Here she found Sparks/Theia, who was in a squatting position with her back to Sam, bodystocking bunched around her ankles to expose the pear-shape of her bare buttocks. Portions of her battlesuit lay near her, neatly stacked on a scrubby patch of grass. Her rifle was with them, just out of her reach.
Theia was staring straight ahead. Her entire body was trembling, gripped with dread, and a stream of faeces was squirting out of her and plopping onto the mud between her feet.
Understandably — because in front of her, rearing out of the water, was the Hydra.
It was like some hideous huge sea anemone. The nine necks that sprouted frond-fashion from its body waved sinuously, balletically alongside one another, sometimes entwining, sometimes vying for position, dripping swamp water as they writhed. Each was capped with a serpentine head into which were set bulbous pus-yellow eyes that glowed with venomous greed. The body itself, mostly submerged, was reminiscent of a lizard's, sheathed in fleshy grey-green scales, with a ridge of finny dorsal spines.
Glaring down at Theia, paralysed and shitting herself with terror, the Hydra opened all nine of its mouths at once and let out a multiplicity of sibilant hisses. Fangs were revealed — nine sets of them, more fangs than Sam could count or wanted to count, and even the smallest longer than her little finger.
For a second — a single, endless-seeming second — Sam just wanted to scream and run away. Never mind that she had watched film of this monster, that she already knew what it looked like, knew what to expect. Seeing a video clip was nothing compared with coming face-to-face with the actual thing. The documentarians' onscreen deaths were preparation but not inoculation. Every bit of her squirmed in primal, atavistic disgust.
Then the reek of the Hydra's breath hit her. It was quite the most repulsive thing she had ever smelled — worse, far worse, than the smell she had once been greeted by on entering a flat in a tower block in Stoke Newington, where she and Prothero had been called after the discovery was made of the three-day-old corpse of a Nigerian people-trafficker. She had puked then, and thought subsequently that this death stench was the most unpleasant olfactory assault her nose had ever suffered and would ever have to suffer. She'd been wrong. She felt beyond nauseated now, sickened to the core of her being. The smell of the Hydra's breath was the smell of decay and slime and marshes and bloat magnified a hundredfold, something dredged up from the bottom of the most stinking, disease-ridden cesspool imaginable, something that would make flies caper in the air with glee before the noxiousness of it sent them spiralling to the ground stone-cold dead.
But it had one benefit. It was so shockingly repugnant, that smell, that it roused her from her fear-struck stupor. It galvanised her into action. If only to get rid of it, purge the smell from the vicinity, Sam raised her gun and fired. Bullets raked the Hydra's flank. A chain of holes erupted in the monster's scaly hide, spurting blood. Meanwhile, dimly, she could hear Landesman ordering Iapetus and Rhea to go to her assistance.
The Hydra roared in pain, all nine heads abruptly switching their attention from Theia to Sam, which had in part been her intention. The creature launched itself up the beach towards her, and even as it came Sam could see the bullet holes healing, flesh puckering shut as though being sealed from within with putty.
She loosed off another volley of shots, aiming this time at one of the heads. Fragments of skull and gobbets of brain flew away, and the Hydra howled and recoiled. Its other eight heads swivelled to inspect the damaged one. Though Sam had blown it half off, the head rapidly regenerated itself. With astonishing speed the plates of the skull re-grew, knitted together and were patched over with fresh skin. A new eye appeared, popping up to fill a socket that had been hollowed out by the gunfire. It all happened as if in a piece of time-lapse film — from ruin to repair in a matter of seconds — until once more the monster had nine identical intact heads.
It lunged at Sam again with all nine mouths gaping wide, claws propelling it up the beach, gouging furrows in the mud. In her ear Landesman was urging her to stay calm. 'Take another head off,' he said. 'Drive it back. The others are on their way.' More faintly she could hear Ramsay, further from the mic at mission control, giving much the same advice.
Sam did as bidden, strafing the frontmost head and all but severing it below the jaw. Immediately another of the Hydra's heads finished the job for her, chewing the loosely dangling head free so that it fell to the ground. This left the way clear for a new head to sprout up from the stump of the neck, flesh and bone swelling and taking shape like a cunningly wrought balloon.
Sam barely paused to register this small miracle. She removed another head. That too was swiftly replaced, as was a third. The Hydra found these decapitations agonising, but each succeeded only in stalling it briefly. It kept on coming up the beach, growing angrier with every step, keener than ever to reach the human who was tormenting it in this way and rend her limb from limb.
Then the gun ran dry. Sam ejected the magazine and groped for a fresh one, and the Hydra, spying an opening, charged at her with redoubled ferocity.
It was mere feet away, and Sam was still trying to slot the new magazine into place, when, to her left, a shotgun blast boomed. The Hydra, struck in the belly, staggered sideways. A Titan appeared from the palmetto thicket. The transponder sensor display in Sam's visor informed her this was Iapetus, although she knew anyway. Not only was Barrington fond of pump-action shotguns, but he was also yelling at the top of his lungs, hurling every insult he could think of at the Hydra, most of them relating to sexual organs, illegitimacy and, in true Ocker tradition, species of native Australian wildlife. 'Gift from the Barracuda!' he cried as he unloaded three more cartridges into the monster, hacking fist-sized craters out of it. The wounds of course soon filled themselves in, but they diverted the Hydra from Sam long enough to allow her to reload, and then she joined in the assault again.
All at once the Hydra was looking less enraged, more beleaguered. Its necks thrashed this way and that as it tried to respond to being besieged on two fronts at once. Sam sprayed away with her submachine gun while Iapetus gave the monster buckshot hell. The pair of them were far from repelling the Hydra, let alone killing it, but they were holding it at bay if nothing else.
'Rhea?' Sam said into the comms. 'Where the hell are you, Rhea?'
Her gun ran dry again. Iapetus gave her covering fire while she smacked a full magazine into place, and just as she did so, Rhea came into view immediately to her left.
'Finally,' Sam said. 'Ready?'
'Ready,' said Rhea. She sparked her flamethrower into life with its magnesium igniter. A finger of fire rippled out from the nozzle. 'Let's do it.'
Briskly Sam deprived the Hydra of another of its heads, then Rhea stepped up and subjected the neck stump to a concentrated jet of fire. Meat crackled and sizzled, and eight Hydra mouths simultaneously let out eight piercing shrieks.
The two Titans repeated the process again, and again. Hydra heads thudded into the beach mud. The severed ends of Hydra necks became ovals of charred, blistered flesh and bone. The odour of cooking reptile filled the air, oddly pleasant, certainly when compared with the smell of the Hydra itself.
'It's working,' Rhea said, slapping a fresh capsule of hydrazine into the flamethrower's reservoir breech. 'Landesman was right.'
Landesman had theorised that the Hydra would have a much harder time repairing burns than any other kind of injury. 'It was Hercules's method, in the myths,' he had said. 'Behead, then burn.'
The cauterised stumps did start to re-grow new heads, but at a greatly retarded rate. The burnt tissue had to be sloughed off first before the proto-head could bubble up and take shape. Now Tethys and Rhea were in a race against the clock. They needed to destroy all nine heads before any of them could renew itself completely. Entirely headless, the monster would surely not survive.
Landesman had made Tethys and Rhea spend a whole afternoon rehearsing this move back at Bleaney. Iapetus was contributing now by taking potshots at the gradually emerging new heads, blowing them to smithereens while they were still just glistening, formless bulges.
All the same it required concentration and nerve to keep the production-line decapitation and cauterisation going, especially as the Hydra was rearing up and all of its necks, beheaded and otherwise, were thrashing to and fro, presenting a set of confusing and highly unstable targets. The monster stood its ground, at least. It seemed fully aware that these humans had discovered a vulnerability which they were exploiting without mercy, but it was either too enraged or too stubborn to think of retreating. Perhaps it simply couldn't believe that after all these years spent at the top of the food chain, during which time it had got used to humans being slow-moving and almost willing prey, it could ever be defeated. It continued to hiss and snap viciously at the Titans even as they whittled its headcount down to three, then two.
At last only a single head remained. Its features had a look of distress and resignation about them, and the baleful yellow glare in that final remaining pair of eyes was suddenly dulled. The Hydra knew the game was up. As if
