The Age of Zeus

46. THE MYRMIDON PROTOCOL

"B ase, Iapetus. Is Phoebe…?"

"Just get to the rendezvous point, Iapetus," Sam said, voice sick and weary. "There's nothing you can do now."

"Shit."

"Base, Rhea. What happened?"

"Phoebe's gone. But I think she might have taken Hermes with her."

"For sure?"

"Don't know. Looks that way."

"Coeus and her. My God."

"I know."

"Then I don't suppose more bad news is going to make any difference." Rhea was speaking in hushed tones. "I'm back at Gramercy Park. Can you see what I'm seeing?"

Sam could. Coeus's decapitated body lay where it had fallen, the head nearby still staring skyward, not far from Hercules's remains — and standing over the Titan's corpse, with their backs to Rhea, were three Olympians. Rhea was some way off from them, lurking in the shadow of an awning of the kind the smarter New York apartment blocks often had outside their front entrances. Nevertheless, even at a distance, Sam had no trouble identifying Zeus, Poseidon and high-helmed Athena.

"Please don't tell me you want me to engage, base."

"Of course not. Get out of there, and try not to be seen."

"Roger that."

As Rhea loped away from the scene, sirens could be heard honking and caterwauling in the background. Blue and red light splashed off building facades to the rear of her.

"Cronus, base. Come in, Cronus," Sam said.

"Cronus here."

"Phoebe is down. Do you copy?"

His pace was slowing. He knew already. "I gathered."

"Were you aware that I asked you to go and help?"

"I… I must have missed that. I was running so hard — I assumed she was still with me."

Sam hesitated. No, this was not a conversation they should have on air. Later. In person. Alone. It would wait.

"Understood, Cronus. Make rendezvous as soon as you can."

"We got two of them, base," Cronus said. "That's not bad going for a day's work."

"Only one of the kills is confirmed," Sam replied. "And they've got Coeus's body."

"Yes, about that. Here's what you'll need to do. Implement the Myrmidon Protocol."

"The what?"

"One of you there knows what I'm referring to."

Baffled looks from Sam and Ramsay were met with a not so baffled look from Patanjali.

The IT wizard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Before I say anything else, it wasn't my idea. It's nothing to do with me. I didn't come up with it, I just made it possible."

"What is the Myrmidon Protocol, Rajesh?" Sam demanded.

"It's, er… It's preset remote reprogramming of the battlesuit nanotech. We send a command signal to the bots that reassigns their function from defence and camouflage to, um, to a process of intromittent erasure."

"In English," said Ramsay.

"Basically? We turn them into eating machines. They consume their way through everything they come into contact with for a period of exactly five minutes, self-replicating as they go, making new bots that are also eating machines. 'Everything' means battlesuit structure, weapons and, um, other stuff. Then, when time's up, they deactivate and go inert. They turn into a big heap of grey goop."

"It's a self-destruct mechanism," Sam said.

"In layman's terms, yes."

"In anyone's terms."

"And the body," said Ramsay. "Anders's body. That gets eaten too."

"Superficially," said Patanjali. "Enough to make identification difficult, if not impossible. It's pretty brilliant, really. Don't you agree?" Their faces told him they didn't. "In a cold-hearted way. I mean, obviously, from a certain viewpoint it could seem kind of callous. But to repurpose the nanobots like that — inspired. They become like ants, submicroscopic ants, munching their way through their environment. Myrmidons were a band of mythical Greek soldiers, led by Achilles. It's in the Iliad. Their armour made them look like ants. Myrmex — that's Ancient Greek for ant. Hence the…"

He trailed off.

"This is a problem for you, isn't it?"

"Damn straight it's a problem," said Ramsay. "You haven't been wearing those battlesuits. We have. And all along there's been a self-destruct mechanism in there no one told us about?"

"You weren't told about it," said Cronus, "because it's intended to be used only under these precise circumstances, when a Titan dies and his or her suit is about to fall into enemy hands. And the protocol needs to be implemented right now, for Coeus. That is an order."

"Just hold on a moment here…" Ramsay began.

" Now, base," Cronus snapped. "We can discuss the ethics of all this another time, if we must, but the protocol has to be put into effect while Coeus's suit remains more or less intact. Should the Olympians start dismantling it, the command signal could fail. You know what to do."

This was directed at Patanjali, who immediately opened an onscreen window, tapped in a password, and waited for a prompt to appear.

The "Yes" was highlighted. Patanjali hit Enter, and up popped the inevitable precautionary message:

Again, the "Yes" was highlighted. Patanjali's finger hovered over Enter. He looked at Sam. With her lips pressed together so hard that they whitened, she nodded. Patanjali hit the key, and a timer appeared, counting down from 5:00, while a message came up saying "Myrmidon Protocol sequence active" and a hollow percentile bar gradually filled up from left to right with a strip of black. Rhea was no longer on-site to transmit a visual, so there was no way of seeing the reactions of the three Olympians as Coeus's battlesuit and its wearer began to disintegrate before their very eyes. Via the feed from Coeus's helmet, however, Sam heard Athena gasp softly in sudden amazement and say, "What's that? It's starting to… dissolve?" Then one of the two male Olympians, almost certainly Zeus, advised stepping back from the body just in case. Moments later the audio stuttered and hissed, then went silent. The visual — still that view of nocturnal New York sky, which Anders Sondergaard's own eyes were past taking in — persisted a little while longer, becoming overlaid with tiny white scratch-marks, as though filaments of spider silk were falling across it.

"The bots," said Patanjali. "Eating into the visor."

Soon the scratch-marks were so numerous and so densely packed together that the image was almost wholly opaque. And then the nanobots must have chewed through a connection, as Coeus's screen abruptly went static-filled, like Phoebe's.

The timer ticked down to 0:00, the percentile bar was black from end to end, and a message announced "Myrmidon Protocol sequence complete."

It was midnight, GMT.

Not much later, the first live news broadcasts started coming in.

NYC's Night Of Chaos.

Manhattan Under Siege.

Gramercy Park Horror.

Hercules Dead, Hermes Missing.

Olympians In The Firing Line.

For Sam, the one abiding image out of the multiplicity of on-the-spot reports was not, as it was for many, footage of a forensics unit from the FBI examining the mutilated carcass of Hercules. Nor was it Athena pontificating to a reporter, with great gravitas, on the nature of the people who had the sheer gall to murder an Olympian in full public view in one of the busiest cities in the world — an Olympian, moreover, who was engaged in helping the inhabitants of that selfsame city.

No, what struck home for Sam was a brief, long-lens shot of two piles of grey dust in the road, one roughly the size and shape of a headless body, the other of a head. As a breeze caught the dust, some of it blew away, exposing blood-smeared bone beneath — a part of Sondergaard that the nanobots hadn't had time to consume.

When, shortly before dawn, she crawled into bed with Ramsay, she asked him to hold her. That was all. Just hold her.

She felt cold, cold to the marrow, and thought she might never feel warm again.