He swung the camera round to show the reporter, whose suit was a cheap designer knockoff, and the cameraman, scruffily but more honestly dressed in jeans, windcheater and Phillies cap. Both of them were very scared, but the cameraman was doing the better job of hiding it. He fixed Hercules with a hard stare.
'See them?' the Olympian sneered. 'These cogs in the media machine. They work for… Which channel do you work for?'
The reporter told him.
'Well,' said Hercules, 'I have a message for your employers, and for everyone watching. And it's this: do not harass us, do not question us, do not cast us in a bad light, do not challenge us — in short, do not fuck with us. Because this is what happens to those who do.'
The image juddered wildly, as though an earthquake had just struck. It broke up into green and white squares, then stuttered, blinking in and out of blackness. This was soundtracked by yells of pain, and thumps, and then some ghastly wet crunching noises.
Finally normal transmission resumed. The camera had been set down on the ground, on its side. There was a spidery pattern of cracks across the lens. There were spatters of red on the lens as well. And lying within shot, slumped on the now-vertical sidewalk as though leaning against a wall, were the reporter and the cameraman. They were recognisable by their clothes only. Where they had once had heads, now they had collapsed, vaguely head-shaped messes. Their hair was matted with blood and dribbles of brain matter. Shards of skull poked out here and there. The slap-slap sound of Hercules's sandalled footfalls could be heard, diminishing in volume. Far off, a woman started screaming.
Then, thankfully, someone back at the studio had the presence of mind to cut the live feed.
Landesman, Lillicrap and Sam were silent. Stunned. Sickened.
'My God,' Landesman said at last. 'That was… My God. Truly horrible. But looking on the bright side — and there is one, and we must look on it — Hercules's timing can't be faulted. What a godsend, no pun intended. He's just handed us a propaganda coup. Our second today. First the Agonides clip, now this. Nobody, seeing what we've just seen, can have any uncertainty any more that what the Titans are doing is right, that we're on the side of the angels. If anybody was hesitant about backing us before, they won't be now.'
'Popularity is all well and fine,' said Sam. 'I'd rather have the public on my side than against me. But it's hardly going to help us win the war, is it?'
'We'll see, Sam,' said Landesman. 'If things continue to go as I hope they do… well, you never know. Public support might just make all the difference.'
32. THE MINOTAUR
T he Resistenza Contru-Diu Corsu, to be honest, did very little actual resisting but talked a good fight and had made enough of a nuisance of itself to warrant the Olympians' interest and earn their antipathy.
That was principally on the strength of two incidents. The first took place during a diplomatic visit by Aphrodite to the island's capital Ajaccio, when the goddess of love came under fire from an RCDC member with an antiquated Kalashnikov. The sniper's accuracy was hampered by three things: the age of his rifle, the half bottle of cognac he had downed beforehand in order to steady his nerves, and the fact that, in his crosshairs, Aphrodite looked so lusciously, delectably beautiful that it seemed to him almost a crime to damage such magnificent female physical perfection in any way. All these factors conspired to make him miss her by a mile and instead wing his country's president and gravely wound the regional prefet, both of whom were sharing a podium with the Olympian as they bestowed on her the freedom of the island and a civic medal or some such meaningless official trinket.
Immediately, Aphrodite spoke over the PA system, calling for calm and asking the would-be assassin to step forward and show himself. This the man did, because there were few who could resist the call of Aphrodite's voice or the love that she exuded. He left his rooftop vantage point and walked through the crowd of startled onlookers to the podium, where he knelt submissively before the Olympian, telling her over and over how much he loved her and how sorry he was for trying to kill her. Aphrodite then invited the people from the crowd to come up and hit him. One by one they complied, gladly, with beatific smiles and any hard objects that came to hand. It took them half an hour to beat the man to death, and he relished every minute of his slow capital punishment with a smile no less beatific.
On the other occasion, Apollo dropped by with a view to hunting the indigenous Corsican red deer, an endangered species which he took closer to the brink of extinction by shooting great numbers of them in the Parc Naturel Regional with his bow and arrows. The RCDC, discovering a streak of conservationist concern within themselves that they'd never known they had, waxed indignant. To protect the poor deer they laced the nature reserve with tripwires attached to grenades which were in turn attached to tree trunks. Apollo, however, was too sharp-sighted to fail to spot the tripwires, and decided to make a sport of splitting them from a range of 100 metres or more and detonating the grenades. A couple of the red deer also sprang the traps, inadvertently, which somewhat undercut the whole purpose of laying them in the first place. So much for the RCDC's new-found green credentials. So much, too, for a number of RCDC members. Apollo elected to remain a little longer in Corsica and to hunt much more interesting game. His tally, by the end of his stay, stood at 52 deer, 9 men, 2 women, and one child. Of the twelve humans he bagged, seven definitely belonged to the RCDC, three were suspected of belonging, one had strong ties to the resistance, and one, the child, was simply an innocent bystander who happened to stray into the path of an arrow. Apollo claimed he deeply regretted the death of the last, although he added, with some pride at his own prowess, that his shaft passed clean through the little girl's head, from ear to ear, and continued onward to kill its intended target. A shot in a million, and a quick, instant death that had barely left a mark on the kid. To look at her, lying on the ground, you'd have thought she had just fallen asleep.
There were demonstrations, of course. Protest marches on the streets of Ajaccio, Bastia, Corte and other major towns. The girl, Ghjuvanna Venturini, became a martyr, her death leading countless hitherto unaligned Corsicans to rally to the RCDC's cause.
The Olympians' solution was the typical one: send in a monster. The Minotaur was relieved of its duties in Crete, where it had been busy stamping down on unrest in the aftermath of the tidal wave — the wave which took the lives of Deborah and Megan Chisholm among many others. The Cretans' anger had more or less run its course, so Hermes took the man-bull from its spiritual homeland and transported it northwest across the Mediterranean to the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte where, for almost a year now, it had been carrying out a similar function as it had on Crete. The mountains that occupied most of Corsica's interior were where the RCDC could be found. Heavily forested on their lower slopes, dotted with nigh-on inaccessible villages, riddled with clefts and caves and secret valleys, the mountains were a great place to hide. Through them wound a labyrinth of goat paths and narrow rocky defiles, the solution of which, if it had one, was known only to the locals.
The Minotaur, however, if legend was to be believed, had form when it came to things labyrinthine. No maze fazed it. It stomped along the mountain passes, trekking from village to village, and anyone who challenged it, anyone who got in its way, anyone who so much as looked at it funny, it attacked. No warning, no hesitation, the Minotaur just put its head down and charged. Few could outrun it. Fewer still could survive being tossed or gored by its horns.
Once or twice an RCDC member might manage to get off a lucky shot at the beast before, inevitably, becoming its next victim. Bullets, however, barely pierced the man-bull's thick black hide, and the sting of their impact was an irritant rather than a deterrent. A surefire way to get the Minotaur angry at you was to take a potshot at it.
Landesman told the Titans that this should be borne in mind when it came to killing the monster.
'Nothing short of a rocket or a coilgun is going to put the thing down,' he said. 'Lesser weapons will simply annoy it and draw its attention. You'd be waving a — No, I shan't say it. Too trite.'
'A red rag to a bull?' said Barrington.
'I was so trying to avoid the simile.'
'You want the obvious said, Landy old mate, you can always rely on me.'
'I know, Dez. I know.'
That was during the pre-op briefing. Now, two days later, five Titans were in the field — Tethys, Mnemosyne, Hyperion, Iapetus, Crius — and they had just spent a hot, dusty, and ultimately fruitless nine hours combing the
