The Age Of Zeus (67 page)

"Come on, do it," Sam urged, as Talos crushed a fleeing soldier with the flat of one hand. The man was cut in two like a pinched ant. Both halves of his body squirmed for a few moments before settling into stillness.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm going to," said Hyperion. "Only... Hephaestus is a person, you know. We should respect that."

"What?"

Hyperion's voice had thickened, becoming oddly husky. He swivelled his head from the gunsight to look at Sam. "Everyone deserves the right to live, don't they? We shouldn't be killing anybody. All life is beautiful."

"Have you gone stark staring mad? What the hell's got into you?"

"
You're
beautiful, Sam."

"Really, this isn't the time. Go ahead and..." Sam stopped and thought about it. Yes, she
was
beautiful, wasn't she? And how nice of him to say so. "Actually, you're pretty damn good-looking yourself," she told Hyperion. "And I love your laugh. It drives me crazy but I love it."

She had no idea why she was saying such things in the thick of battle. The setting could not have been more inappropriate. Yet they needed to be said. So many things needed to be said but never were. People, she realised, wasted their lives keeping in all the expressions of kindness and desire that they should be sharing out. They caged their feelings up when they ought to be giving them free rein. The world would be a far better place without all these inhibitions holding everyone back. If you loved someone, or even just appreciated them, why not simply admit it? What was there to be gained by being all cool and remote and sardonic?

"Rick," she breathed, "this is crazy but... I want to kiss you again."

"Yeah?"

"And not just kiss you. It's been a while. Maybe we can find somewhere private and quiet, away from all this, and..."

"Sounds good to me."

In her mind, as if from some fathomless inner canyon, a tiny voice was shouting
What is this? What in hell's name are you doing?
It was, in fact, Jamie McCann's voice, but she didn't recognise it as such, and it was easily ignored. Her stomach was doing flipflops at the thought of getting naked with Ramsay again. Her craving for him was a low-down ache, a heat-filled tide. She was wet, goddammit, wet
down there
, and she wanted to rip the TITAN suit off Ramsay's body and leap on him,
engulf
him, on this very spot. More than that, she wanted to burrow into him, unwrap him like a birthday parcel, shred him to bits in a frantic paroxysm of lust. She imagined her fingernails scoring tracks down his back, her fists grabbing handfuls of his flesh and tearing them away in bloody chunks, her teeth biting into his succulence and devouring every hot inch of him until there was nothing left. It would be the last lovemaking they ever did, and the best. Ultimate in every way. The climax to end all climaxes.

Something in the grin of the man beside her - the looseness of it, the ferocity - told her he was feeling the same way. He laid aside the coilgun.

"That's right," crooned a soft, luxuriant voice nearby. "Give in to it. That emotion. That impulse. Take each other. Have each other. Fuck each other. Fuck each other up and over and under."

Aphrodite stalked towards them like a catwalk model, hips leading the way.

"And leave my husband be. He has work to do, and I'm here to make sure he can do it, uninterrupted."

The loveliest woman in the world. Sam felt inadequate before her, and also gratified that so exquisite a creature was taking any notice of someone as ordinary as herself. Her ravenous hunger for Ramsay continued to sharpen under the gaze of Aphrodite's glittering, long-lashed eyes. With each step the Olympian took closer to her, Sam's arousal grew. What she would do to Ramsay, she would do to appease the goddess - and goddess this was, make no mistake about that. It was the only word that suited a being who belonged so clearly, supernally, majestically to a higher order of existence. Sam was her slave. She would do anything Aphrodite demanded, anything this living angel asked of her. It was that simple. If it was Aphrodite's will that she consume Ramsay in a frenzy of passion, and be consumed herself at the same time, so be it. What else was love, after all, but a sacrifice, a surrender, a submission to a force greater than oneself?

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

A
res 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.