The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  Hercules was, indeed, hitting the SUV with everything he had, and the chunky oversized car was rapidly getting beaten out of shape. Segments of bodywork flew off. The radiator grille fell. The headlamps popped out and dangled on their wires like enucleated eyeballs still attached to their optic nerves. Finally, with a grunt, Hercules clean-and-jerked the SUV off the ground and tossed it into the air. It came down in the centre of the road on its roof and lay there, crumpled, leaking oil and water.

  That was when Hercules noticed the cameraman and the reporter. He came straight over, cloak billowing out behind him. His face was flushed, his eyes bloodshot and swimmy. He reached for the camera. The cameraman shied away, the image veering shakily to one side.

  "Give me that," the Olympian growled. "Give me that fucking - that fucking thing, fucker."

  "Hey, I'm filming here," the cameraman said. "I'm allowed to film. This is a public space."

  "Give!" Hercules made another lunge for the camera, missing, his outstretched arm blurring from right to left.

  "Chuck, give it to him," hissed the reporter.

  "Freedom of the press," said the cameraman. The man behind the lens was, it seemed, braver than the man who usually stood in front. "In this country we have something called the Constitution. We have rights. We're allowed to shoot whatever we -"

  Hercules's third attempt to grab the camera was successful. The onscreen image swerved in all directions, now showing a section of kerb, now the sky, now someone's sneakers, before finally settling on an extreme close-up of the Olympian's own face. Every pore in his skin was visible. The pockmarks on his nose looked like lunar craters.

  "Rights?" he boomed, so loud that it overloaded the microphone and his voice crackled with distortion. "Hey! People out there! You hear this man? You think you have rights? Don't make me laugh. What about my right to walk down a street without some moron poking a camera at me? Huh? What about that? What about my right to let off steam and have a few drinks and chat up some nice piece of eromenos without some dick of a paparazzi intruding?"

  "Eromenos?" said Sam.

  "Boy lover," said Landesman.

  "I'm not paparazzi," the reporter protested. "I'm an accredited journalist with -"

  "Shut up, you cheap-suited media monkey," Hercules snapped. Spittle flecked the lens. "I'm talking here. Didn't your mother ever teach you to keep quiet and listen when your betters are talking? Now, where was I? Oh yes. Rights. Understand this, people of America and the rest of the world. You have no rights. Not while we're in charge. You used to have some, maybe, a few, in the early days after we took over. We started out treating you with respect - as much as we felt you deserved. We hoped you'd be wise enough, mature enough, to gladly and meekly accept what we were offering. But no-o-o, you objected, you resisted, you fought back, and that was when you forfeited your rights, any rights you thought you had. And now you're doing it once again, resisting. We thought you'd settled down but you haven't. You've started being treacherous, treasonous little savages again, and that means as far as we're concerned the gloves are off and the only right you have left now - hah, right, left, ha ha - the only right you have left is to bow your heads and do whatever the fuck we tell you to. Case in point: these two bottom-feeders."

  He swung the camera round to show the reporter, whose suit was a cheap designer knockoff, and the cameraman, scruffily but more honestly dressed in jeans, windcheater and Phillies cap. Both of them were very scared, but the cameraman was doing the better job of hiding it. He fixed Hercules with a hard stare.

  "See them?" the Olympian sneered. "These cogs in the media machine. They work for... Which channel do you work for?"

  The reporter told him.

  "Well," said Hercules, "I have a message for your employers, and for everyone watching. And it's this: do not harass us, do not question us, do not cast us in a bad light, do not challenge us - in short, do not fuck with us. Because this is what happens to those who do."

  The image juddered wildly, as though an earthquake had just struck. It broke up into green and white squares, then stuttered, blinking in and out of blackness. This was soundtracked by yells of pain, and thumps, and then some ghastly wet crunching noises.

  Finally normal transmission resumed. The camera had been set down on the ground, on its side. There was a spidery pattern of cracks across the lens. There were spatters of red on the lens as well. And lying within shot, slumped on the now-vertical sidewalk as though leaning against a wall, were the reporter and the cameraman. They were recognisable by their clothes only. Where they had once had heads, now they had collapsed, vaguely head-shaped messes. Their hair was matted with blood and dribbles of brain matter. Shards of skull poked out here and there. The slap-slap sound of Hercules's sandalled footfalls could be heard, diminishing in volume. Far off, a woman started screaming.

  Then, thankfully, someone back at the studio had the presence of mind to cut the live feed.

  Landesman, Lillicrap and Sam were silent. Stunned. Sickened.

  "My God," Landesman said at last. "That was... My God. Truly horrible. But looking on the bright side - and there is one, and we must look on it - Hercules's timing can't be faulted. What a godsend, no pun intended. He's just handed us a propaganda coup. Our second today. First the Agonides clip, now this. Nobody, seeing what we've just seen, can have any uncertainty any more that what the Titans are doing is right, that we're on the side of the angels. If anybody was hesitant about backing us before, they won't be now."

  "Popularity is all well and fine," said Sam. "I'd rather have the public on my side than against me. But it's hardly going to help us win the war, is it?"

  "We'll see, Sam," said Landesman. "If things continue to go as I hope they do... well, you never know. Public support might just make all the difference."

  32. THE MINOTAUR

  The Resistenza Contru-Diu Corsu, to be honest, did very little actual resisting but talked a good fight and had made enough of a nuisance of itself to warrant the Olympians' interest and earn their antipathy.

  That was principally on the strength of two incidents. The first took place during a diplomatic visit by Aphrodite to the island's capital Ajaccio, when the goddess of love came under fire from an RCDC member with an antiquated Kalashnikov. The sniper's accuracy was hampered by three things: the age of his rifle, the half bottle of cognac he had downed beforehand in order to steady his nerves, and the fact that, in his crosshairs, Aphrodite looked so lusciously, delectably beautiful that it seemed to him almost a crime to damage such magnificent female physical perfection in any way. All these factors conspired to make him miss her by a mile and instead wing his country's president and gravely wound the regional préfet, both of whom were sharing a podium with the Olympian as they bestowed on her the freedom of the island and a civic medal or some such meaningless official trinket.

  Immediately, Aphrodite spoke over the PA system, calling for calm and asking the would-be assassin to step forward and show himself. This the man did, because there were few who could resist the call of Aphrodite's voice or the love that she exuded. He left his rooftop vantage point and walked through the crowd of startled onlookers to the podium, where he knelt submissively before the Olympian, telling her over and over how much he loved her and how sorry he was for trying to kill her. Aphrodite then invited the people from the crowd to come up and hit him. One by one they complied, gladly, with beatific smiles and any hard objects that came to hand. It took them half an hour to beat the man to death, and he relished every minute of his slow capital punishment with a smile no less beatific.

  On the other occasion, Apollo dropped by with a view to hunting the indigenous Corsican red deer, an endangered species which he took closer to the brink of extinction by shooting great numbers of them in the Parc Naturel Régional with his bow and arrows. The RCDC, discovering a streak of conservationist concern within themselves that they'd never known they had, waxed indignant. To protect the poor deer they laced the nature reserve with tripwires atta
ched to grenades which were in turn attached to tree trunks. Apollo, however, was too sharp-sighted to fail to spot the tripwires, and decided to make a sport of splitting them from a range of 100 metres or more and detonating the grenades. A couple of the red deer also sprang the traps, inadvertently, which somewhat undercut the whole purpose of laying them in the first place. So much for the RCDC's new-found green credentials. So much, too, for a number of RCDC members. Apollo elected to remain a little longer in Corsica and to hunt much more interesting game. His tally, by the end of his stay, stood at 52 deer, 9 men, 2 women, and one child. Of the twelve humans he bagged, seven definitely belonged to the RCDC, three were suspected of belonging, one had strong ties to the resistance, and one, the child, was simply an innocent bystander who happened to stray into the path of an arrow. Apollo claimed he deeply regretted the death of the last, although he added, with some pride at his own prowess, that his shaft passed clean through the little girl's head, from ear to ear, and continued onward to kill its intended target. A shot in a million, and a quick, instant death that had barely left a mark on the kid. To look at her, lying on the ground, you'd have thought she had just fallen asleep.

  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, Miz
z 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?"