The Age of Zeus

78. GODS' END

"Rhea…"

Sam rolled off Poseidon's body and crawled over to her fellow Titan.

"I'm all right," Rhea rasped. She didn't sound it, though. She wasn't moving, and through her visor Sam could see a face that was perplexed and slightly panicked. "I just can't — can't feel anything. My arms, my legs… Won't move. Nothing works. I think he might have — "

"Uh, all Titans." McCann. "It's Cronus. The old geezer's been doing pretty well for himself 'til now, but he's squaring off against Zeus, and it's just him, and I think he could do with reinforcements."

Sam looked at Hyperion, then Rhea.

"Go," Rhea said. "There's nothing you can do for me right now. Go help him."

"Hang in there. I'll be back as soon as I can."

Rhea gave a short, mirthless laugh. "I'm not going anywhere."

They didn't need transponder sensors to tell them where Cronus was. All they had to do was follow the lightning, which crackled in the air above the agora, darting this way and that through the mist in silvery veins. In the agora itself, the flashes weirdly illuminated a tableau of ruin and death. At one end, amid tumbled columns, lay Dionysus. He had been crushed by falling masonry. His eyes were wide and unseeing. All colour and jollity were gone from his face.

Not far from him Demeter sat hunched over, cradling Hera's head in her lap. Hera was as lifeless as Dionysus, Sam could tell that at a glance. Demeter, however, refused to accept it.

"I can heal you," she sobbed. "I can bring you back, O Hera Of The Height." Her hands probed the many bullet wounds that riddled Hera's body, but nothing happened. The wounds stayed open. Hera was in a state that not even Demeter's curative power could remedy.

But the main business of the scene was taking place in the centre of the agora, beside the wreckage of the Super Puma. There, Zeus and Cronus stood face to face, their bodies rigid and bowed, bent towards each other like two sides of an arch that didn't quite meet at the top.

Father and son reunion. For the first time in a decade and a half Regis and Xander Landesman were in each other's presence, and talking.

Or rather shouting.

"This was mine!" said Zeus. " My dream! My achievement! I did it without any help from you. I worked hard, I struggled to make it happen, but you just couldn't let me have it, could you? You just couldn't bear the idea of your son being better than you, more powerful, more successful. So you had to come along and tear it all down."

"This isn't about me and you, Xander," Landesman retorted. He had his visor up so that he could look his son straight in the eye. "You think I'd go to all this trouble to destroy you and your Olympians out of some kind of jealousy? You're mad. You've turned into a power-crazed megalomaniac — a mass-murdering monster. Someone had to stop you. Someone had to end this tyranny of yours."

"And it simply had to be you, did it?"

"I'm your father. I brought you into the world. I bear some of the responsibility for what you've done, what you've become. The blood-guilt is mine. Therefore it's only right that I should be the one who brings you down."

The lightning flashes were coming thicker and faster overhead. Hyperion took a step towards Zeus and Cronus, levelling his coilgun, but Sam restrained him with a hand.

"This is their moment. Let them be."

"I can take out Zeus while his guard's down."

"It's a standoff. It might resolve itself peacefully."

Hyperion let out a sceptical huff of breath, but stayed where he was, coilgun not fully raised.

"You're a danger to everyone," Cronus told his son.

"No, only to anyone who opposes me," said Zeus. "Do you not understand what I've managed to do here? Do you not realise how good I've made life for billions of people?"

"Do you not realise how bad you've made it, Xander? So bad it makes me ashamed. That's all I've felt these past ten years, nothing but shame."

"Your feelings aren't my concern. I don't seek your approval. I never have."

"Your mother would have been ashamed too."

"Don't bring her into this! Don't you dare!" Zeus bellowed. "You never deserved her. She was worth a thousand of you."

"You barely even knew her."

"I remember enough about her to know that she loved me more than your ever did or could."

"I loved you."

"No, you tolerated me at first. Then you resented me, and finally you despised me."

"I despise what you are now."

It struck Sam how truly alike these two men were. Their faces, pressed up to each other, were mirror images, almost. The level of antipathy radiating from both of them was near identical too.

"Then here I am, Dad," said Zeus, making the last word a vindictive snarl, a kind of accusation. "This is your chance to finish me. Take it. You won't get a better one. Or a second one."

"I don't want to kill you, Xander. I should, given how you did your level best to kill me. I ought to, in the light of all your crimes against humanity. But I don't. Can't you see that it's over? Your Olympians are dead. Olympus is overrun. You've nothing left. You're beaten. But you can still walk away from all this. Come back with me. Come home. Let's start again. I can protect you, look after you, give you a new shot at life."

"After fifteen years? After all that's happened? Hah! You must be joking."

Cronus looked saddened but not surprised. "I thought I should offer. You've refused. So I'm afraid you leave me with no choice."

Seizing Zeus's shoulder with one hand, he produced an oscillo-knife with the other.

"Let the punishment fit the crime," he said, and before Zeus could so much as blink, he plunged the buzzing blade into his son's crotch.

A sideways torque of the wrist.

A blossoming of blood across the front of Zeus's robe.

"Dad…?" Zeus said, his voice wavery, strangulated.

Cronus worked the oscillo-knife like a saw, hacking away at Zeus's genitals with a cold and remorseless efficiency. His other hand bore down, keeping Zeus planted firmly in place.

"This is the fate of kings of pantheons," he hissed. "And of fathers."

"Dad…"

The lightning began to coalesce. The brightness overhead grew as though a new sun was forming within the mist.

"Oh shit," muttered Hyperion.

Cronus was concentrating too hard on what he was doing to notice. Relishing the moment too much. "You took mine." The words were a hoarse hiss, only just audible. "Now I take yours."

"Daddy," Zeus moaned. "Please. No. Stop."

But Cronus paid no heed.

The lightning swelled into a vast, lambent sphere. Plasmic sparks wormed and veined across every surface in the agora. The air felt alive with power.

"We gotta get out of here," Hyperion said.

And Sam knew he was right, but she couldn't move. Couldn't turn. Couldn't tear herself away.

"Daddy!"

Something plopped wetly onto the flagstones between Zeus's feet. He was shuddering. The lower half of his robe was nothing but redness.

"Daddeeeee!!!"

Then the lightning broke, and the world went white. Not the filmy white of the mist. A pure, bleaching, incandescent white that penetrated every crack and corner and left no room for shadows, no dark crevices, nothing unilluminated. A whiteness like the beginning of Creation, or its end. Accompanied by a bang that was beyond sound, beyond comprehension, loud enough that it made any other noise a whisper by comparison — and a wave of intense heat and pressure that came like a giant, sweeping hand and drove all before it. A hurricane of burning brilliance that picked up Sam and Hyperion and whirled them and tangled them and tossed them aside, and left only a howling blackness in its wake.