'The servos are sealed units,' said McCann. 'The electrics and electronics are water-resistant, pretty much. I'm not promising — '
'Pretty much is good enough. Rhea?'
'Yes? Bit busy here.'
'Leave the Field Marshal.'
'I can't. He'll — '
'He can cope. Leave him. We're going to rush Poseidon, the four of us. Top speed. Push ourselves through that dome. The seal on the visors should allow us enough air to breathe to do the job. Whoever reaches him first…'
The sentence didn't need finishing. Hyperion loped off, head down, swiftly building up momentum. Theia followed, then Sam. Rhea rapidly explained the plan to Armstrong-Hall, who nodded consent. Then, breaking away from him, she too accelerated towards Poseidon. The four Titans battered their way through water tentacles that lashed ripplingly at them. Hyperion let out a wordless war cry that grew in volume and intensity as he neared Poseidon's protective dome, becoming an abandoned, here-goes-nothing howl as he hit the curved wall of water and plunged headlong in. Theia jumped in straight after him. Then came Rhea, and finally Sam.
The impact was weird — not like diving into water, more like entering a thick, slimy layer of silica gel. Air bubbles erupted around Sam with a measured effervescence, roiling away and popping slowly. She felt herself begin to decelerate almost immediately, inertia giving way to entropy, and she could see the same happening to the others. All at once they were moving like divers at deep-fathom pressures, fighting against the extra density and viscosity Poseidon had introduced into the water.
But they were moving. Making headway, too. The dome stopped bullets, but bullets did not have the power of independent locomotion. All four Titans were closing in on Poseidon, Hyperion to the fore, and the Olympian was aware of their presence, their proximity, but there was very little he could do about it at that moment other than reinforce the dome still further. Sam felt the water tighten around her, pressing in on the suit, and redoubled her efforts. The servos responded, and she continued to wade through. Water began to seep in around the edge of her visor but it oozed rather than flowed. Its own gluey consistency prevented it from rushing in and flooding her helmet.
She and the other Titans were inside the dome for less than a minute. It felt longer, as though the water retarded time as well as physical objects. Everything wavered and wobbled around Sam. Her hand batted aside a drifting bullet as she thrust herself through, using her arms as much as her legs to propel her along.
With Hyperion mere inches away from breaching the dome's inner surface, Poseidon concluded that his only practical option was to drop his defences altogether. The dome lost cohesion in an eyeblink, collapsing in a great sloshing downrush of water, which exploded back upwards as it hit the floor, like some tremendous circular sea wave crashing on the shore and breaking almost to its original height.
In the midst of this white frothing up-burst the four Titans shot forwards as the impetus they'd accumulated within the dome wall, no longer restrained, was suddenly released — an unintended consequence for both them and Poseidon. They hurtled helplessly at the Olympian from different directions, colliding with him almost as one. He could not stop them, and the quadruple impact was bone-crunching. Sam, even above the roar of water cascading all around, heard something within Poseidon's body snap as she struck him with her shoulder.
The Titans rebounded, sprawling. Poseidon simply crumpled on the spot where he'd been standing, like a marionette discarded by its puppeteer. Similarly, and simultaneously, the swimming-pool jellyfish subsided out of existence. The dozens of soldiers being marauded by it walloped down onto the gleaming dark blue tiles.
The Olympian had been fatally injured.
But he was not dead.
As Sam struggled to a kneeling position, Poseidon was already extending one quivering hand towards Theia. Divining what he was up to, Sam started scuttling towards him with a cry of 'No!'
Too late.
Theia was convulsing. Her limbs twisted and contorted as though she were having an extremely violent kind of fit. Her head came up, and Sam was staring her in the face, looking straight into two bulging, uncomprehending, scarlet-tinged eyes. And then Theia's face was gone. There was only blood, a massive blurt of it splurging out from every facial orifice and painting the interior of the visor dark red.
Theia slumped flat. Poseidon turned his attention to Rhea, who was lying on her side and fumblingly trying to detach a pistol from her suit. Suddenly she went rigid. A fraction of a second later, Sam leapt on Poseidon and started punching him in the face with everything she had. It amazed even her how fast her arm was moving — up and down like a steam piston pumping at full tilt — and how much damage each servo-assisted blow inflicted. Poseidon's features seemed to dissolve under the barrage, losing everything — shape, solidity, humanity. She felt bits of him cracking and splintering under her fist. She had punched through a drystone wall once. By a comparison a man's skull, even an Olympian's, was hardly anything.
She didn't dare stop. She planned to keep battering Poseidon until there was nothing left of him. It was Hyperion, however, who delivered the coup de grace. He bent down and grabbed the sides of the Olympian's head while Sam was still belabouring it with her fist, and he wrenched it up double-handed, detaching base of skull from topmost vertebra. Poseidon's face, such as it now was, froze as if in shock. His mouth gaped, revealing two runs of shattered teeth. His head lolled to the side. Another Olympian had been scratched off the list.
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
