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.
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.'
