The Age of Zeus

74. TALOS

The Olympians' next line of defence came courtesy of Hephaestus. He called it Talos, and this was only a slight misnomer. In the myths Talos, the giant guardian of Crete, had been made entirely of bronze, whereas Hephaestus's version was constructed from much less noble matter — car parts, old refrigerators and tumble dryers, lengths of discarded pipe and ductwork, sink drainers, industrial offcuts, countless bits and pieces of metal scavenged from the scrapheaps and junkyards of Athens and brought back to Olympus to be merged and plaited and moulded together inside his temple, all in anticipation of an incursion like this.

Sam and Hyperion were among the very first to see Talos as it arose from within the temple. First they heard a series of stupendous creaks and groans, the sound of joints grinding as they moved. Next, they saw a colossal figure stand stiffly upright, rising above the temple rooftop. At full height it was close on 40 feet tall, and it was blockily humanoid, like some sort of cubist piece of monumental statuary. Patchwork too, its various different-coloured components thrown together with no overall aesthetic design, just fitting wherever they would go. A few freezers lashed together with cables served for one upper arm. The fenders and radiator grilles from several makes of car became a glittering chrome neck. Scaffolding poles and filing cabinets meshed to form the bulk of its chest.

It had no face, which made it look even more imposing and sinister. Its entire head was just a bumpy mass of hubcaps, office chairs, hood ornaments, shopping trolleys, hi-fi equipment and anglepoise lamps shaped into a rough oblate sphere, multifaceted and featureless. Eyes, nose and mouth would have given it character, might even have softened its appearance somehow. This towering metal thing, however, was utterly inhuman.

Now it clambered out over the entrance end of the temple, clumsy, crunching the roof underfoot and smashing tiles with its hands, which were the claw-tipped buckets from two Caterpillar excavators, and Sam and Hyperion looked on with equal parts disbelief and horror.

Hyperion summed it up when he said, "That is one seriously fucked-up Transformer robot."

No sooner had it set foot outside the temple than Talos began laying into the troops that were swarming around its legs. Bullets flew at it and pinged ineffectually away, the ricochets causing death and injury among the shooters. Even a rocket-propelled grenade did nothing much except put a dent in Talos's torso, and the damage repaired itself instantly, metal bending and buckling outward to fill in the smoking hole. The metal giant, barely impeded, swung its excavator-bucket hands left and right, scooping up soldiers and flinging them aside. Bodies fell screaming, limbs shattered and rubbery. Often Talos's sweeping hands severed its victims' legs at the shin, leaving booted feet standing on the ground while their owners flailed through the air gouting jets of arterial blood from stumps.

Talos lumbered on, with soldiers now scattering in all directions to get out of its path. Wherever they took refuge, though, the metal giant could still get to them. A group of men, cowering beneath the portico of Artemis's temple, died as Talos pounded the support columns and brought part of the edifice crashing down on their heads.

"We have to stop that thing," Sam said.

"Of course we do," Hyperion agreed. "Only one small problem. Fucking how?"

"Hephaestus is controlling it. Find Hephaestus, kill him, you kill it."

"I don't see him."

"He's got to be somewhere close. As I understand it, he has to be able to see something to manipulate it. He needs line of sight. His temple's as good a place as any to start looking. That's where the robot-whatever came from."

Exchanging a grim nod, the two Titans accelerated toward the temple, making sure to steer well clear of Talos's thumping feet. Each of these was the shell of a Volkswagen Beetle densely packed with gym weights for solidity and stability, and was not something you would wish to be caught beneath, as more than a few of the invading troops had found to their great cost.

Hyperion spotted Hephaestus first. The Olympian was lurking in the shadows of the temple entrance, hunched over, his whole body trembling with the strain of controlling his creation. Sam was reminded of an orchestra conductor swept up in the throes of a particularly dramatic section of a symphony. Occasionally Hephaestus even mimed Talos's actions. He jerked an arm to the side; Talos's arm ploughed through yet more soldiers.

Hunkering down with Sam behind a pile of rubble from Artemis's temple, Hyperion lined up a shot with the coilgun. The range was less than 50 metres. He couldn't miss.

"Come on, do it," Sam urged, as Talos crushed a fleeing soldier with the flat of one hand. The man was cut in two like a pinched ant. Both halves of his body squirmed for a few moments before settling into stillness.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm going to," said Hyperion. "Only… Hephaestus is a person, you know. We should respect that."

"What?"

Hyperion's voice had thickened, becoming oddly husky. He swivelled his head from the gunsight to look at Sam. "Everyone deserves the right to live, don't they? We shouldn't be killing anybody. All life is beautiful."

"Have you gone stark staring mad? What the hell's got into you?"

" You're beautiful, Sam."

"Really, this isn't the time. Go ahead and…" Sam stopped and thought about it. Yes, she was beautiful, wasn't she? And how nice of him to say so. "Actually, you're pretty damn good-looking yourself," she told Hyperion. "And I love your laugh. It drives me crazy but I love it."

She had no idea why she was saying such things in the thick of battle. The setting could not have been more inappropriate. Yet they needed to be said. So many things needed to be said but never were. People, she realised, wasted their lives keeping in all the expressions of kindness and desire that they should be sharing out. They caged their feelings up when they ought to be giving them free rein. The world would be a far better place without all these inhibitions holding everyone back. If you loved someone, or even just appreciated them, why not simply admit it? What was there to be gained by being all cool and remote and sardonic?

"Rick," she breathed, "this is crazy but… I want to kiss you again."

"Yeah?"

"And not just kiss you. It's been a while. Maybe we can find somewhere private and quiet, away from all this, and…"

"Sounds good to me."

In her mind, as if from some fathomless inner canyon, a tiny voice was shouting What is this? What in hell's name are you doing? It was, in fact, Jamie McCann's voice, but she didn't recognise it as such, and it was easily ignored. Her stomach was doing flipflops at the thought of getting naked with Ramsay again. Her craving for him was a low-down ache, a heat-filled tide. She was wet, goddammit, wet down there, and she wanted to rip the TITAN suit off Ramsay's body and leap on him, engulf him, on this very spot. More than that, she wanted to burrow into him, unwrap him like a birthday parcel, shred him to bits in a frantic paroxysm of lust. She imagined her fingernails scoring tracks down his back, her fists grabbing handfuls of his flesh and tearing them away in bloody chunks, her teeth biting into his succulence and devouring every hot inch of him until there was nothing left. It would be the last lovemaking they ever did, and the best. Ultimate in every way. The climax to end all climaxes.

Something in the grin of the man beside her — the looseness of it, the ferocity — told her he was feeling the same way. He laid aside the coilgun.

"That's right," crooned a soft, luxuriant voice nearby. "Give in to it. That emotion. That impulse. Take each other. Have each other. Fuck each other. Fuck each other up and over and under."

Aphrodite stalked towards them like a catwalk model, hips leading the way.

"And leave my husband be. He has work to do, and I'm here to make sure he can do it, uninterrupted."

The loveliest woman in the world. Sam felt inadequate before her, and also gratified that so exquisite a creature was taking any notice of someone as ordinary as herself. Her ravenous hunger for Ramsay continued to sharpen under the gaze of Aphrodite's glittering, long-lashed eyes. With each step the Olympian took closer to her, Sam's arousal grew. What she would do to Ramsay, she would do to appease the goddess — and goddess this was, make no mistake about that. It was the only word that suited a being who belonged so clearly, supernally, majestically to a higher order of existence. Sam was her slave. She would do anything Aphrodite demanded, anything this living angel asked of her. It was that simple. If it was Aphrodite's will that she consume Ramsay in a frenzy of passion, and be consumed herself at the same time, so be it. What else was love, after all, but a sacrifice, a surrender, a submission to a force greater than oneself?

She was about to turn back to Ramsay and start unbuckling his battlesuit straps. He was ready to do the same for her.

Then her visor display registered a fellow Titan, Theia, coming in at a fast lick from behind Aphrodite. She flicked a glance in that direction and saw only a vague outline of a human being, a shimmer of white that mimicked the stronghold's pale stone and the mist. Aphrodite saw nothing at all. Heard nothing either. She was focused on her pair of thralls, the couple who were about to butcher each other in her name. Theia marched smartly up and placed the business end of the pistol against the back of the Olympian's head, pointed at her brain stem, execution-style. There was a burst of light, a muffled report, and one side of Aphrodite's faced distended outwards. An eye bulged. Her flawless beauty was gone in an instant, all symmetry lost. She opened her mouth and blood frothed out over those plushly perfect lips. Her long legs gave way and she crumpled, head lolling back. As she hit the ground, Theia shot her again. And then, just to be sure, once more.

"Witch," she said. She switched out of camouflage mode, materialising as her full, solid self. "Jezebel. The lake of fire for all eternity. How's that feel?"

All at once, everything that had boiled up inside Sam simmered down again. She was left feeling foolish and ashamed, as in the aftermath of a one night stand she knew she should never have had, that same remorse only magnified a hundredfold. She felt bereft, too, as though she'd lost something unutterably precious, a certainty she normally never had. She assumed Ramsay was experiencing a similar degree of embarrassment and ruefulness. Through their tinted visors neither of them could quite meet the other's gaze.

"Now, are you going to kill Hephaestus or what?" Theia said. "'Cause that huge walking pile of trash is coming right this way."

Talos was, indeed, stomping towards them. It moved with obvious purposefulness, not pausing to bother with any of the soldiers who got in its way. Sam glanced in Hephaestus's direction and saw that the Olympian had emerged into the open, at the top of the temple steps, and that his face was a tangle of grief. Tears coursed down his cheeks.

"My wife!" he keened. "Aphrodite! Aphrodiiiteee!"

"Hyperion," Sam said, "for fuck's sake…!"

Hyperion snapped the butt of the coilgun into the crook of his shoulder. The metal giant was mere yards away. Theia was already retreating from it. Its shadow loomed over the Titans, its faceless head hazed in the mist. One hand rose, pivoting on its wrist so that the excavator bucket was turned upside down and became an immense hatchet, a toothed guillotine.

"Shoot him!" Sam cried. "Just bloody well shoo-"

The coilgun snap-crackle-spat. Hephaestus was hit dead centre of his body mass. The bullet punched a hole through him the size of a teacup saucer. The kinetic energy of the impact was such that the Olympian was thrown ten feet through the air, flying backward as though he was as light as a scarecrow. He struck one column of his temple, rebounded off it at an angle and struck the next column along, leaving a gory splash on both. His corpse rolled floppily down the steps, fetching up not far from his late wife, near enough that his outstretched hand was almost touching hers.

At the same time Talos halted in its tracks. For a few seconds it looked as though the metal giant would stay like that, frozen in the act of bringing its hand down on the Titans. Then the static figure began to teeter. Countless sharp edges screeched against one another as its upper half canted forwards and its legs bent at the knees. Off-balance, and without Hephaestus to animate it, it could no longer support itself. It toppled, plunging straight toward Hyperion and Sam. Theia cried out in alarm, but Sam was already moving, and she had Hyperion by the scruff of the neck, one hand slotted down the top of his backplate. Servomotors churned furiously as she sprang clear of the tumbling Talos, dragging Hyperion with her. A dozen tons of scrap metal slammed into the floor, breaking asunder. All the artful structuring Hephaestus had done disintegrated. When everything stopped avalanching and subsiding, what had been the giant now resembled the places its parts had been sourced from — vast, shapeless mounds of junk.

Soldiers started cheering. Meanwhile, Sam and Hyperion picked themselves up out of the litter of debris that was scattered around them. They waded through it over to Theia.

"We owe you," Sam said.

"Just glad to have you back, Tethys," Theia replied. "I prayed to the Lord Jesus to keep you safe, and He did."

"How's the arm?" Sam remembered Theia getting hit by one of Apollo's arrows at Bleaney.

"Ain't what it used to be," Theia said, flexing her elbow gingerly. The joint would bend through only a few degrees of its full range of movement. "That's why I'm down to just a pistol. But it's still good. I'm good."

Over the comms came Iapetus's voice. "Ah, all Titans? Iapetus. Anyone hear me? Little spot of bother here, and I'd really appreciate some help."

Sam consulted her visor display to gauge his whereabouts. Then, without another word, she rushed off in that direction, Hyperion and Theia close behind.