globe. Ramsay joked that he wished he was collecting air miles. He'd have a free trip to the Bahamas by the end of all this jetsetting.

  Chisholm spelled Gray and Greene in the cockpit every now and then, so as to give the pilots a break. "Don't worry," he announced over the intercom the first time he took the controls. "I've chauffeured princes and presidents around the world. You're in safe hands. Now, would someone mind looking after my guide dog for a while?"

  Other than him and Ramsay, the team the Titans were fielding this time around consisted of Sam, Mahmoud, Harryhausen, and Hamel.

  In Japan, Sirens were at large. Successive Japanese prime ministers had been voicing opinions that were openly contrary to Pantheonic diktat. Successive Japanese prime ministers had been assassinated by the Olympians for voicing such opinions. Successive candidates for the post of Japanese prime minister had been voted in precisely because they promised to voice the same opinions as their predecessors. To be elected to the highest office in the National Diet these days was tantamount to signing your own death warrant.

  Still, there was no shortage of applicants. It was the collective will of the nation, apparently, that its supreme leader, its spokesperson on the world stage, should verbally bait the Olympians, however dire the consequences for him or her. Every three months or so there was yet another state funeral followed by yet another general election. A part, now, of the swearing-in of a new prime minister involved the formal donning of a Rising Sun bandanna, kamikaze-pilot-fashion, and a vow to give one's life for one's country - less an oath, more a promise. It would have been farcical, almost, if it hadn't been done with such utter solemnity and sincerity.

  The Sirens had been stationed in Japan much in the manner of an occupying force, there to dampen the country's ardour for self-sacrificial political insubordination. In that regard, though, the Olympians had miscalculated somewhat. The Sirens were a gaggle of gorgeous, partially feathered women who sang songs of such unspeakable loveliness that anyone who heard them was driven to commit an act of fatal self-harm. Any man, that is. Their song had no effect on women. Oestrogen or the absence of a Y-chromosome - biologists could not make up their minds which it was - rendered the fairer sex immune. To female ears, the Sirens' voices were just so much warble and twitter. To male ears, by contrast, they were an irresistible lure, and the message that permeated each note and phrase of their song was doom. Cut your wrists, overdose on prescription tranquillisers, take poison, hang yourself from a tree, put a gun in your mouth - the choices were many, the outcome always the same.

  The Sirens were, in other words, suicide-manufacturing machines. This, for many a Japanese male, many a young one in particular, made them an attractive proposition, something to seek out rather than steer clear of. The monsters drew two specific types of man to them - the melancholic type who saw glory in the idea of terminating his own life under the influence of a thing of great beauty, and the patriotic type who wished to demonstrate his complete self-effacing love of country without having to go through the rigmarole of taking part in electoral processes and rising to the top position and dying then.

  Song aside, the Sirens were pretty much defenceless, birds of prey who were also sitting ducks. The Titans tackled them in the old capital, Kyoto, low-lying city of temples and shrines, where a number of municipal parks had become designated Siren zones, places to visit only if you were keen to hear the Sirens sing for the first and last time. The city council had started charging admission to the parks, in the region of ¥200,000 per head, to cover the cost of removal of people's mortal remains. Someone, after all, had to pay for the women-only clean-up crews who went in twice daily, morning and evening, to zip corpses into bodybags and cart them out on stretchers.

  Under cover of darkness, a women-only clean-up crew of a different kind stole into all the Siren parks one after another in swift succession. With external audio gain on their helmets turned down to zero and thumping heavy metal piped over the comms link for good measure - just in case - Tethys, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Rhea carried out a series of surgical strikes. Muzzle suppressors were used to minimise gun noise. The night was long and harrowing. Had the Sirens not had downy feathers for hair, and a glossy pinnate covering on their arms and backs, it would have been very difficult, if not downright impossible, to kill them in cold blood like this. Up until now the monsters had been mostly animalistic and, more to the point, monstrous. The Sirens were, in essence, women. Killing them was, in essence, murder. And they were, of course, utterly ravishing to look at, these hara kiri canaries. Where their close kin the Harpies were demonic in appearance, these were angelic. Asleep, nesting in the bough of a tree or in a self-made bower amid some deftly trimmed ornamental shrubbery, they seemed innocuous and exquisitely fragile, something that should be cared for and protected, not ruthlessly exterminated.

  Sam managed to overcome her qualms. Given that she had helped take out the Sphinx, the Sirens' vaguely human aspect cut no ice with her. She knew what had to be done, and did it, and once she'd set the example, shown the other three the way, they found it easy enough to copy her. Each Siren perished in silence, unawares. By the time it came to despatch the last of them, all four Titans were hardened to the task and it felt much like wringing the neck of a chicken or putting down an enraged swan. A distasteful but necessary deed. How many deaths had the Sirens been responsible for? The total ran into the hundreds. This, then, was a reasonable and justifiable reckoning.

  The Gulfstream departed from Kansai International Airport in Osaka that same night, before the sun was up and well before the Sirens' bodies were discovered by suicide-seekers who had travelled far, some of them the length of the Japanese archipelago, had coughed up their park entrance fees, and were disappointed to have their plans for self-annihilation thwarted. (Kyoto city council did, incidentally, reimburse the ¥200,000 entrance fees, but only to the suicide-seekers who didn't, for form's sake, go ahead and take their own lives regardless.)

  The incumbent prime minister, Sayu Urasawa, went on national TV that very day to announce, with great pride, that the Sirens were no more. "We have been rid of a scourge in our midst," she crowed. "Death has been brought to the death-bringers. Down with the Olympians!" The inevitable upshot of this was that, within an hour, Urasawa herself was dead. Hermes teleported into a cabinet meeting at her official residence, the Kantei, teleported out again with Urasawa in his clutches, reappeared at the pinnacle of the Tokyo Tower, shoved the prime minister off, and was gone again before the screaming Urasawa had even hit the pavement a thousand feet below.

  29. THE GORGONS

  The Gulfstream flew south-west to the Malay Peninsula, passing Hong Kong en route.

  What was left of Hong Kong.

  The T
itans gazed out at the remnants of the city from the plane's starboard portholes. A few skeletal skyscrapers still stood, canted at angles like gravestones in an untended cemetery. The coastline was pitted with craters, many of them awash with seawater like small lagoons. Wrecked jumbo jets lay sprawled across the runways of the reclaimed-land airport. Houses high in the hills were hollow, roofless shells, overrun with vines and creepers.

  Here and there could be seen pockets of makeshift habitation - tents set up on streets in the central business district, clusters of junks and sampans moored in Victoria Harbour, shanty towns along the waterfront. Cooking fires sent up thin trails of smoke between the devastated buildings. Many survivors of the Obliteration still could not bear to leave Hong Kong - it would seem like abandoning the corpse of a loved one - and a number of non-residents had moved there, coming from as nearby as Kowloon and as far away as America, in a gesture of protest against the city's destroyers. Some had even set themselves the task of burying the dead, a huge undertaking. Mass ossuaries had been established in the basements of banks and financial services corporations. Vaults that had once been crammed with wealth and treasure were now gradually being filled with millions of sun-bleached bones.

  "Glad Fred's not with us," Ramsay said sombrely, as the shattered, humiliated city receded into the distance. "Imagine that was Chicago... Nah, doesn't bear thinking about."

  They landed at Singapore, at a freight airport where, in sweltering equatorial heat, the techs unloaded the TITAN suits and weapons into the back of a waiting hire truck. It had become a routine procedure by now. The battlesuits and weapons were brought out in locked steel flightcases embossed with the Daedalus Industries logo. Permits were checked by officials. Import duties were paid on the "product" contained in the flightcases. Bribes were also paid where required, and they almost always were required. That way, airport officials were disincentivised from opening the flightcases to make sure what was stated on the computer docket - components for keeping missile defence systems in basic working order - matched what actually lay inside. Then began the road journey to the site of enemy engagement.

  In Singapore itself, a strict nighttime curfew was in effect. This was because, after dark, the entire island city-state belonged to the Gorgons. Every evening at sundown the trio of snake-haired creatures would emerge from their lair, a pit they had dug for themselves at the Botanic Gardens on Tanglin Road, and wander the streets in a group, communicating with one another by means of hisses, their forked tongues flickering. Singaporeans lived in terror of them. Blinds were kept tightly drawn between dusk and daybreak, and only a fool would venture outdoors during that time. One look from a Gorgon, one moment's exposure to those slitted serpentine eyes, and...

  Well, the evidence of what would happen was all around, plain to see. On pavements, in parks, street corners, temple steps, everywhere - the statues. Statues of people, some cowering or shying away, others with their arms extended imploringly, still others frozen in the act of fleeing, looking over their shoulders. The statues appeared to be made of stone but in fact were composed of a carbon compound that had the ashy, powdery texture of pumice. Samples tested by scientists had shown that this substance was living tissue after it had been scorched by a sudden, massive burst of heat from the inside out, desiccated and hardened to a rocklike texture. The statues were the mortal remains of those who had been baked on the spot, instantaneously cooked somehow by a Gorgon's stare. To the locals they had become objects of superstition and dread. Living Singaporeans refused to touch them or, for that matter, move them or dispose of them. They simply walked around them, eyes averted, and hoped they themselves wouldn't share the same fate.

  Singapore's crime, for which the Gorgons were the punishment, was that it had been the venue for a failed attempt to overthrow the Olympians. A group of businesspeople, principally weapons manufacturers and oil sheiks, had got together, united by their disgust at the steep decline in profits that had come about as a result of Olympian policies on defence spending and renewable energy sources. This, the so-called Raffles Syndicate - named not after the fictional gentleman thief, as some literary-minded wags liked to suggest, but after the sumptuous colonial-era hotel where their conspiratorial meetings took place - had provided funding for a battalion of international paratrooper mercenaries to launch a direct assault on Mount Olympus.

  The raid had been well-intentioned, but doomed to disaster. In all, it had lasted a little under half an hour, from the moment the first mercenary had his heart clawed out in midair by a shrieking Harpy to the moment the final remaining mercenary died on the ground, choking on the spear which Artemis had plunged through his neck; and not once during that half an hour had the Olympians' stronghold been in danger of being breached. Nor had any Olympian suffered any injury beyond the odd bullet wound, which was well within the powers of their resident healer, Demeter, to cure.

  The members of the Raffles Syndicate had all, naturally, been tracked down and executed in various messy ways, and the Gorgons had ever since been teaching Singapore, and the world, a lesson - the lesson being it wasn't just wrong to plot against the Pantheon, it was wrong even to harbour those who would plot against the Pantheon.

  Nightfall. Six Titans fanned out through the Down-town Core, Singapore's oldest urbanised area and one of the Gorgons' preferred haunts. They moved in pairs along the deserted streets, Tethys with Mnemosyne, Phoebe with Rhea, Hyperion with Oceanus. The city's nocturnal stillness, combined with its immaculate cleanliness, was more than a little eerie. The place seemed more museum, or mausoleum, than municipality. It felt like a specimen of the modern world that had been isolated and preserved for future generations to admire. Adding to this impression were the statues, rough-featured but in all-too-real poses of horror and fear, caught in the pure amber glow of the streetlights. What a contrast they made with the statue of the city's founder Sir Stamford Raffles who stood on the east of the Singapore River, polymarble arms folded, looking out with monumental pride over all he surveyed.

  "Base - Tethys," Sam said, after the Titans had spent an hour quartering the Downtown Core, without sign of the Gorgons. "No luck so far. Suggest we widen our sweep."

  "Roger that," Landesman replied. Satellite bounce lent a faint echo to his voice. "Remember, if you spot one of them, for God's sake get away as fast as you can and take cover. Unlike the mythical Gorgons these ones don't need eye-to-eye contact. They just need to be able to see you."

  "And then they roast you," said Hyperion. "Does anyone else think that's just plain wack? These bitches being able to flash-fry you just by looking at you?"

  "I've known a couple of ladies in my time who could do that," Oceanus chipped in.

  Mnemosyne groaned. "And we're sharing open comms with a pair of Neanderthals."

  "Ah, you've just never been around real men before," said Hyperion.

  "Oh, that's right. Silly me. I should be grateful to be in the company of such prime specimens of macho manhood. In fact, just talking to you, hearing your butch voices, it's made me come in my trolleys."

  "Do any of you people even speak English?" Hyperion said. "I mean, 'trolleys'? What the hell does - ?"

  "Titans," Landesman cut in tersely, "need I remind you that the Gorgons appear to exhibit an advanced and refined form of pyrokinesis. They can superheat any object to a core temperature of two thousand degrees Fahrenheit or higher, as long as they have direct line of sight of it. I'd suggest, therefore, that you concentrate all your energies on looking for them, because if they see you first..."

  "Understood, base," said Sam. "Get that, everyone? Let's stow the banter and stay focused."

  "Snakes for hair, too," Hyperion muttered. "Not enough that they're three crazed Martha Stewarts who want to make biscuits out of you, but they gotta have snakes for hair as well."

  "Hyperion."

  "Stowing the banter, ma'am. Banter stowed."

  On they strode through the silent, pristine city, past malls where no night watchmen patrol
led any more, past terraced shophouses whose window displays weren't lit up because there was no point (nobody was about, out of hours, to stop and glance in), past a hospital whose emergency department was closed (woe betide you if you were taken ill at night in Singapore these days), and along tree-lined avenues such as Orchard Road where nothing stirred but the occasional gutter-hugging rat and the palm and angsana fronds simmering gently in the hot night breeze. Another hour elapsed. A bead of sweat trickled down Sam's back and she commanded the battlesuit to lower its inner temperature by a couple of degrees. Her visor HUD pinpointed the other five Titans' relative locations: Mnemosyne within 5 metres of her, Hyperion and Oceanus a couple of hundred metres north-east, Phoebe and Rhea roughly quarter of a kilometre due east. Each was represented by a dot of light, with a callsign marker attached and a cluster of characters displaying ever-shifting values of distance, vector and relative direction. It gave her a weird, heady sense of connectedness to see this data hovering in front of the streetscape before her, to know precisely where her fellow team-members were even when they were out of sight. It was a kind of technology-enabled omniscience. The battlesuits lent their wearers the abilities of gods. The Titans had yet to discover, though, whether the suits made them the equals of gods.

  That will come, she thought. This systematic, methodical killing of monsters was the warm-up to the main event, like the preliminary heats of a race that led to the finals. Useful practice for the Titans but also, according to Landesman, tactically important. The Olympians were now aware that somebody was coming for them. Arrogance and bluster would remain their outward response. Inwardly, however, might they not be feeling a certain amount of anxiety right now? The first prickings of doubt? Watching the ranks of their monsters getting whittled down, they might well have a sense that their position was being undermined, like people on a dais feeling the support struts beneath them being pulled away one by one. The Olympians' sturdy Olympus redoubt, that Acropolis-like structure with its palisades and battlements and its squadron of guardian Harpies, might be impregnable, but not so their hearts. Even the Olympians weren't immune to fear. This programme of monstercide was a propaganda tool as much as anything. For that reason alone, it was vital that the Titans continue to pursue it. Fear among the Pantheon could lead to discord, discord to disunity, disunity to a reduction in effectiveness. Which, as Landesman said, could only be a good thing.