She was about to turn back to Ramsay and start unbuckling his battlesuit straps. He was ready to do the same for her.
Then her visor display registered a fellow Titan, Theia, coming in at a fast lick from behind Aphrodite. She flicked a glance in that direction and saw only a vague outline of a human being, a shimmer of white that mimicked the stronghold's pale stone and the mist. Aphrodite saw nothing at all. Heard nothing either. She was focused on her pair of thralls, the couple who were about to butcher each other in her name. Theia marched smartly up and placed the business end of the pistol against the back of the Olympian's head, pointed at her brain stem, execution-style. There was a burst of light, a muffled report, and one side of Aphrodite's faced distended outwards. An eye bulged. Her flawless beauty was gone in an instant, all symmetry lost. She opened her mouth and blood frothed out over those plushly perfect lips. Her long legs gave way and she crumpled, head lolling back. As she hit the ground, Theia shot her again. And then, just to be sure, once more.
"Witch," she said. She switched out of camouflage mode, materialising as her full, solid self. "Jezebel. The lake of fire for all eternity. How's that feel?"
All at once, everything that had boiled up inside Sam simmered down again. She was left feeling foolish and ashamed, as in the aftermath of a one night stand she knew she should never have had, that same remorse only magnified a hundredfold. She felt bereft, too, as though she'd lost something unutterably precious, a certainty she normally never had. She assumed Ramsay was experiencing a similar degree of embarrassment and ruefulness. Through their tinted visors neither of them could quite meet the other's gaze.
"Now, are you going to kill Hephaestus or what?" Theia said. "'Cause that huge walking pile of trash is coming right this way."
Talos was, indeed, stomping towards them. It moved with obvious purposefulness, not pausing to bother with any of the soldiers who got in its way. Sam glanced in Hephaestus's direction and saw that the Olympian had emerged into the open, at the top of the temple steps, and that his face was a tangle of grief. Tears coursed down his cheeks.
"My wife!" he keened. "Aphrodite! Aphrodiiiteee!"
"Hyperion," Sam said, "for fuck's sake...!"
Hyperion snapped the butt of the coilgun into the crook of his shoulder. The metal giant was mere yards away. Theia was already retreating from it. Its shadow loomed over the Titans, its faceless head hazed in the mist. One hand rose, pivoting on its wrist so that the excavator bucket was turned upside down and became an immense hatchet, a toothed guillotine.
"Shoot him!" Sam cried. "Just bloody well shoo-"
The coilgun snap-crackle-spat. Hephaestus was hit dead centre of his body mass. The bullet punched a hole through him the size of a teacup saucer. The kinetic energy of the impact was such that the Olympian was thrown ten feet through the air, flying backward as though he was as light as a scarecrow. He struck one column of his temple, rebounded off it at an angle and struck the next column along, leaving a gory splash on both. His corpse rolled floppily down the steps, fetching up not far from his late wife, near enough that his outstretched hand was almost touching hers.
At the same time Talos halted in its tracks. For a few seconds it looked as though the metal giant would stay like that, frozen in the act of bringing its hand down on the Titans. Then the static figure began to teeter. Countless sharp edges screeched against one another as its upper half canted forwards and its legs bent at the knees. Off-balance, and without Hephaestus to animate it, it could no longer support itself. It toppled, plunging straight toward Hyperion and Sam. Theia cried out in alarm, but Sam was already moving, and she had Hyperion by the scruff of the neck, one hand slotted down the top of his backplate. Servomotors churned furiously as she sprang clear of the tumbling Talos, dragging Hyperion with her. A dozen tons of scrap metal slammed into the floor, breaking asunder. All the artful structuring Hephaestus had done disintegrated. When everything stopped avalanching and subsiding, what had been the giant now resembled the places its parts had been sourced from - vast, shapeless mounds of junk.
Soldiers started cheering. Meanwhile, Sam and Hyperion picked themselves up out of the litter of debris that was scattered around them. They waded through it over to Theia.
"We owe you," Sam said.
"Just glad to have you back, Tethys," Theia replied. "I prayed to the Lord Jesus to keep you safe, and He did."
"How's the arm?" Sam remembered Theia getting hit by one of Apollo's arrows at Bleaney.
"Ain't what it used to be," Theia said, flexing her elbow gingerly. The joint would bend through only a few degrees of its full range of movement. "That's why I'm down to just a pistol. But it's still good. I'm good."
Over the comms came Iapetus's voice. "Ah, all Titans? Iapetus. Anyone hear me? Little spot of bother here, and I'd really appreciate some help."
Sam consulted her visor display to gauge his whereabouts. Then, without another word, she rushed off in that direction, Hyperion and Theia close behind.
75. AMPHITHEATRE
Ares and Iapetus were cat-and-mousing across the amphitheatre. The Olympian, though slowed by his damaged knee, pursued the Titan wherever he went, allowing him no quarter, no let-up. Iapetus jinked now this way, now that, but Ares stayed doggedly on his tail, battle axe swinging.
"Hold still, impudent mortal flea!" he shouted. "Hold still and fight me!"
"Can't really do that, mate," Iapetus replied, "on account of I value having my head attached to the rest of me."
"What makes you think I'll be so merciful as to lop your head off first?"
"Yeah, all the more reason not to stop moving then."
As Sam arrived on the scene, she could see Iapetus was beginning to tire. She could see, too, that Ares was as volcanically vigorous as ever, his bad leg notwithstanding. Bit by bit he was gaining ground on his quarry. Every lunge he made got him a little nearer. His axe blows were missing by an ever narrower margin. Iapetus wasn't being given a moment to stop and draw breath, let alone draw a weapon. Ares's relentless hounding would soon wear him out.
She raised her gun and blasted at Ares. Spurts of sand kicked up at his feet. A couple of rounds dinged his armour but failed to penetrate. He glanced over his shoulder long enough to sneer at her, then resumed his pursuit of Iapetus. Shots from Hyperion's coilgun blew a series of small craters in the ascending stone seats behind Ares. Again the Olympian was unscathed.
"Ain't as if he's a big target or anything," Theia admonished.
"He's also leaping around like a jackrabbit," Hyperion retorted. "You're so damn deadeye dick, you try hitting him."
"Closer," said Sam. "We need to get in much closer."
She loped off across the amphitheatre's oval arena, threading between the archery targets and mannequins and items of outdoor exercise equipment. "Iapetus," she said over the comms, "lead him towards us. Maybe we can pincer him."
"I'll give it a try," Iapetus said, panting. "By the way, Tethys, thank God you're back, because these past few weeks, that bastard Hyperion's been mooning around like a koala without a gum tree."
"Save your breath. Just bring him to us."
"Fair go, I'll - Holy shit! All of you! Get down!"
Sam did as Iapetus said, dropping to a crouch without even thinking twice, and at that same instant an arrow embedded itself in the face of the mannequin nearest to her. If she'd been a split second later ducking, it would have gone straight through her own face.
She scurried round behind the mannequin as a further three arrows thwacked into the sandy floor where she had been squatting a moment earlier. Another four arrows stitched themselves in a neat line up the mannequin's leg. Sam hugged her knees in tight to her chest, making herself a ball. A TITAN suit was resistant to Apollo's shafts except, as Theia's experience had shown, at the joints, and Apollo was easily accurate enough to pierce those or the other vulnerable area, the face, which the acrylic glass of the visor would do little to protect.
Apollo had her trapped in p
osition and was also dishing out the same treatment to Hyperion and Theia, forcing them to take cover with a rain of arrows. From a vantage point high up atop the amphitheatre's encircling seats he pivoted to shoot at each of the three Titans in turn, like a compass needle veering between different norths, and the arrows came thick and fast. He was loading the next as his bowstring was still vibrating from firing off the previous one.
"He's got to run out soon," Sam said. "When he does, we rush him."
But no sooner had the words left her lips than Hermes popped into view immediately behind Apollo, with a sheaf of fresh arrows in his arms, which he dumped into the Olympian archer's quiver. From the way Hermes was standing, Sam could only assume Demeter had fixed his injured feet. He vanished again, and the arrow storm continued unabated.
Iapetus, in the meantime, was near exhaustion. So was his battlesuit battery.
"I'm red-lining," he gasped, "and this mad-axeman drongo isn't giving up. Any ideas?"
"We're trying to get to you," Sam replied, "but Apollo's not letting us."
"Ah fuck it," said Iapetus, and Sam detected a kind of weary finality in his voice, and it chilled her. "Then there's only thing left to do."
"Iapetus..."
"All Titans, I just want you to know, you're a bunch of ruddy arseholes," Iapetus said, "and it's been a privilege working with you. Same goes for the dipsticks back at base."
Then he turned to address Ares.
"All right, big boy, you want me? I'm out of puff and standing still now. Come and get me."
He was indeed standing still, and Ares didn't hesitate to take advantage of the fact, springing towards Iapetus with his axe raised above his head double-handed. He brought it down on the Titan's shoulder in a whirring arc. The crunch of the impact was immense, and Iapetus, grunting, was driven to his knees. Sam saw his arm droop limply and knew that even though his suit had absorbed much of the force of the blow, such was Ares's strength that he had at the very least numbed the nerves in the arm and perhaps had broken Iapetus's collarbone.
"That the best you could do?" Iapetus said tightly. "And here was I thinking you were the god of war. God of woofters is more like it."
With a bellow of annoyance Ares lofted the axe again and whirled it round in a semicircle to slam the blade into Iapetus's flank. The Titan sprawled sidelong onto the amphitheatre floor, and over the comms Sam heard him moan, the sound of someone in gruelling pain. To Ares he gasped, "No, I take it back. Even a woofter would hit harder than that."
Ares straddled his fallen opponent, chest heaving in triumph. "You would do well not to mock me. It will only prolong your ordeal."
"I'll tell you what's an ordeal, mate - having to listen to you yabber on in that stupid gruff voice of yours. Anyone ever tell you you sound like Russell Crowe with a hangover?"
Infuriated, Ares whammed the axe three times onto Iapetus's back. The Titan convulsed with each blow, and the third of them finally managed to crack the battlesuit. Splinters of polycarbonate erupted around the blade.
"Ha!" Ares exclaimed. "Your shell is broken, so-called Titan. What have you got to say for yourself now? Death is just seconds away. Any more smart remarks?"
Iapetus did mutter some words, but so softly that Ares couldn't hear.
Sam, on the other hand, could.
"Base - Myrmidon Protocol."
And in London, Jamie McCann replied, "Aw no, Iapetus. No."
"Myrmidon. Do it, you useless Scots bastard."
"But the failsafe. Myrmidon won't work while the CPU's still detecting a pulse."
"Bet Patanjali can override that, can't he?"
"He says yes."
"Then do it. I'm crocked anyway."
"Come on, speak up," said Ares. He levered his fingers under the rim of Iapetus's visor and snapped it off. "There, that's better. Now I can hear you properly. Wouldn't want your last words to be a feeble mumble, would we? Say your bit, and die like a man."
"And you," Iapetus replied, loud and clear, "die like the lame-brained boofhead you are."
He clamped an arm around Ares's leg and held on tight, and then the nanobots, having been switched to Myrmidon mode, went to work. They began to eat into Iapetus's suit, but latched onto Ares as well. Anything they came into contact with, they swarmed over swiftly and voraciously. Ares stared down at his leg as the copper greave that sheathed his shin started to disappear before his very eyes, thinning, losing solidity, crumbling to a shower of fine glittering granules. The same was happening to his axe, which was still embedded in Iapetus's backplate. The blade was falling to pieces, becoming metallic dust, and now the haft was disappearing too, but Ares was too stupefied to let go, and then the nanobots were on his hand and eating through his copper gauntlet like an army of invisible termites. He flapped the hand in the air as if this might shake off whatever was attacking him, but of course that was impossible. He tried to free his leg from Iapetus's grip but that too was unshakeable, ineluctable.
"In case you were wondering," Iapetus growled, "you've been bitten by the Barracuda."
And then he started screaming, and Ares started screaming too, as the nanobots dug through to the skins of both men, and then their flesh, gnawing away at startling speed, like acid, and burrowing deeper still, into bone, into marrow.
The combined screams rose in a ghastly crescendo, and Sam clutched the sides of her helmet in an effort to block it out, but of course she couldn't block out the signal from Iapetus's comms this way. It was sickening, almost unendurable, a man's mortal agony being fed direct into her ears, but at long last it began to fade, subsiding to a series of rasping sobs, and these suddenly cut out as a crucial piece of circuitry succumbed to the nanobots' attentions.
Ares's cries of pain carried on, though. The nanobots had made quicker work of Iapetus because there had been considerably more of them on him to begin with than on Ares. They continued to throng over the Olympian's body but their progress was slower, incremental, a more protracted torment. His hand was gone, his arm ending in a stump that seemed to fizz as the nanobots wormed further up, eroding. His leg too was gone from the thigh down, the tip of his femur protruding, sharpened to a point by the depredations of the 'bots. He was half sitting, half kneeling on the ground, and writhing helplessly, and the sand around him was dark brown with his and Iapetus's blood. Eventually shock set in, and Ares slumped forwards. The nanobots munched on, occupying the last few moments of their lives with consumption of the Olympian's spasmodically shuddering form.
In the end, by the time the nanobots' five minutes of Myrmidonhood were up, almost a third of Ares had been dissolved, vanished as though rubbed out by an eraser. The dust to which parts of him had been reduced was all but indistinguishable from the sand the remainder of him lay on.
One threat had been dealt with. But Apollo remained at large.
76. APOLLO APPALLED
During his fellow Olympian's slow demise, Apollo was too aghast to keep up his barrage of arrows. He, like the three Titans, could only look on with disgust and dismay as a comrade-in-arms met his end in truly grisly fashion.
No sooner had the horror run its course, though, than he resumed his attack. With a vengeance. He started down the rows of stone seats, firing at the Titans, not as rapidly now but with control and deliberation. He was conserving his arrows, using them sparingly but still with sufficient frequency to keep the Titans in their place. Each time one of them leaned from cover to take aim at him, an arrow came twanging in, forcing a reconsideration of that idea. Every step Apollo took brought him remorselessly closer. Soon, if not stopped, he'd be at point-blank range.
"Dammit, there's three of us and only one of him," Hyperion said. "How come he's keeping us at bay and not the other way round?"
"Because he's hyper-fast and he doesn't miss," Sam said. "Theia, did I see a Perseus gun strapped to your hip?"
"Yup. Heck, it clean slipped my mind. Gimme a moment."
Theia was huddled behind a vaulting horse, one side of which w
as now quilled with arrows. Round the edge of it she sneaked the barrel of her Perseus gun. Before she could use it, however, an arrow smacked the gun out of her grasp. A second arrow send it scooting across the arena floor, out of reach.
Theia hissed in frustration. "If I was the cussing type," she said, "I'd be cussing."
"Never mind," said Sam. "Look, we're just going to have to rush him. If we all come out at once, run flat out... well, he'll have trouble hitting all of us, and there's a chance he won't hit any of us."
"How big of a chance?" said Hyperion. "Because my guess would be: not very."
"We can't stay put and just wait for him to get here."
"I know. Fuck. OK then. Count of three, then go. Tethys, you can do the honours."
"One," said Sam.
Crouching up behind the mannequin, she planted her toes in the sand like a sprinter at the starting blocks.
"Two."
Her plan was to keep her head down, presenting as little of her face as possible to Apollo. Knee, elbow, shoulder, ankle, wrist - she could take an arrow in one of those and keep going. She was prepared for it. So long as one of the three Titans got a clear shot at him. Herself preferably, but it really didn't matter which.
"Thr-"
Abruptly, men came pouring over the amphitheatre's rim, firing rifles at Apollo. A couple of dozen of them all told, dressed in plain clothes, mostly heavy metal band T-shirts. Dark-haired, swarthy, moustachioed, and leading them was a figure Sam had no trouble recognising - Paulu Galetti.
The Resistenza.
Apollo whirled to confront this new threat, and killed four of the men in the space of as many heartbeats. Then he moved to retreat, still slotting in and sending off arrows as he darted across the arena through a whining blizzard of bullets. He was no match for Hermes when it came to speed, but he was fast enough, and even when on the hoof his bow accuracy was such that not one of his shots was wasted. Resistenza members fell in swift succession, sprouting arrows from the eye, the chest, the gizzard, the gut. By the time Apollo gained the sanctuary of a niche in the low wall that encircled the arena, he'd already halved the number of his assailants.
The Age Of Zeus Page 45