New Labour number three was a somewhat controversial one. Hephaestus had fashioned a statue of none other than Zeus himself, 112 feet tall, one foot taller than the Statue of Liberty, and similarly made of copper. Hercules helped hoist the Zeus statue into place on a plinth on Governors Island so that it gazed across the Upper Bay towards Manhattan and dominated the view southwest from Battery Park much as the Statue of Liberty did. Naturally, plenty of New Yorkers grumbled. They all knew what the Statue of Liberty symbolised. What did the statue of Zeus stand for? Some, however - people who were perhaps of a more sentimental outlook - felt that after all these years of solitary spinsterhood it was high time ol' Lady Liberty had a mate.
Hercules's fourth New Labour was unplanned and impromptu, and occurred just as he'd completed the third. One of the Staten Island Ferry boats got into difficulties coming in to dock at Manhattan. The captain would later profess himself mystified as to what happened. He'd made the back-and-forth trip countless times and thought he knew the tides and currents in the bay intimately. He could have berthed that boat blindfolded. But then a sudden, inexplicable and very powerful rip caught the ferry, twisted her round and began pushing her sideways towards the pier at great speed. Nothing the captain could do would impede her progress or correct the profound list to starboard she had developed. Two likely outcomes awaited: either the ferry would hit the pier broad abeam, crushing dockworkers and possibly holing herself and sinking, or she would roll over and capsize. Neither was, to say the least, desirable.
Then, salvation.
It came in the form of Hercules, who had just alighted from a coastguard motor launch and who now leapt into action, bracing himself between the ferry's hull and the pier. With his immense strength he halted the boat, staved off a collision, and averted disaster. A couple of hundred commuters cheered and the captain hooted his foghorn in appreciation. Hercules took a bow - hero of the hour.
That night, in a comedy club just off Times Square, a young rising star of the circuit made an observation that drew boos and jeers and caused a number of his audience to walk out in high dudgeon. What if, he mused, the ferry "accident" hadn't been accidental? What if Poseidon had been lurking somewhere on the sidelines and had created the freak current that imperilled the boat? What if, in other words, the whole event had been staged? A put-up job?
But you didn't say such a thing, not so soon after a near-calamity and not when your audience was made up of locals who were becoming increasingly enamoured of Hercules and were inclined to forgive him for his past misdemeanours. You might think it, but you certainly didn't say it. Or, if you were going to say it and you were in a comedy club, you should at least try to make a joke out of it.
New Labour number five seemed trivial by comparison with the previous one: laying the foundation stone for a new shopping mall in Rockaway. A half-ton foundation stone, admittedly, the hefting and placing of which by one man, unaided by machinery, was no mean feat. But still, after he had saved all those lives, somewhat underwhelming.
The sixth New Labour was begun but never finished.
43. OSCILLO-KNIVES
They were digging up the roads around Gramercy Park. They'd been digging them up for weeks. They dug them up day and night, night and day. Resurfacing was in progress. Soon there would be new silk-smooth asphalt. But in the meantime, as the stressed, bleary-eyed residents of the area knew all too well, there was digging-up. Jackhammers clank-clattering away well into the small hours, interspersed with truck-reversing warning klaxons and the sound of workmen hollering. Arc-lights that glared at the dark and made it go away. Continuous racket and hassle, meaning no sleep in the city that never sleeps.
Hercules came one evening to help speed things along. He stamped on the old asphalt, breaking it away in chunks from the layer of Portland cement concrete below, and then he tossed the chunks into skips to be carted off at a later date. Workmen leaned on their idle tools and were duly impressed, although their union representative did put in a call to his boss, the general president of the local Teamsters chapter, just to check whether Hercules's voluntary contribution to the project would affect his men's overtime bonuses. He was told that the mayor had promised it wouldn't.
The Titans sprang their ambush just as Hercules was prising up a particularly sizeable lump of asphalt. The Olympian's hands were full. He was preoccupied. A black-armoured figured zoomed in at blazing speed, a shadow in the arc-lights, and Hercules stumbled, dropping his burden. He cursed, and noticed that his arm hurt. He looked down and saw a gash in the bare skin of his right biceps, a wound that widened before his very eyes, exposing subcutaneous fat, then raw muscle, and then the shiny whiteness of bone.
Hercules roared, as much in indignation as pain. His biceps! His big, beautiful biceps! Ruined! He was proud of his physique. He knew how impressive his body looked. Many a young man had openly admired Hercules's naked self, gasped at those abs, run fascinated fingertips over those quads, and spent a long time in close-up, salivating appreciation of those fine dimpled glutes. But of his biceps muscles Hercules was particularly fond. They were superbly defined and, he thought, defined him superbly.
And now, somehow, one of them had been slashed through to the bone, all but cleaved in two.
Blood came, welling up like oil from the desert, filling the wound and brimming over.
"Hey big guy, you OK?" one of the workmen asked.
"I don't know," said Hercules. His brain was fuddled. He had no idea what was going on.
Then a shadow flitted towards him. A human figure. Something in its hand.
This time Hercules actually heard the wound being inflicted - heard the sound of his own skin being split, his own flesh being parted, a wet hiss, a slick unzipping of living tissue. It was presaged by a brief hum, which he had no way of identifying as the noise of an oscillo-knife, a Landesman-devised weapon whose razor-sharp 10-inch ceramic blade was given additional cutting power by means of 3,000-Hertz micro-pulses generated by a compact vibrational unit in the hilt. To this knife, any substance up to and including solid concrete was butter. Flesh, even the extraordinarily dense and durable bodily tissue of the godling, presented no obstacle.
The second wound was to Hercules's left flank, just below the ribs. A third caught him on the calf, narrowly missing severing his Achilles tendon. The shadow figures were coming in from all directions. They criss-crossed him like cars around a police officer directing traffic at an intersection. His back was raked. His left pectoral was sliced. Hercules turned this way and that, snarling spittle and spite.
"Slow down, you fuckers!" he railed. "Slow down so I can see you! Stop and fight like men!"
He got his wish.
One of the shadows decelerated to a halt in front of him, going from vague blur to solid three-dimensionality. Hercules saw a man sheathed in protective gear, helmed, visored, with a pump-action shotgun in his hands.
"Who," he growled, "the fuck are you?"
The armoured man pursed his lips as though in sympathy. "Bleeding pretty badly there, mate," he said in an Australian accent. "Of course, it's nothing Demeter couldn't fix. Only, your healer Sheila's not going to get here in time."
Hercules eyed the shotgun contemptuously. "You can't kill me with that."
"Reckon? Maybe, maybe not. But I bet this'll hurt heaps."
The shotgun belched. The skin was flayed from Hercules's right trapezius. The Olympian staggered but stayed upright. He was dimly aware of the workmen, who only moments earlier had been looking on with pleasure as he did their job for them, running away now as fast as they could, hightailing it out of there, ditching their hardhats and high-viz vests to lighten the load.
Another shotgun round shredded Hercules's other, treasured biceps.
"I'll kill you," he snarled at his assailant. "Fucking strangle you with my bare hands until your head pops off like a champagne cork."
"Vivid image," said the Australian. "Shame neither of your arms is working properly any more."
&nbs
p; "Then I'll chew your head off with my teeth."
"Yeah, yeah. I had a brother, you know. Malcolm was his name. Malc."
"So?"
"Lived in Sydney. You killed him with a car. You don't even know you did, but you did."
"Do you think I care?"
"I think you do now."
Hercules's laugh was a caustic croak. "All you mortals are so feeble, so frail. You're like strands of spun sugar, and I am a hammer. I break you. It can't be helped. I brush past you and you crumble. I'm used to it. So should you be."
"'I break you'? This from the fella who's being cut to ribbons."
"Even like this," Hercules said, "I can pulverise you."
"Come on then, you big beardy shirt-lifter. Come and have a go."
The Olympian let out an enraged "Gnaaarrrhhh!" and lurched forwards as emphatically as his mutilated body would allow - which wasn't a lot. He was hit by yet another shotgun round, he had no clear sense where, he hurt all over so one further source of pain did not much make of a difference, it was one amongst a chorus of screaming voices - and then his target vanished from view.
After that, Hercules found himself on his knees in the broken roadway. He was howling in helpless fury, a baited bear hounded by dogs. The black-clad figures swooped in again, again, again, cutting, cutting. He was being made an example of. He was being made to suffer. Crucified. Tears sprang to his eyes. The injustice of it. His blood soaked the shattered asphalt around him. Genteel Gramercy Park had a new sound to keep it awake, the keening wail of a beleaguered, dying demigod.
And then one final, muffled shotgun blast brought hush.
44. AMBUSHING THE AMBUSHERS
Shortly before the op commenced, the latest mythoporn extravaganza showing on Blue Eros came to a climax. Perve-seus And His Winged Stallion Poke-ass-horse exhaustively documented the sexual permutations that could be achieved between man and equine, and in one scene extended the range by having the pair copulate while in flight, although cheaply rendered special effects and the patently fake pair of wings tacked onto the horse's back somewhat diminished the boundary-stretching majesty of the moment.
The movie was playing on one screen in mission control at Bleaney while the other screens were dedicated to the visor-cam feeds from the five Titans who were lying in wait in various places of concealment all round the site of the roadwork. Ramsay was trying to pay attention to the op-in-progress but kept finding himself drawn to the filmic bestiality, then repelled by it, then drawn, then repelled, over and over. His expression was at times so incredulous that his face looked as if it was melting and sliding downwards.
"Fuck," he breathed as the final credits rolled and, in yet another Pyrrhic victory for low-budget CGI, Perve-seus and mount soared off unconvincingly into the sunset. "I mean, Jesus. That was some sick, sick shit."
"I don't know, looked like true love to me," said Patanjali. "Of course, if you were that offended, Rick, you could always have asked me to change channels."
"I guess I thought I was broadening my horizons or some such, but now all I've got is a vision of a man drinking horse spunk stuck in my head."
"All right, quiet, people," said Sam. "It's started."
Much of the visor imagery was an unintelligible muddle, the Titans travelling too fast and their motion too shaky for the cameras to cope with. Time and again there were glimpses of Hercules flitting in and out of view at the corner of a screen as everybody took their turns with their oscillo-knives, Coeus then Phoebe then Rhea then Cronus, in a well-choreographed sequence. Iapetus had his moment of face-to-face confrontation, delivering shotgun rounds to Hercules's shoulder, arm and finally groin, and then the darting knife attacks resumed. The Titans were whittling the Olympian down. It was the only way to tackle an opponent so physically powerful - swift harrying strikes that gradually and increasingly disabled, like fighter planes strafing a dreadnought. Hercules tried to lash out at his assailants. On several occasions his blows nearly connected, but he was slowed down and made clumsy by the knife slashes, hamstrung, and he was flailing rather than fighting, and anyway at full speed the Titans were all but unhittable targets.
At last he was entirely helpless. On his knees, still somehow upright, but sagging. His lion-skin cloak tattered and dripping with blood. Unable to lift his limbs. Scarcely able to hold his head up. Once more he became a steady central object in Iapetus's visor-cam, as Barrington approached him, shotgun to the fore.
"Sorry now, you lousy mongrel?"
Hercules's brimming eyes suggested he was, if only for himself. The tears mingled with the blood spatters on his cheeks, turning from clear to pink as they trickled down.
"The other... Olympians," he gasped. "My family. They... will kill you. All... of you."
"Maybe," said Iapetus. "But you won't be around to see it."
He lodged the end of the shotgun barrel between Hercules's teeth.
"I'd ask if you have any last requests, Herc," he said, "but I can see you've got a gobful. Just the way you like it."
"Do it, Dez," Sam muttered, off-mic. "Enough tormenting. Get it over with."
"My brother was worth a hundred of you," Iapetus declared, and squeezed the trigger.
Hercules's cheeks were lit up from within like a jack-o'-lantern. Then his face seemed to collapse in on itself. His eyes bulged dumbly. His body slumped.
"There you go, Malc," Iapetus said softly. "She'll be right. Rest easy, mate."
The other four Titans joined him beside Hercules's lifeless body.
"Good work, one and all," said Cronus. "Iapetus, I trust you're pleased."
"Ripper, boss. Couldn't be happier."
"Then we should think about making tracks." Cronus's visor-cam viewpoint swept from one end of the street to the other. The roadway was deserted, as were the sidewalks, but faces were visible in almost every lit window overlooking the scene. "Before we attract any more attention."
"Fair go."
"We rendezvous at -"
"All Titans." This was Sam, into the mic. "Look north. I think I just saw..."
The visor-cam images all swung in the same direction.
All showed that something was coming.
A man.
Fast as a car.
Sam had spotted him appearing round the corner at the far end of the street, just as Cronus had been turning to look the other way. Cronus had missed him but she hadn't.
Loincloth. Winged sandals. Winged metal helmet. Staff with a pair of snakes wrapped around it.
Hermes, brandishing his caduceus.
None of the Titans had time to move, or even to cry out.
Then the visor-cam image from Coeus spun, showing brown night-time city sky, buildings, ground, sky, buildings, ground, until it finally settled on just sky, with blobs superimposed on it, splashes of something ink-dark and wet...
"Scheisse," Phoebe hissed. "Sein Kopf. Sein verdammter Kopf!"
"Go!" Sam yelled.
"His head..." said Iapetus, numb, aghast. "Clean off."
"Go!" Sam repeated. "He'll be coming back for another of you. It is a trap. Go! Split up! Run! As fast as you bloody can - run!"
45. RUN
The four Titans scattered, Iapetus northward, Cronus, Phoebe and Rhea west. At the first intersection they came to, Cronus and Phoebe continued west while Rhea turned south. All four of them used road as well as sidewalk, slaloming between people and cars, going wherever a gap presented itself. Pedestrians yelled in protest as they were accidentally bumped into or barged aside. Drivers slammed on the brakes and honked their horns as black-clad figures shot by in front of them. Taillights flashed. Headlights flashed. Some very ripe language erupted in each Titan's wake, as if they were farmers sowing quick-sprouting seeds of profanity. For every person who was alarmed or startled to see an armoured, paramilitary-looking figure rushing past at astonishing speed, there were ten who were simply annoyed or indignant. "Hey, asshole, go shoot your goddamn sci-fi movie somewhere else!" "Extreme sports is California,
dude!" "Fuck you, buddy!"
New York.
"Where is he?" Cronus yelled. "Where's Hermes now?"
"No idea," Iapetus replied. "Bastard's got to be chasing one of us."
"Somebody look over their shoulder."
"Not me, mate. Too busy running. At this speed I've got to concentrate on where I'm going, or - shit! See? Nearly hit a mailbox just talking to you."
"Peripheral expansion mode," said Sam. "All of you."
"It's even harder to run in a straight line when that's on," said Rhea.
"Just do it. Keep looking forwards, blinker out the rest. I'll be the eyes in the back of your head."
One after another the visor-cam images jumped into warped widescreen. Buildings on either side ballooned from the vanishing point then tapered off again to the edges. Parked vehicles, railings, front doorsteps, shop windows, passers-by - everything swelled and shrank away as though viewed through a crystal ball travelling rapidly a few feet off the ground.
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...
The Age Of Zeus Page 25