The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "Even though you've had no field experience?"

  "I'll pick it up as I go. I'm a quick study."

  "Will the Titans take orders from you, though?"

  "They do already, to some extent. The only difference now will be I'll be right there beside them, not miles away. Sam, you can raise all the objections you like, but this isn't negotiable. This is just how it's going to be."

  "And when I come back after a week, what then?"

  "We shall figure out a way of meshing together seamlessly, you and I."

  "I've been doing OK on my own so far."

  "There's absolutely no slight intended here on your leadership qualities. Those have been all but impeccable. This is about taking the Titans to the next level. Our biggest battles lie ahead. I like to think that the addition of me to your number will strengthen your - our - effectiveness."

  "Well," said Sam frostily, "you're the boss."

  "Indeed I am."

  "And Darren Pugh," she said. "Would I be wrong in thinking he was never going to be Cronus? It was never likely?"

  "Ah, Pugh. Yes. He was more of a... Do you know the word libation?"

  "Long word for a drink. Popular with pompous pub landlords and real-ale bores."

  "Bit more than that. It's an offering. In classical times, before wine was served at a feast some of it would be poured out onto the ground, to appease the gods. The same at sacrifices, so that the gods would be propitiated and whatever the sacrifice was being made in aid of would be granted. Now I of course don't believe in any of that nonsense literally, but I thought it would be a nice idea - appropriate - if in this classically-based enterprise of mine I followed the precedent. Instead of a wine libation for good luck, a human libation. One of you. One I could afford to lose, even wanted to lose. I selected Pugh as the twelfth invitee secure in the knowledge, or let's at least say ninety-nine per cent certain, that he would back out before we'd even got going. He didn't have the incentive or the temperament to commit to the cause. And sure enough, he did exactly as anticipated. In addition, I'd been havering somewhat over whether I ought to enrol myself as a Titan. I was treating Pugh as a kind of test of fate. If he baulked, that would confirm that I was meant to be Cronus. And so he did, and so I was."

  "A rigged test. You chose him mainly because you knew he wouldn't sign up."

  "A test weighted in my favour, perhaps. But then it never hurts to give fate a little helping hand every now and then. That's something I've learned in business over the years. Good fortune is a case of playing the odds, and only an idiot plays poor odds."

  "And Pugh was also there to consolidate the rest of us," Sam said. "He helped us make up our minds, by being such a wanker. We thought, Let's not be like him. Let's do the opposite of what he's done."

  Landesman raised a sage eyebrow. "Such an accusation! Now would I do a thing like that? Deliberately expose you all to someone whose actions would, through contrasting example, lend impetus and validity to your actions?"

  Sam stood. "All right, Mr Landesman. This is your show. You can run it however you like. I will prove you wrong about the Minotaur, though. And I'll do it within a week easily.

  "And don't think I don't realise that taking away my prefect's badge is just another way of playing me. Now the pressure's on and I'll be twice as determined to get the Minotaur onside. You're an arch manipulator, and that's fine. I just want you to know I know I'm being manipulated, and I'm only going along with it because it serves my purpose."

  Landesman acknowledged this. "For what it's worth," he said, "I'd never make anyone do anything they didn't already -"

  He broke off. Sam was half out the door and, he could tell by the tension in her upper body, poised to bang it shut behind her as hard as she could.

  "Please!" he cried. Then, more softly, and imploringly: "Please. Don't."

  "Don't...?"

  "Slam it. There's nothing I can't abide more than a door being slammed. Alexander, my son... Towards the end, that was all he ever seemed to do - slam doors on me. It was the soundtrack to the latter years of our relationship, like drumbeats getting faster and faster, until one day the front door slammed, loudest of all, and that was that. He left, never to return. So I... I have a thing about it. It's painful not only on the ears, and I'd appreciate it if you... well, didn't."

  Sam was tempted.

  But then she wasn't some stroppy, spoiled rich kid with parental-neglect issues, was she?

  She departed quietly; closed the door gently.

  From the other side came a "Thank you!" and there was something about it that made Sam pause. The tone was ever so slightly smug.

  She couldn't help wondering: had she just been manipulated again?

  37. UNARMED

  Suited up, Sam prepared to enter the pen. In one hand she held an enamel pail full of pieces of raw chicken; in the other, one full of corncobs. Nobody had any idea what the Minotaur ate, so she was hedging her bets. The Minotaur might be a ruminant, in common with all bovines, but its aggressive nature suggested carnivorousness. One thing she was sure of: she wasn't going to offer it beefsteak, as Barrington had proposed. That would be too close to cannibalism for comfort.

  Mahmoud, also battlesuited, stood by the wheel handle that operated the door.

  "There was quite a bit of mooing and thumping around in there just before you turned up," she told Sam. "Things have quietened down, but still, you should be careful."

  "I will be," Sam replied. "And so should you. Close that door on me the second I'm in, and then get well clear. I may have to come back out in a hurry."

  "Got you. Best of luck, duck."

  McCann had fitted the door with a disabling system, to prevent it being opened by means of the matching wheel handle on the inside. Whether the Minotaur was intelligent and dextrous enough to work the handle was unclear, but no chances were being taken. Mahmoud hit the lever that re-engaged the lock mechanism, then grasped the wheel and began rotating. The door groaned open. Sam heard the Minotaur grunt and stir inside the pen.

  She stepped through. The door whumped shut behind her.

  Smells hit her: Minotaur musk, urine, dung.

  The monster itself was crouched in a corner, surveying her intently. It rose to its feet. A full height, its horns scraped the ceiling. It lowed with unmistakable hostility. It knew this human. Remembered her.

  "Food," Sam said in as soothing a voice as she could muster. "Here. I've brought you food."

  The Minotaur eyed the pails as she set them down on the floor. She searched for a flash of recognition, comprehension, on its face. Saw none.

  "Eat." She mimed lifting food to her mouth. "Mmmm. Tastes good." She smacked her lips. "Yummy."

  Performing this babytalk act made her feel an idiot. The Minotaur's blank look made the feeling worse.

  The monster shook its head, as though pestered by a gnat.

  Then it lowered its horns.

  Oh shit.

  It came, at speed, across the floor.

  Sam, at greater speed, feinted one way, then jinked the other.

  The Minotaur collided full-tilt, head-first, with the wall where she had been standing a split second earlier. It reeled backwards, crashing over onto the pails and scattering chicken meat and corncobs.

  While the monster lay stunned, Sam made her exit.

  She gave the Minotaur an hour to calm down. Then she nerved herself to re-enter the pen. She would be presenting Landesman with a tame beast even if it killed her.

  "Here we go again," said Mahmoud. "Don't forget your matador cape."

  This time the Minotaur was lying in wait. It sprang as soon as Sam crossed the threshold, ramming her sidelong, sending her sprawling. She scrambled to her feet and met the monster with a reciprocal attack, thrusting it backward with her shoulder until it struck a wall. She left the Minotaur winded, heaving for breath, as she hurried out the door a second time.

  "This is not working," she confessed to Mahmoud, peeling off a slab of chicken breast
that had got stuck to her arm.

  "You don't say."

  "The Minotaur associates me with hurting it. I can't win its trust as long as it looks at me and thinks of pain."

  "Why don't I try going in? It mightn't remember me."

  "You sure? You'd be prepared to do that?"

  Mahmoud went in. There was a scuffle. She came out again, Sam swinging the door shut just in time before the Minotaur could follow. The Minotaur hammered on the inside of the door, making it boom like a gong.

  "OK, well, we're definitely not at home to Mr Happy this afternoon," Mahmoud said. "And, by the way, you didn't tell me that room's minging in there. Little warning please, next time I'm about to walk straight into a farmyard."

  Sam gave the Minotaur another couple of hours to settle itself. Then she said to Mahmoud, "It's the suits."

  "What about the suits?"

  "The Minotaur sees them and knows we're the enemy."

  "So?"

  "So I have to go in without my suit on."

  "D'you know, I knew you were going to say that, and then I thought, No, she'd never. Nobody would be that daft."

  "It's the only way. In my suit, I'm the bad guy."

  "And without your suit, you're toast," Mahmoud said. "You're not doing this, Sam. I won't let you. Talk about suicidal!"

  "If it sees me as a person, it might just hold off from attacking."

  "Why? Persons are what it attacks. That's what it does."

  "Not if I make it clear I don't pose a threat."

  "Your mind's made up, isn't it? OK, what if I go in with you then, with the coilgun, just in case."

  "A gun's as bad as a battlesuit," said Sam. "This needs to be me, alone, suitless, unarmed."

  "Unarmed as in the Minotaur's going to rip your ruddy arms out of their sockets."

  "I don't think so. I think I'll be all right."

  "Weren't those Julius Caesar's famous last words as he set off for the Forum? 'I'll be all right'?"

  "Can you trust me on this?"

  "No. But yes. If you say I must."

  "I do."

  Sam felt naked, not simply suitless, as she approached the pen for the third time. She felt as terrified as - no, more than terrified than - she'd felt when setting out on her first op, against the Hydra. Ramsay would pitch a fit if he knew what she was up to. She had absolutely no protection here. The Minotaur could finish her off in a heartbeat. Standing before the door she experienced a moment of wooziness followed by a moment of sheer wanton panic. What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? It was a supreme effort to turn to Mahmoud and give her the nod to open the door. It was an even greater effort to make her feet move one in front of the other and walk into the pen. And when the door closed behind her, her fear became a visceral thing, a cold relentess clenching of the gut.

  The Minotaur fixed its crimson gaze on her, and Sam knew she was dead.

  38. BULLS AND BULLIES

  "I'm empty-handed," she told the monster. Her voice seemed to come from a distance, from elsewhere, not her own mouth. "See? No battlesuit. No weaponry. Nothing. Just me. Because I know you don't want to hurt me. I know there's intelligence somewhere in there, there's a mind that knows that hurting and killing is not what you want to do."

  She doubted the Minotaur understood a word, but what she was saying didn't matter so much as how it was said. She was adopting as soft and unthreatening a tone as possible, and her whole manner was designed to give the monster no sense of antagonism or loathing. She held her head down and her hands open, palms out. This was the way she'd been taught in the Met to deal with hostile behaviour. Meet it with reasonableness, and let just enough of your fear show through that the other person knew you were intimidated but not to the point of quivering-jelly terror. Bullies and lunatics thrived on other people's terror. It was their drug, and the trick was to give them a tincture of it, enough to keep them happy but nowhere near enough to ignite a narcotic frenzy.

  She kept talking, even as the Minotaur began to stalk closer to her. She kept talking because there was nothing else she could do.

  "Were you a man once? Before you became a man-bull? Did someone turn you into this? Did they take you and do something to you that made you a monster? Did they do it against your will? I think maybe they did. And then they trained you like a fighting dog. They used threats and brutality to make you violent. I think you used to be ordinary, a human being like me, and you can remember that. From time to time the memory of what you were floats to the surface, and you realise what you've become, and it causes you distress. I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry, too, that I hurt you back in Corsica. There's so much pain in your life, and I only added to it. I want to make up for that. I want to help."

  The Minotaur continued to close in on her, but it was moving slowly. It appeared to be listening. And it hadn't attacked her yet, which was definitely something. Definitely progress.

  "Look." She bent and picked up a corncob. "Food." She proffered it. "This is for you, if you want. You must be hungry. If it's not what you like, I can get something else. Water too. I bet you're thirsty. I could fetch a nice big bowl of water."

  A flicker in those red eyes. A glimmer. A spark?

  "I'm not your enemy. I could be your friend, if you'd like."

  The Minotaur loomed over her. For several moments - very long moments - Sam could see some kind of struggle going on within it. A part was telling it to crush her like a bug. Another part was telling it not to.

  Then, with a snort, the monster slapped her hand aside. The corncob went flying, and Sam bit back a yelp of shock and pain.

  The Minotaur spun round and strode off to a far corner, where it hunkered down with its back to her.

  Sam's hand throbbed.

  But the Minotaur had held back, she knew. It could easily have shattered every bone in her hand and hadn't.

  The monster had just given her a message.

  Not corncobs. Something else.

  39. NON-ACROBATIC

  Her hand was numb as she entered the pen yet again. Puffy, too, the back of it starting to swell up in a lovely sunset-coloured bruise.

  She placed a plastic sink bucket brimming with water on the floor and a bale of hay beside it. The Minotaur studied both items from afar. Then up the monster got and over it came, shambling across the room. It bent to the bucket first and slurped up water sloppily. Then it turned to the hay bale. After a moment's contemplation, fleshy nostrils flaring, it kicked the bale aside, then urinated on it for good measure.

  "OK, OK, I get it, I can take a hint," said Sam.

  She returned with a selection of raw vegetables. These, to her relief, met with the Minotaur's approval. It fell on them greedily, munching down handful after handful.

  Next she tried some fruit, and that, too, found favour.

  "Well, we've established that it's a veggie," she said to Mahmoud at the end of the day, as they headed off to get some food for themselves. "Might make life easier. Veggies are peace-loving hippy types after all, aren't they?"

  "Except for that Hitler bloke. I've heard he had a bit of a nasty streak."

  "I think it was missing a testicle that made him that way."

  "That certainly isn't the Minotaur's problem," Mahmoud said with a giggle. "I mean, ruddy 'eck! Have you seen the size of its you-know-whats?"

  "Can't say I noticed," Sam said.

  A sly look came over the other woman. "Probably just me then. Maybe if I'd been getting some action lately, I wouldn't have noticed either."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Oh come on, Sam. Don't play dumb."

  Sam glance furtively ahead and behind. The corridor they were in was empty. She lowered her voice anyway. "How did you know?"

  "I didn't," said Mahmoud, gloating. "'Til now. All I had was a hunch, which you've just gone and confirmed."

  "You cow."

  "And you did come to our room very late last night. Not that I blame you, mind. Rick's lush. Not my type, b
ut still lush."

  "You can't tell anyone."

  "I won't. Scout's honour. So, when did it start? Corsica, I'm guessing. That's when the flirting stopped between you."

  "Flirting? We were flirting?"

  "You may not have realised it but you were. Even when you were in a grump with each other and not talking, that was a kind a flirting. And now you're both so formal around each other in public, there just has to be something else going on."

  "Does anyone else suspect, do you know?"

  "Not as far as I'm aware. What's the problem? There's nothing wrong with him and you hooking up. Why do you need to keep it a secret?"

  "I don't know. I just do. I think it would look bad, the team leader sleeping with one of the team."

  "Or maybe, if nobody else knows, you can pretend it's not happening."

  "Why would I want to do that?" Sam asked stiffly.

  "Because you had someone once," Mahmoud replied. "You've never talked about him but I know you did. He was The One, and you don't want to admit to yourself that anybody could ever replace him. So it's arm's length for poor old Rick, and probably for every other man you're with from now on."

  There was flint in Sam's voice. "Bollocks. That's bollocks."

  "Is it?"

  "You know nothing, Zaina. Nothing."

  Mahmoud understood she had overstepped the mark. There were some truths Sam wasn't prepared to hear.

  "No, of course," she said, mollifying. "My mistake. So, er..." She changed the subject clumsily. "More Minotaur tomorrow, then?"

  "Yes."

  "Pretty soon you'll have that thing eating out of your hand."

  Sam decided to take this literally, as an inspiration and a challenge. The next morning she brought in a single apple, which she held out to the monster. The Minotaur sniffed suspiciously, reached for the apple, then withdrew its hand. Sam offered the fruit again, telling the Minotaur there was nothing wrong with it, it was delicious. The Minotaur still wouldn't take it. Finally Sam took a bite out of the apple herself to prove it was safe. The Minotaur, letting out short, stertorous breaths, watched her chew. Then, abruptly, it snatched the bitten apple off her and retreated with it to its favourite corner of the pen.