The Age of Zeus

75. AMPHITHEATRE

Ares and Iapetus were cat-and-mousing across the amphitheatre. The Olympian, though slowed by his damaged knee, pursued the Titan wherever he went, allowing him no quarter, no let-up. Iapetus jinked now this way, now that, but Ares stayed doggedly on his tail, battle axe swinging.

"Hold still, impudent mortal flea!" he shouted. "Hold still and fight me!"

"Can't really do that, mate," Iapetus replied, "on account of I value having my head attached to the rest of me."

"What makes you think I'll be so merciful as to lop your head off first?"

"Yeah, all the more reason not to stop moving then."

As Sam arrived on the scene, she could see Iapetus was beginning to tire. She could see, too, that Ares was as volcanically vigorous as ever, his bad leg notwithstanding. Bit by bit he was gaining ground on his quarry. Every lunge he made got him a little nearer. His axe blows were missing by an ever narrower margin. Iapetus wasn't being given a moment to stop and draw breath, let alone draw a weapon. Ares's relentless hounding would soon wear him out.

She raised her gun and blasted at Ares. Spurts of sand kicked up at his feet. A couple of rounds dinged his armour but failed to penetrate. He glanced over his shoulder long enough to sneer at her, then resumed his pursuit of Iapetus. Shots from Hyperion's coilgun blew a series of small craters in the ascending stone seats behind Ares. Again the Olympian was unscathed.

"Ain't as if he's a big target or anything," Theia admonished.

"He's also leaping around like a jackrabbit," Hyperion retorted. "You're so damn deadeye dick, you try hitting him."

"Closer," said Sam. "We need to get in much closer."

She loped off across the amphitheatre's oval arena, threading between the archery targets and mannequins and items of outdoor exercise equipment. "Iapetus," she said over the comms, "lead him towards us. Maybe we can pincer him."

"I'll give it a try," Iapetus said, panting. "By the way, Tethys, thank God you're back, because these past few weeks, that bastard Hyperion's been mooning around like a koala without a gum tree."

"Save your breath. Just bring him to us."

"Fair go, I'll — Holy shit! All of you! Get down!"

Sam did as Iapetus said, dropping to a crouch without even thinking twice, and at that same instant an arrow embedded itself in the face of the mannequin nearest to her. If she'd been a split second later ducking, it would have gone straight through her own face.

She scurried round behind the mannequin as a further three arrows thwacked into the sandy floor where she had been squatting a moment earlier. Another four arrows stitched themselves in a neat line up the mannequin's leg. Sam hugged her knees in tight to her chest, making herself a ball. A TITAN suit was resistant to Apollo's shafts except, as Theia's experience had shown, at the joints, and Apollo was easily accurate enough to pierce those or the other vulnerable area, the face, which the acrylic glass of the visor would do little to protect.

Apollo had her trapped in position and was also dishing out the same treatment to Hyperion and Theia, forcing them to take cover with a rain of arrows. From a vantage point high up atop the amphitheatre's encircling seats he pivoted to shoot at each of the three Titans in turn, like a compass needle veering between different norths, and the arrows came thick and fast. He was loading the next as his bowstring was still vibrating from firing off the previous one.

"He's got to run out soon," Sam said. "When he does, we rush him."

But no sooner had the words left her lips than Hermes popped into view immediately behind Apollo, with a sheaf of fresh arrows in his arms, which he dumped into the Olympian archer's quiver. From the way Hermes was standing, Sam could only assume Demeter had fixed his injured feet. He vanished again, and the arrow storm continued unabated.

Iapetus, in the meantime, was near exhaustion. So was his battlesuit battery.

"I'm red-lining," he gasped, "and this mad-axeman drongo isn't giving up. Any ideas?"

"We're trying to get to you," Sam replied, "but Apollo's not letting us."

"Ah fuck it," said Iapetus, and Sam detected a kind of weary finality in his voice, and it chilled her. "Then there's only thing left to do."

"Iapetus…"

"All Titans, I just want you to know, you're a bunch of ruddy arseholes," Iapetus said, "and it's been a privilege working with you. Same goes for the dipsticks back at base."

Then he turned to address Ares.

"All right, big boy, you want me? I'm out of puff and standing still now. Come and get me."

He was indeed standing still, and Ares didn't hesitate to take advantage of the fact, springing towards Iapetus with his axe raised above his head double-handed. He brought it down on the Titan's shoulder in a whirring arc. The crunch of the impact was immense, and Iapetus, grunting, was driven to his knees. Sam saw his arm droop limply and knew that even though his suit had absorbed much of the force of the blow, such was Ares's strength that he had at the very least numbed the nerves in the arm and perhaps had broken Iapetus's collarbone.

"That the best you could do?" Iapetus said tightly. "And here was I thinking you were the god of war. God of woofters is more like it."

With a bellow of annoyance Ares lofted the axe again and whirled it round in a semicircle to slam the blade into Iapetus's flank. The Titan sprawled sidelong onto the amphitheatre floor, and over the comms Sam heard him moan, the sound of someone in gruelling pain. To Ares he gasped, "No, I take it back. Even a woofter would hit harder than that."

Ares straddled his fallen opponent, chest heaving in triumph. "You would do well not to mock me. It will only prolong your ordeal."

"I'll tell you what's an ordeal, mate — having to listen to you yabber on in that stupid gruff voice of yours. Anyone ever tell you you sound like Russell Crowe with a hangover?"

Infuriated, Ares whammed the axe three times onto Iapetus's back. The Titan convulsed with each blow, and the third of them finally managed to crack the battlesuit. Splinters of polycarbonate erupted around the blade.

"Ha!" Ares exclaimed. "Your shell is broken, so-called Titan. What have you got to say for yourself now? Death is just seconds away. Any more smart remarks?"

Iapetus did mutter some words, but so softly that Ares couldn't hear.

Sam, on the other hand, could.

"Base — Myrmidon Protocol."

And in London, Jamie McCann replied, "Aw no, Iapetus. No."

"Myrmidon. Do it, you useless Scots bastard."

"But the failsafe. Myrmidon won't work while the CPU's still detecting a pulse."

"Bet Patanjali can override that, can't he?"

"He says yes."

"Then do it. I'm crocked anyway."

"Come on, speak up," said Ares. He levered his fingers under the rim of Iapetus's visor and snapped it off. "There, that's better. Now I can hear you properly. Wouldn't want your last words to be a feeble mumble, would we? Say your bit, and die like a man."

"And you," Iapetus replied, loud and clear, "die like the lame-brained boofhead you are."

He clamped an arm around Ares's leg and held on tight, and then the nanobots, having been switched to Myrmidon mode, went to work. They began to eat into Iapetus's suit, but latched onto Ares as well. Anything they came into contact with, they swarmed over swiftly and voraciously. Ares stared down at his leg as the copper greave that sheathed his shin started to disappear before his very eyes, thinning, losing solidity, crumbling to a shower of fine glittering granules. The same was happening to his axe, which was still embedded in Iapetus's backplate. The blade was falling to pieces, becoming metallic dust, and now the haft was disappearing too, but Ares was too stupefied to let go, and then the nanobots were on his hand and eating through his copper gauntlet like an army of invisible termites. He flapped the hand in the air as if this might shake off whatever was attacking him, but of course that was impossible. He tried to free his leg from Iapetus's grip but that too was unshakeable, ineluctable.

"In case you were wondering," Iapetus growled, "you've been bitten by the Barracuda."

And then he started screaming, and Ares started screaming too, as the nanobots dug through to the skins of both men, and then their flesh, gnawing away at startling speed, like acid, and burrowing deeper still, into bone, into marrow.

The combined screams rose in a ghastly crescendo, and Sam clutched the sides of her helmet in an effort to block it out, but of course she couldn't block out the signal from Iapetus's comms this way. It was sickening, almost unendurable, a man's mortal agony being fed direct into her ears, but at long last it began to fade, subsiding to a series of rasping sobs, and these suddenly cut out as a crucial piece of circuitry succumbed to the nanobots' attentions.

Ares's cries of pain carried on, though. The nanobots had made quicker work of Iapetus because there had been considerably more of them on him to begin with than on Ares. They continued to throng over the Olympian's body but their progress was slower, incremental, a more protracted torment. His hand was gone, his arm ending in a stump that seemed to fizz as the nanobots wormed further up, eroding. His leg too was gone from the thigh down, the tip of his femur protruding, sharpened to a point by the depredations of the 'bots. He was half sitting, half kneeling on the ground, and writhing helplessly, and the sand around him was dark brown with his and Iapetus's blood. Eventually shock set in, and Ares slumped forwards. The nanobots munched on, occupying the last few moments of their lives with consumption of the Olympian's spasmodically shuddering form.

In the end, by the time the nanobots' five minutes of Myrmidonhood were up, almost a third of Ares had been dissolved, vanished as though rubbed out by an eraser. The dust to which parts of him had been reduced was all but indistinguishable from the sand the remainder of him lay on.

One threat had been dealt with. But Apollo remained at large.