The Age of Zeus

26. REPERCUSSIONS

L andesman ordered the screen switched off. A hubbub broke out among the Titans and the technicians, a dozen voices speaking at once. Landesman requested, and got, silence.

"Let's just take a moment, shall we?" he said. "Think things through calmly and rationally. We knew something like this was going to happen. It was inevitable. There was no way the Olympians weren't going to react once they twigged what we're up to. All we can hope for is that the fallout is relatively mild."

"People are going to die," said Sondergaard.

"We don't know that yet," said Landesman. "We'll have to wait and see."

"I signed up to stop the Olympians," said Tsang. "I didn't sign up to provoke them into attacking civilians."

"What did you think they were going to do, Fred?" Landesman asked with some asperity. "Sit back and take it? What have they ever done when they've felt threatened? Lashed out. It's their way. We need to be grown-up about this. We need to accept that there will, alas, be unavoidable by-products of our campaign. There will be — that ugly euphemism — collateral damage. It simply can't be helped. Sam, you'll back me up here, won't you?"

"I hate it," Sam said. "I'm sure you hate it too, Mr Landesman. We all do. But…" She couldn't see a way around it. Landesman was right. The Olympians were bound to strike back. That had been their policy from the very start: let no insult or protest go unpunished. "We are at war now. We started it. The Olympians are taking it to the next level. How could they not? And it will keep on escalating if we carry on, that's obvious. So what do we do? Do we stop? We could, and then whatever repercussions the Olympians have in mind right now will be the end of it. War over. Titanomachy II dribbles to a halt. I don't know about any of you but that seems pretty ignominious to me. It'd make everything we've done so far a waste. Soleil's death — pointless.

"The alternative is to forge on in the full and frank knowledge that non-combatants are going to suffer. We have to weigh that against what we're hoping to accomplish. Is it worth it? Is it a good trade-off? I don't know. I'd like to think so. I don't have much stomach for watching the Olympians penalise others for what we've done, but equally, every death they cause in our name, every life they take as retribution, is one more reason to keep fighting against them, one further incentive to topple the bastards. That's the only consolation I can see, but I think it counts for something."

A "Hear! Hear!" came from Ramsay, and was echoed by Mahmoud, Barrington and Chisholm. If the others were less convinced by her argument, none of them showed it.

"Well said, Sam," said Landesman. "Couldn't have put it better myself."

After that it was simply a question of waiting — waiting to find out what the Olympians were going to do and how bad it was going to be. Landesman had BBC News put back up on the screen, along with a number of rolling-news channels including CNN, Al-Jazeera and the Nippon News Network in inset windows. Zeus's message was being played and replayed across the world, translated or subtitled in every known language, spreading to the farthest corners of the globe, reaching places where it was midnight or later and few were awake to hear and heed. Landesman viewed it over and over, scowling hard. To Sam it seemed as though he was scrutinising the speech, analysing Zeus's every word, every nuance, in the hope of gleaning some insight from it, some clue as to what the Pantheon had in mind.

Perhaps, she thought, it would be only a lenient rebuke, a token gesture, a slap on the wrist. Some destruction of property, a handful of deaths, no more.

She didn't really believe that, though. If she knew anything about the Olympians, it was that they rarely did things by halves.