The Age of Zeus

IS WITH YOU!! FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT!!!"

"It's an unmitigated disaster," said Lillicrap. He, Landesman and Sam were in the command centre, channel-hopping. The international news networks had picked up on the phone clip and were airing it over and over again for the benefit of, presumably, the last half-dozen people left on the planet who'd failed to catch it online.

"Is it?" said Landesman.

"Isn't it?" came the plaintive reply, Lillicrap no longer sure of his opinions, no longer sure if he even had opinions of any value still.

"I admit that I'd have preferred not to go public quite so soon," said his boss. "A little longer in the shadows would have been no bad thing. But this was inevitably going to happen. The Titans were inevitably going to be spotted and, yes, filmed by somebody. And now that it's happened, we should be thanking our lucky stars that, one, you can't see anyone's face, so we've managed to keep our anonymity from being compromised; and, two, the footage makes it abundantly clear what the Titans are about. Agreed, Sam?"

"It doesn't leave much room for doubt as to who the good guys and the bad guys are," Sam said. "You've got the Lamia biting Nigel's neck. You've got us — well, me — trying to save Nigel. You've got Rick taking no prisoners once the Lamia's in the water. To the average punter we look compassionate but seriously hardcore. I think that sends out the right message. We were fortunate, too, that the Agonides got the footage up first, them being naturally inclined to be sympathetic to our cause. They put the most positive spin on it that we could hope for, and that may well have influenced how others feel about it. First impressions count."

"Although not everyone, it seems, is happy." Landesman toggled the screens to show a broadcast of live proceedings from the House of Commons. "Bartlett's in the middle of making a statement to Parliament. Look at his face. No prizes for guessing what tack he's taking."

"…inexcusable and unforgivable," the prime minister rumbled. The Honourable Members around him nodded and lowed like cattle at milking time. "The Olympians have done nothing to provoke these fiendish, murderous attacks on their prodigies, Mr Speaker, nothing to invite such wilful, premeditated acts of slaughter. Nothing whatsoever."

"Did he just say 'fiendish'?" said Sam.

"It's 'prodigies' I'm having difficulty with," said Landesman. "I daresay someone on his speechwriting team was handed a thesaurus and charged with finding the most euphemistic synonym for 'monster.'"

"These people, whoever they may be," Bartlett continued, "may think of themselves as agitators. Liberators. Freedom fighters. But let me tell you this." He thumped the despatch box with a statesmanlike fist. "They do not fight for my freedom, nor for the freedom of the Great British public."

This elicited plenty of "Hear! Hear!" — ing from his cabinet and backbenchers, and from across the floor as well.

"Great British public," Landesman echoed. "Words that always get a cheer in the Commons, regardless of what's actually being said. It's a political Pavlovian bell, and my, how it makes the dogs salivate!"

"No," said Bartlett, "what they are, Mr Speaker, what they so abundantly and incontrovertibly are, are terrorists."

Landesman heaved a theatrical sigh. "And there it is. The T-word. I knew it was coming. Didn't I say, Jolyon? Didn't I predict it?"

"You did, Mr Landesman."

"The minute we emerged into the limelight, some political stooge or other would get up on his hind legs and call us terrorists. I knew it would happen. And I'd have laid good money on it being Capitulating Catesby, too. We should have had a wager, Jolyon."

"I would have been foolish to take on that wager, sir, knowing I would surely lose. Rashly dispensing money is not something I'm too fond of."

"Yes, yes, no need to remind me. King of the purse strings. Master of the budget. We all know how diligent you are at your job."

"Or try to be. When I get the chance."

"It wasn't a complai- Oh, now hold on. What's this?" Landesman flipped to a different channel, an inset picture expanding to fill the entire screen. It was an American local news affiliate, and the words "Live From New York" were emblazoned across the top. Reasonably steady handheld camerawork showed a brawny, thickset figure staggering along a Manhattan street. The time was approaching noon, EST, and the person onscreen looked horribly drunk. He pinballed from lamppost to shopfront to parked car.

Which would have been unremarkable, perhaps, were it not for the fact that the figure was clad in a loincloth and a lion-skin cloak and that each time he collided with something it bent or broke. Behind him he had left a trail of damage — shattered plate-glass windows, tilted streetlights, splintered tree trunks, deeply dented car wings. Burglar alarms were whooping. Car alarms were wailing. Manhattanites could be seen peering out from office windows above or looking nervously on from the opposite side of the road.

"Hercules," Sam said, and sure enough, it was the ultra-strong Olympian, and the only conclusion to be drawn from his behaviour was that he'd just come from enjoying ample hospitality at some downtown bar, probably one of his favourite Chelsea or Greenwich Village hangouts.

A reporter, off-camera, was providing a breathless, blow-by-blow commentary.

"So, yeah, Hercules has been on the rampage for maybe half an hour now," he said, "and we have these amazing scenes of carnage that we're sending you, I mean look at him, he's out of control, totally blotto, got to be, and you can probably hear him, the guy's shouting, through it's impossible to make out what he's actually saying, it's all just kind of a incoherent howl, but — holy cow! Did you see that?" To the cameraman: "Did you get that, Chuck? Hercules just, just, he just walked into a mailbox, and he seemed to hurt himself, stub his toe maybe, and so he just kicked the thing, kicked it clean across the street, and now it's, well, it's embedded I guess is the word, embedded in the side of that building over there, jeez, that was some kick, dude should think of trying out for the NFL, 'cause that mailbox is well and truly stuck in the wall of that building, like a dart in a dartboard, and now — whoa! Somebody's SUV is taking a pasting. Zoom in on that, Chuck. Got it? Herc is really not pleased with that car, he's real ticked off with it, maybe he doesn't like four-by-fours, you know, gas guzzlers, maybe there's some kind of eco thing going on here…"

Hercules was, indeed, hitting the SUV with everything he had, and the chunky oversized car was rapidly getting beaten out of shape. Segments of bodywork flew off. The radiator grille fell. The headlamps popped out and dangled on their wires like enucleated eyeballs still attached to their optic nerves. Finally, with a grunt, Hercules clean-and-jerked the SUV off the ground and tossed it into the air. It came down in the centre of the road on its roof and lay there, crumpled, leaking oil and water.

That was when Hercules noticed the cameraman and the reporter. He came straight over, cloak billowing out behind him. His face was flushed, his eyes bloodshot and swimmy. He reached for the camera. The cameraman shied away, the image veering shakily to one side.

"Give me that," the Olympian growled. "Give me that fucking — that fucking thing, fucker."

"Hey, I'm filming here," the cameraman said. "I'm allowed to film. This is a public space."

"Give!" Hercules made another lunge for the camera, missing, his outstretched arm blurring from right to left.

"Chuck, give it to him," hissed the reporter.

"Freedom of the press," said the cameraman. The man behind the lens was, it seemed, braver than the man who usually stood in front. "In this country we have something called the Constitution. We have rights. We're allowed to shoot whatever we — "

Hercules's third attempt to grab the camera was successful. The onscreen image swerved in all directions, now showing a section of kerb, now the sky, now someone's sneakers, before finally settling on an extreme close-up of the Olympian's own face. Every pore in his skin was visible. The pockmarks on his nose looked like lunar craters.

"Rights?" he boomed, so loud that it overloaded the microphone and his voice crackled with distortion. "Hey! People out there! You hear this man? You think you have rights? Don't make me laugh. What about my right to walk down a street without some moron poking a camera at me? Huh? What about that? What about my right to let off steam and have a few drinks and chat up some nice piece of eromenos without some dick of a paparazzi intruding?"

" Eromenos?" said Sam.

"Boy lover," said Landesman.

"I'm not paparazzi," the reporter protested. "I'm an accredited journalist with — "

"Shut up, you cheap-suited media monkey," Hercules snapped. Spittle flecked the lens. "I'm talking here. Didn't your mother ever teach you to keep quiet and listen when your betters are talking? Now, where was I? Oh yes. Rights. Understand this, people of America and the rest of the world. You have no rights. Not while we're in charge. You used to have some, maybe, a few, in the early days after we took over. We started out treating you with respect — as much as we felt you deserved. We hoped you'd be wise enough, mature enough, to gladly and meekly accept what we were offering. But no-o-o, you objected, you resisted, you fought back, and that was when you forfeited your rights, any rights you thought you had. And now you're doing it once again, resisting. We thought you'd settled down but you haven't. You've started being treacherous, treasonous little savages again, and that means as far as we're concerned the gloves are off and the only right you have left now — hah, right, left, ha ha — the only right you have left is to bow your heads and do whatever the fuck we tell you to. Case in point: these two bottom-feeders."

He swung the camera round to show the reporter, whose suit was a cheap designer knockoff, and the cameraman, scruffily but more honestly dressed in jeans, windcheater and Phillies cap. Both of them were very scared, but the cameraman was doing the better job of hiding it. He fixed Hercules with a hard stare.

"See them?" the Olympian sneered. "These cogs in the media machine. They work for… Which channel do you work for?"

The reporter told him.

"Well," said Hercules, "I have a message for your employers, and for everyone watching. And it's this: do not harass us, do not question us, do not cast us in a bad light, do not challenge us — in short, do not fuck with us. Because this is what happens to those who do."

The image juddered wildly, as though an earthquake had just struck. It broke up into green and white squares, then stuttered, blinking in and out of blackness. This was soundtracked by yells of pain, and thumps, and then some ghastly wet crunching noises.

Finally normal transmission resumed. The camera had been set down on the ground, on its side. There was a spidery pattern of cracks across the lens. There were spatters of red on the lens as well. And lying within shot, slumped on the now-vertical sidewalk as though leaning against a wall, were the reporter and the cameraman. They were recognisable by their clothes only. Where they had once had heads, now they had collapsed, vaguely head-shaped messes. Their hair was matted with blood and dribbles of brain matter. Shards of skull poked out here and there. The slap-slap sound of Hercules's sandalled footfalls could be heard, diminishing in volume. Far off, a woman started screaming.

Then, thankfully, someone back at the studio had the presence of mind to cut the live feed.

Landesman, Lillicrap and Sam were silent. Stunned. Sickened.

"My God," Landesman said at last. "That was… My God. Truly horrible. But looking on the bright side — and there is one, and we must look on it — Hercules's timing can't be faulted. What a godsend, no pun intended. He's just handed us a propaganda coup. Our second today. First the Agonides clip, now this. Nobody, seeing what we've just seen, can have any uncertainty any more that what the Titans are doing is right, that we're on the side of the angels. If anybody was hesitant about backing us before, they won't be now."

"Popularity is all well and fine," said Sam. "I'd rather have the public on my side than against me. But it's hardly going to help us win the war, is it?"

"We'll see, Sam," said Landesman. "If things continue to go as I hope they do… well, you never know. Public support might just make all the difference."