The Age of Zeus

73. CERBERUS

One and a half thousand troops converged on the wrecked gate, with Field Marshal Armstrong-Hall leading from the front, putting both his life on the line and his money where his mouth was.

They were a makeshift army, so it wasn't pretty, no breathtakingly well-drilled unit here advancing in formation, more like a rabble of men and women, most in uniform, some not, slogging upslope through the mist, sinking ankle-deep in scree, crunching through patches of thin-crust leftover snow, tripping, stumbling, colliding, and now and then, alas, accidentally discharging their weapons and winging a comrade. But still, up they went, on they came, feeding out of the treeline and streaming toward and into the stronghold.

The Harpies descended as eagles on a flock of sheep, feet first, talons flared. Here, and here, and now here, somebody was hauled aloft, dangling from claws that hooked under the ribcage or clavicle or through the meat of the shoulder. Savage beaks went for throats or bellies, digging, rending, wrenching. A few of the bird-women's doomed victims, however, retained the presence of mind to use their guns even as their bodies were being lifted up and opened up. One Harpy spiralled to earth with a wing blown clean off, its slayer death-gripped in its talons. Another, dropping its burden, fell with the most of its head missing.

This made their "sisters" more cautious but didn't discourage them from further attacks. Now they swooped on the soldiers in pairs and, once airborne again, played wishbone with their prey.

But the Harpies totalled less than twenty, and the invading troops had numbers on their side. They could bear the losses the Harpies inflicted. They surged on, pouring in through the gate. Dozens of them entered the stronghold at other points, using ropes and grappling hooks to scale the walls. With the Harpies otherwise occupied, this was now a viable method of access.

Within the stronghold, the ragtag army met with the Olympians' next layer of defence.

In earlier days, before the Titans, Hera would have been able to assemble a daunting array of monsters from her menagerie. She would have gathered them all in beforehand from their various locations around the world and would now be countering the influx of mortals by unleashing a horde of nightmares — the Cyclops with its blunt strength, the Gorgons with their shrivelling stares, the Griffin with its naked viciousness, the Minotaur with its formidable rage, to name a few.

As it was, all she had left were Cerberus and Typhon.

Not that Cerberus and Typhon were anything to sneeze at.

The three-headed dog, large as a wolfhound, stocky as a Rottweiler, cut a swathe through the invaders. It thought nothing of chomping on three of them at once, sinking teeth simultaneously into one man's arm, someone else's leg and a third person's privates. It accounted for nearly thirty fatal dismemberments before, at last, a British SAS lieutenant-colonel with a Minimi light machine gun was able to put the canine down.

Typhon was an even more perturbing proposition. Half man, half serpent, it slithered sinuously among the enemy ranks, spewing out a hideously corrosive acidic secretion. Xander Landesman had tried his level best to engineer a beast that could shoot flames from its eyes as the Typhon of myth had done, but this had proved to be beyond even his considerable prowess, a fantasy attribute too far. He'd settled for the ability to eject organic acid, by means of a delivery system derived from the venom-squirting glands of the spitting cobra. The acid, aerosolised by a gust of breath, burned flesh on contact and could eat through clothing in a matter of seconds. Typhon, moreover, habitually aimed for the eyes, and a great many of the attacking army succumbed to the monster in just that fashion, blinded, their eyeballs turning opaque and bursting, aqueous humour dribbling down their blistered cheeks.

Field Marshal Armstrong-Hall came within a hair's breadth of becoming one of Typhon's victims, but was saved by Rhea. The Titan threw herself between Sir Neville and the monster, taking the splash of acid on the back of her battlesuit. The nanobots raced to neutralise the acid's effects and managed to prevent it from doing any more than scarring the surface of her armour. Millions of them were sacrificed in this effort, however, and Rhea's visor display informed her that the suit's integrity had been compromised and its bulletproofing capacity reduced to 60 %. Which wasn't so bad, in her estimation. She could live with 60 %.

Side by side with Sir Neville she blasted away at Typhon. He had his army-issue SA80 assault rifle, she her Landesman-issue flamethrower. Between them, at a safe remove, they were able to pin the monster down. It spattered acid in all directions, snake body lashing to and fro like an unsecured high-pressure fire hose. Soon, though, it was bullet-holed and ablaze, and not long after that it was a long, thick coil of charred meat, twitching and rolling as it burned.

Sir Neville looked at Rhea. "You know," he said, "when your man Landesman got in touch, I had my doubts. I didn't think there'd be much to be gained by joining forces with a bunch of glorified amateurs."

"I hope you've changed your mind," Rhea replied.

"Too bloody right I have," Sir Neville said, and then the grizzled old veteran (DSO, DSC, MC, KCB, Gulf Medal) turned and waved his troops onward. "Come on! Fan out. Don't bunch up. Occupy any high ground you can find, and if you see an Olympian, do not hesitate, shoot to kill."

The orders were relayed, translated into other languages where necessary, disseminated by walkie-talkie, and for the most part obeyed. Sir Neville knew he was in charge of too many people, and a great proportion of them weren't strictly speaking subject to him in any way. Discipline was at a premium and frankly, though he hardly dared admit it to himself, it was a miracle he'd managed to get all fifteen hundred of them up onto Olympus during the night, let alone been able to get them to follow him en masse into the stronghold.

Working in his favour was the fact that he had become the figurehead for this latest and hopefully last act of anti-Olympian insurgency. Every single man and woman present here today knew who he was and had come largely because of him. That helped. They were willing to be commanded by him because he, in a single person, represented what they all stood for. Nevertheless it had been a hell of an administrative and logistical struggle. Sir Neville had hardly had a wink of sleep in seventy-two hours and was running on adrenaline and glucose-enriched power bars only. If he didn't have to fight, he was pretty sure he would collapse any moment through sheer exhaustion.

On he trudged, though, with Rhea alongside him, and several hundred serving soldiers, further into the stronghold, wondering what the Olympians had in store for them next.