The Age Of Zeus (40 page)

Baffled looks from Sam and Ramsay were met with a not so baffled look from Patanjali.

The IT wizard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Before I say anything else, it wasn't my idea. It's nothing to do with me. I didn't come up with it, I just made it possible."

"What is the Myrmidon Protocol, Rajesh?" Sam demanded.

"It's, er... It's preset remote reprogramming of the battlesuit nanotech. We send a command signal to the bots that reassigns their function from defence and camouflage to, um, to a process of intromittent erasure."

"In English," said Ramsay.

"Basically? We turn them into eating machines. They consume their way through everything they come into contact with for a period of exactly five minutes, self-replicating as they go, making new bots that are also eating machines. 'Everything' means battlesuit structure, weapons and, um, other stuff. Then, when time's up, they deactivate and go inert. They turn into a big heap of grey goop."

"It's a self-destruct mechanism," Sam said.

"In layman's terms, yes."

"In anyone's terms."

"And the body," said Ramsay. "Anders's body. That gets eaten too."

"Superficially," said Patanjali. "Enough to make identification difficult, if not impossible. It's pretty brilliant, really. Don't you agree?" Their faces told him they didn't. "In a cold-hearted way. I mean, obviously, from a certain viewpoint it could seem kind of callous. But to repurpose the nanobots like that - inspired. They become like ants, submicroscopic ants, munching their way through their environment. Myrmidons were a band of mythical Greek soldiers, led by Achilles. It's in the
Iliad
. Their armour made them look like ants. Myrmex - that's Ancient Greek for ant. Hence the..."

He trailed off.

"This is a problem for you, isn't it?"

"Damn straight it's a problem," said Ramsay. "You haven't been wearing those battlesuits. We have. And all along there's been a self-destruct mechanism in there no one told us about?"

"You weren't told about it," said Cronus, "because it's intended to be used only under these precise circumstances, when a Titan dies and his or her suit is about to fall into enemy hands. And the protocol needs to be implemented right now, for Coeus. That is an order."

"Just hold on a moment here..." Ramsay began.

"
Now
, base," Cronus snapped. "We can discuss the ethics of all this another time, if we must, but the protocol has to be put into effect while Coeus's suit remains more or less intact. Should the Olympians start dismantling it, the command signal could fail. You know what to do."

This was directed at Patanjali, who immediately opened an onscreen window, tapped in a password, and waited for a prompt to appear.

The "Yes" was highlighted. Patanjali hit Enter, and up popped the inevitable precautionary message:

Again, the "Yes" was highlighted. Patanjali's finger hovered over Enter. He looked at Sam. With her lips pressed together so hard that they whitened, she nodded. Patanjali hit the key, and a timer appeared, counting down from 5:00, while a message came up saying "Myrmidon Protocol sequence active" and a hollow percentile bar gradually filled up from left to right with a strip of black. Rhea was no longer on-site to transmit a visual, so there was no way of seeing the reactions of the three Olympians as Coeus's battlesuit and its wearer began to disintegrate before their very eyes. Via the feed from Coeus's helmet, however, Sam heard Athena gasp softly in sudden amazement and say, "What's that? It's starting to... dissolve?" Then one of the two male Olympians, almost certainly Zeus, advised stepping back from the body just in case. Moments later the audio stuttered and hissed, then went silent. The visual - still that view of nocturnal New York sky, which Anders Søndergaard's own eyes were past taking in - persisted a little while longer, becoming overlaid with tiny white scratch-marks, as though filaments of spider silk were falling across it.

"The bots," said Patanjali. "Eating into the visor."

Soon the scratch-marks were so numerous and so densely packed together that the image was almost wholly opaque. And then the nanobots must have chewed through a connection, as Coeus's screen abruptly went static-filled, like Phoebe's.

The timer ticked down to 0:00, the percentile bar was black from end to end, and a message announced "Myrmidon Protocol sequence complete."

It was midnight, GMT.

Not much later, the first live news broadcasts started coming in.

NYC's Night Of Chaos.

Manhattan Under Siege.

Gramercy Park Horror.

Hercules Dead, Hermes Missing.

Olympians In The Firing Line.

For Sam, the one abiding image out of the multiplicity of on-the-spot reports was not, as it was for many, footage of a forensics unit from the FBI examining the mutilated carcass of Hercules. Nor was it Athena pontificating to a reporter, with great gravitas, on the nature of the people who had the sheer gall to murder an Olympian in full public view in one of the busiest cities in the world - an Olympian, moreover, who was engaged in helping the inhabitants of that selfsame city.

No, what struck home for Sam was a brief, long-lens shot of two piles of grey dust in the road, one roughly the size and shape of a headless body, the other of a head. As a breeze caught the dust, some of it blew away, exposing blood-smeared bone beneath - a part of Søndergaard that the nanobots hadn't had time to consume.

When, shortly before dawn, she crawled into bed with Ramsay, she asked him to hold her. That was all. Just hold her.

She felt cold, cold to the marrow, and thought she might never feel warm again.

47. MEDIA PASTE

T
he world's media gorged on the events in New York for days afterward, chewing over each and every morsel then regurgitating and chewing it over again, until what was left was a paste of facts, opinions and suppositions so thin and watery as to be almost devoid of nutritional content. There remained, however, a few gristly segments which no amount of intellectual mastication could break down to a palatable consistency. How, first and foremost, had the slayers of Hercules been able to kill him? How had they come by weapons capable of harming a demigod? And how could they move at such speed? Then there was the matter of Hermes. Where was he? Was he alive or dead? And, although he had come to Hercules's rescue, could he not have arrived sooner? For that matter, how was it that Zeus, Poseidon and Athena had turned up in Gramercy Park shortly after Hercules was killed? Their presence in New York that night seemed to imply they'd suspected an attempt was going to be made on his life. If so, couldn't they have taken steps to prevent it?

The awkward questions would not go away, and so Zeus agreed to guest on America's top-rated daytime chatshow, with Hera, to set the record straight.

The show's hostess, Paulita Dominguez, started out deferential, as you did with the Olympians, liberally deploying their godly epithets - Zeus the Sign-Giving, Hera the White-Armed, Zeus the Far-Seeing, Hera the Purple-Belted, and so forth. The longer the interview went on, though, the bolder and more pugnacious she became. Neither Zeus nor Hera, side by side on a tasteful beige leather sofa on a set decked out to look like someone's living room, seemed to be giving her acceptable answers. Zeus spoke of unfortunate timing. He said he had had an inkling that Hercules might be a target for these people - these "scuttling cockroaches," as he called them - but had had no idea they would be quite so audacious as to attack him out in the open, with eyewitnesses on hand. No sooner had it become apparent that Hercules was in difficulties then Hermes had raced to the scene, but, fast though he was, he had arrived too late to do anything except punish the perpetrators.

"He could have teleported," Paulita suggested.

"Yes, a good point," Zeus replied, "but you see, he wasn't sure where Hercules was. That is to say, he thought he was somewhere but in fact he was... well, not there, but somewhere else."

He appeared to be floundering. Hera leapt in. "What my husband is trying to say, Miss Dominguez, is that there were too many variables. Hermes didn't believe he could teleport in safely. He thought it better to come in running, so that he could assess the situation as he approached."

In general, Zeus's performance on
Paulita
was uncharacteristically listless and unconfident. Hera did most of the talking, and kept trying to divert the hostess from confrontational lines of questioning towards a more personal, domestic agenda.

"I'm sure the audience here and your viewers at home want to hear how we're dealing with our shock and grief back on Olympus," she said at one point, and at another said, "I'd prefer to be discussing Hercules's legacy, not his death but his life. Hercules was my stepson but like a son to me. A wayward one, but lively and loveable in spite of it." And on the subject of Hermes: "We hold out hope that he will find his way home safe and sound. My heart aches to think about a stepson - another stepson of mine - lying somewhere, in a remote corner of the earth, injured, perhaps in great pain. Argus is searching high and low for signs of him, and we pray for his return."

"Pray?" said Paulita, intrigued. "Who exactly does an Olympian pray to?"

"Figure of speech," said Hera.

"Are you scared?" This was Paulita's closing question. The floor manager was making winding-up motions, while in the production gallery they were telling her over her earpiece to reel the interview in. There was a sense of disappointment in the air. This edition of the show hadn't turned out to be as riveting as everyone had hoped. Paulita had one last chance to dredge up some TV gold.

"Scared?" said Hera as though unfamiliar with the word, let alone the concept.

"Of these people, these paramilitaries, these terrorists, whatever you care to call them. They've killed most of your monsters. They've killed at least one of you, maybe even two. All I'm saying is, if I were you, I'd be at least a little nervous about stepping foot outside Mount Olympus now."

This roused Zeus from his torpor. "But you are
not
us, woman," he thundered. "You are mortal, prone to insecurity. You know fear all the time, whether it's fear of your ratings slipping or of people thinking you're fat, or most of all the deep-down fear that you're hideously overpaid for doing a job that a trained monkey could do, and better, what's more. You are a seething mass of anxieties and inadequacies, and I am not. I am king of the Pantheon and I fear nothing and no one!"