The Age of Zeus

9. BOLDER AND BOULDER

Ramsay was right. They were becoming a team.

Sam saw it the following day, as they took the TITAN suits outside to practise in the open air. A morning mist shrouded the island, ideal conditions for trying out the thermal imaging. Through her visor, person-shaped agglomerations of lurid colour roved through a whiteout world. She watched them mingle and interact, each indistinguishable from the other, her colleagues, and in their comings together and their gesturings and their mirrorings of movement she saw how comfortable they now were in one another's company. She heard it in the comms link chatter too — banter passing to and fro, sometimes a massed cry of "Shut up!" in response to an especially crude remark from Barrington, and plenty of bullish talk about the Pantheon, belittling references to their powers and prowess. Within the group a clear sense of purpose was coalescing. The battlesuits were all they were cracked up to be and more, and the promise of vengeance was looking like one that Landesman could make good on. After only a handful of days the recruits were lining up in the same direction, like fish in a strong current. Even Mahmoud had overcome her initial awkwardness with her suit and was bounding around like the rest of them, exulting in the sensation of power lent her by this ultra high-tech carapace and joining happily in with the deity-dissing. She was in with the gang. Only Sam remained the outsider, and she couldn't figure out why.

Unless Ramsay was right on another count: the thing that was holding her back was herself.

Did she really want to topple the Olympians? Did she hate them that much? Was hatred a solid enough motivation for putting herself on the front line of a conflict with them?

She tried looking at it another way. Would the world be a better place if the Olympians were removed from it?

Landesman, on that first day, had advanced all the arguments in the Olympians' favour, the lines of reasoning that many a politician and Pantheonic apologist had used to justify kowtowing to them. No question, people were no longer being killed in their thousands, no longer butchering one another in the name of God, politics and profit. The disease of war, which had for centuries had never failed to infect some region of the planet, had been cured. Nowhere was armed conflict a daily fact of life now. Nations coexisted. Rival countries glowered at each other across their borders and exchanged occasional disgruntled verbal salvoes, but the rhetoric was always muted, never reaching a level of bellicosity that would draw the Olympians' attention and arouse their disapproval. The world sat like schoolchildren in the presence of a strict teacher, bolt upright, hands on desks, facing forwards, with nary a paper dart or an ink pellet sailing through the air.

But it was a classroom with bloodstains on the walls, and the hush that filled it buzzed with fear and horror.

And if you complained -

If you protested -

And people did -

If you did have the temerity to do that -

The hubris -

Then the wrath of gods would be visited upon you.

As, for instance, in Hyde Park, July 25th, two and a half years ago.

When Apollo and Artemis descended on a milling, militant crowd, and chants turned to screams, and placards and banners carrying messages such as "Down With The Olympians" and "Ban The Pantheon" and "No To Divine Terror" became spattered to illegibility with gore.

Sam had not been there.

But he had.

And he had died.

And with his death something inside Sam had died as well, and that was no mere figure of speech.

Hatred? Did she still feel that for the Olympians?

Not to the extent that she used to. For months after the events at Hyde Park, hatred had burned fiercely inside her, and its heat had made her feel alive, had maybe even kept her alive. But eventually like any fire it had subsided. She couldn't sustain it. Her heart ran out of fuel for it.

The embers still smouldered, however. And Landesman's Titan project was a breeze blowing across them, fanning them back to life.

Right, Sam told herself, if you really want to do this, do it.

She recalled McCann telling her to listen to the battlesuit, trust it.

There was a boulder in front of her, a hunk of black granite firmly embedded in the ground. The other recruits were all some distance off. The mist gave her cover. Nobody would see her fail, if she failed.

The boulder was clearly heavier than anything she could normally lift. Even the strongest man alive would have struggled with it, most likely in vain, with nothing to show for his efforts apart from maybe a hernia or some kind of prolapse.

Sam squatted down. She clamped her gauntleted hands on either side of the boulder. She concentrated on being in the battlesuit, being at one with the battlesuit, working in tandem with it. So far, so good. Before now, the mere act of grabbing the boulder would have been beyond her. The manoeuvre would have gone awry somehow. Either she wouldn't have been able to control the positioning of her hands or she'd have misgauged the squat and ended up flat on her bum or her back.

Heartened, she heaved.

Next thing she knew, she was standing upright, no boulder in her hands.

"Shit."

She looked down. Odd. No boulder on the ground either, just a depression, a patch of bare soil where it had once sat.

So where — ?

She looked up.

The boulder was falling. Fast.

She sprang backwards out of its path of descent.

The boulder thudded to earth at almost the exact same instant she did.

She sat up with her legs akimbo, propped on her elbows, dazed. What just happened?

Except, she knew what had just happened.

How high had she hurled the boulder? Fifteen, maybe twenty metres straight up, she estimated.

How far had she leapt? Ten metres, thereabouts, in a single bound.

Sam thought about it for a moment.

Then she broke into a giggle. She listened to herself. Actual giggling. Tee-hee-hee.

This TITAN suit.

Oh, all of a sudden she was starting to like this TITAN suit.