'As was I.' Landesman smiled paternally at the engineer. 'Off you go. You've done well. Back into your civvies.'
McCann went over to the other technicians, who began helping him divest himself of the suit. Landesman, meanwhile, returned the coilgun to the armoury, then addressed his eleven recruits again.
'So you've seen the battlesuit in action. What do you think?'
'That's supposed to make us superior to the Olympians?' said Harryhausen.
'What is the single greatest disadvantage an ordinary person has against the Olympians?' Landesman asked rhetorically. 'Vulnerability. The TITAN suits do away with that. They compensate for the relative physical weakness of us mere humans by giving us a sturdy, almost impregnable exoskeleton. I'm not suggesting that wearing one would allow you to go toe-to-toe with, say, Hercules, trading punches. But it would afford protection from the worst of any damage he tried to inflict, and its stealth capability would allow you to sneak up on him, and night vision would enable you to do so under cover of darkness. And you've seen the kind of cutting-edge weapons available here. I'm not offering unqualified superiority to the Pantheon. What I am offering is a significantly levelled playing field.'
'But there's just eleven of us,' said Barrington, 'and how many of them?'
'Twelve, not counting the monsters,' said Chisholm. 'The standard canonical Dodekatheon. Plus Hercules and Dionysus, who are in the Kos Dodekatheon but not the canonical. Hercules, by tradition, is a demigod, but he still counts. Then there's Argus. Nobody's quite sure which he is, mainly because nobody's ever seen him — god or monster or something in between. So, depending on how you look at it, you could say there are thirteen in all, thirteen and a half, even fourteen and a half.'
'And each of them, each of the main ones, is worth a regiment of soldiers at least,' said Barrington. 'I mean, Hamlet here fought with a whole army against just half a dozen, and look how that turned out.'
Sondergaard scowled at the Australian. 'Hamlet?'
'Only famous Dane I could think of, mate.'
'Hans Christian Andersen? Kierkegaard? Niels Bohr? Karen Blix-?'
'Mate, you should be grateful I've heard of any Danes at all. I'm just saying, your country's entire armed forces took on six Olympians and lost. That's however many battalions, and the eleven of us wouldn't even make a company. Sorry, Landesman, super-suits or not, the maths just doesn't add up.'
'But it isn't just about the suits, Dez,' Landesman said smoothly. 'It'll be the tactics as well. I've a strategy mapped out that Athena herself would be proud of. A handful of Titan troops going up against the Olympians in a full-frontal assault would be, I grant you, futile. Tantamount to suicide. A series of low-key, guerrilla-style attacks, on the other hand, picking them off one by one…'
Eto'o's ears pricked up. 'They wander the world,' she said. 'They're not always to be found on Mount Olympus. They argue among themselves too often for all of them to stay there all of the time. They're often alone.'
'Precisely. And I'd be drawing particularly on your knowhow, Soleil, your experience and expertise in the field of counter-Olympian insurgency.'
'I would be happy to share it.'
'I'm asking,' Landesman said to all eleven of them, 'for six months of your lives. That's how long I envisage this taking. Six months to rid the world of the Olympian scourge. Six months to restore humanity's control of its own destiny. In the ancient myths, it was the gods who rose up against the Titans. The Titans were the children of Uranus, powerful, primeval creatures he could not control. Their name itself derives from the Greek verb teino, meaning 'I strain,' because according to Hesiod in his Theogony they 'strained in insolence.' They rampaged around, uncontrollable. Zeus was the son of one of them, Cronus. Cronus had a habit of eating his offspring, swallowing them whole so that none of them could turn on him and depose him, but Zeus managed to escape that fate. He forced Cronus to vomit up his fellow gods, then enlisted their aid in attacking him. So began the Titanomachy, the War of the Titans. Sorry, am I boring you, Dez?'
'No, mate, don't mind me. You carry on. I always yawn when I'm fascinated.'
'That war lasted ten years. Eventually the immortals overthrew the Titans and took their place as rulers of the world. The Titans were imprisoned in the bowels of the earth, and Zeus — well, he castrated his father.'
'Is that what's going on in that charming picture over there?' said Ramsay, indicating the mural. 'Is that Zeus with that — that Batman scythe?' The blade of the scythe was black and curiously batwing-shaped. If Batman ever had need of a pre-technological farming implement, it would surely look like the one in the painting.
'Ah, no,' said Landesman. 'There is no famous image of the castration of Cronus, unfortunately, so what you're looking at is a reproduction of Vasari's fresco The Castration Of Uranus. It's Cronus who's doing the testicular lopping off there and his father, Uranus, who's the poor fellow being deprived of his assets. In that respect Zeus, when he chose to remove Cronus's testicles, was simply following on in a patrilinear tradition. Apparently a lot of that sort of thing went on between the gods and their daddies. It's a recurring motif.'
'Paging Dr Freud,' said Hamel.
'Indeed,' said Landesman.
'Don't tell me,' said Ramsay. 'There's some kinda code hidden in the picture, right? Some historical message that reveals the secret of the Olympians. Dan Brown's working on the novel even as we speak.'
'I'm afraid the answer's no, although it's an ingenious guess. There's no code, no secret message. The painting is just a painting, albeit a splendid and rather beautiful one. Oh, and by the way, the blade of the scythe looks like that because it's supposed to be made of knapped flint. Most pre-Bronze Age tools used flint, Vasari's point being that the myth is ancient, even by classical standards.'
'So what's the mural up there for?' Sam asked. 'If it's to cheer up the workplace, you'd probably have been better off with a picture of Daniel Craig or a kitten in a tree instead.'
'I had it painted there as a — you could say as a source of inspiration,' replied Landesman. 'A reminder of gods' natures. Their cruelty, their vindictiveness. What I'm actually intending to do, with the help of you people, is invert the Titan story. An act of symmetry. I'm proposing Titanomachy II, an uprising of Titans against the gods, or whatever the Olympians actually are. And just as Zeus and his Olympian cohorts succeeded in defeating the Titans, I fully anticipate that events in the real world will mirror myth — you, my Titans, will defeat the Olympians. If, that is, you're willing. Are you? Now that you've some idea of the resources you'll have at your disposal, the level of logistical and technological support I'll be able to provide, are you up for this? Half a year to eliminate the entire Pantheon and lay to rest the ghosts that haunt you. Come on, what do you say?'
Nothing.
'Tell you what,' Landesman continued, unfazed, 'I'll give you a week to decide. You start training with the battlesuits tomorrow, testing out some of the weaponry as well.'
'Tomorrow?' said Ramsay. 'Isn't that kinda soon? Some of us have lives, you know. We can't drop everything and start working for you, just like that.'
'Is that so, Mr Ramsay? I daresay you, for one, could put everything on hold, close down your life, with just a couple of phone calls. I daresay all of you could. You've all come here with few burdens and even fewer emotional ties. That was intentional on my part. Be honest. Whatever you have at home, how hard will it be to leave behind? Even just for a week. And if after that week any of you come to the conclusion that this isn't for you, fine, you may depart without a stain on your reputation and with head held high. You won't be leaving me short-handed. I have reserve candidates. How about that? A fair deal, I'd have thought.'
8. PAIRING OFF
By her second day trialling the TITAN suit, Sam was half convinced she would quit once the week was out. By her third day, she was fully convinced.
She couldn't seem to get the knack of using the suit. She felt as if she were fighting it rather than wearing it. The servos made her limbs want to do things she didn't want them to. When she raised an arm, the suit tried to get her to loft it into the air. When she put a foot forward to walk, the suit urged her to leap. She spent a great deal of time tottering, almost falling over, and falling over, like a novice ice skater or a little girl trying on mummy's high heels. Out of the others, only Mahmoud was having similar problems. The rest got to grips with the suits relatively
