The Age Of Zeus (68 page)

Apollo had her trapped in position 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 was 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.

From the niche his arrows zinged out at regular intervals, but the Corsicans did not slacken or relent. Galetti started up a cry - "Ghjuvanna Venturini!" - which the others took up and roared in unison. The noise rang round the amphitheatre, as though for once this place had an audience filling its seats, and it was hard to say whether or not the Olympian had learned the name of the little Corsican girl he had accidentally slain, whether or not he even remembered her, but the sheer volume and venom with which her countrymen chanted it seemed to give him pause. Briefly the volley of arrows let up. Galetti and the rest noted this and made the most of it, zeroing in on the niche.

"Come on, back them up!" Sam cried, leaping out from behind the mannequin, which now looked more like a human-shaped porcupine than anything.

Hyperion and Theia emerged from cover too, and the three Titans followed in the wake of the Resistenza members, all converging on Apollo.

The Olympian realised the trouble he was in and began to defend himself again. But his momentary hesitation had cost him the advantage. The Resistenza men, with Galetti to the fore, crowded in on him in the niche. He was subsumed, overwhelmed by numbers. Sam saw one of the Corsicans emerge holding his bow aloft. Another had his quiver. Then Apollo himself was being lugged bodily out into the arena, with a man holding each of his limbs. He twisted and struggled, but to no avail.

The Corsicans, of whom only a handful remained, tossed him onto the sand and secured his hands and feet. Galetti stepped up. He had an arrow protruding from his shoulder. It must have been the last one Apollo loosed off before he'd been swamped. It would doubtless be the last one he ever loosed off. A desperate, flailing shot. That was the only reason Galetti was still alive.

Galetti lowered his rifle to Apollo's head.

"Go on," the Olympian snarled, face pressed into the sand. "Mortal scum. Do it. Try. How can you kill me? I am a god! Immortal! Eternal! Everlasting!"