you and you've spilled every secret you have she'll hand you over to my cousin Ares — a little gift to her lover. Likes a mortal woman now and then, does Ares, though I should warn you, he can get rather rough. Doesn't always know his own strength, if you know what I mean.'
'Cronus!' Sam tried again, urgency fraying her voice.
'Maybe he can't hear,' Ramsay said. 'I hope to God that's it.'
'Few mortals get the privilege of travelling with me, fraulein,' Hermes said. 'One moment we're here, the next — blink! — somewhere else. I understand it can be unpleasant if you're not used to it and not an Olympian. You'll probably feel rather sick afterwards. But a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime experience. Ready?'
He closed his eyes, summoning his concentration.
And that was when Phoebe struck.
She headbutted him, ramming the brow of her helmet onto the bridge of her nose. Hermes shrieked, and blood spurted from his nostrils. He didn't let go, however. He blinked, and then in retaliation he started to hammer at Phoebe's helmet with his caduceus again.
The blows coming rattlingly fast, like hail on a roof. Phoebe, it seemed, was helpless, with no choice but to endure the attack. But then Sam heard, distinctly even though it was a tiny sound amid all the commotion, the metallic tink of the pin being pulled from a grenade.
'Kerstin…' she sighed. Resigned. Knowing there was nothing she could do, and nothing else Phoebe could do.
Hermes ceased battering her. His nose had begun to swell, and a slick of blood coated his mouth and jaw.
'That really hurt, and it's going to cost you, bitch. One teleport? How about twenty? You'll be puking yourself inside out by the time we're done.'
There was a blizzard of onscreen static, and then Olympian and Titan were on a high hilltop somewhere, perhaps New Zealand. Lush grassland below. Pasture, with maggot-sized sheep.
Another blizzard of static.
They were in a desert. Copper-coloured sand dunes. Magnesium-flare sun.
More static.
An icy waste. A howling wind. Endless whiteness. Bleached blue sky.
And all Sam could think was, The grenade. He doesn't know.
Static.
Some city. Not New York. The other side of the world. Broad daylight. A dusty marketplace. Vendors yelling. Flies swarming over foodstuffs. India?
Static.
A rainforest. Liquid jungle sounds.
And then a burst of sharp light.
And then just static. Constant sizzling static, filling the screen from edge to edge.
46. THE MYRMIDON PROTOCOL
'B ase, Iapetus. Is Phoebe…?'
'Just get to the rendezvous point, Iapetus,' Sam said, voice sick and weary. 'There's nothing you can do now.'
'Shit.'
'Base, Rhea. What happened?'
'Phoebe's gone. But I think she might have taken Hermes with her.'
'For sure?'
'Don't know. Looks that way.'
'Coeus and her. My God.'
'I know.'
'Then I don't suppose more bad news is going to make any difference.' Rhea was speaking in hushed tones. 'I'm back at Gramercy Park. Can you see what I'm seeing?'
Sam could. Coeus's decapitated body lay where it had fallen, the head nearby still staring skyward, not far from Hercules's remains — and standing over the Titan's corpse, with their backs to Rhea, were three Olympians. Rhea was some way off from them, lurking in the shadow of an awning of the kind the smarter New York apartment blocks often had outside their front entrances. Nevertheless, even at a distance, Sam had no trouble identifying Zeus, Poseidon and high-helmed Athena.
'Please don't tell me you want me to engage, base.'
'Of course not. Get out of there, and try not to be seen.'
'Roger that.'
As Rhea loped away from the scene, sirens could be heard honking and caterwauling in the background. Blue and red light splashed off building facades to the rear of her.
'Cronus, base. Come in, Cronus,' Sam said.
'Cronus here.'
'Phoebe is down. Do you copy?'
His pace was slowing. He knew already. 'I gathered.'
'Were you aware that I asked you to go and help?'
'I… I must have missed that. I was running so hard — I assumed she was still with me.'
Sam hesitated. No, this was not a conversation they should have on air. Later. In person. Alone. It would wait.
'Understood, Cronus. Make rendezvous as soon as you can.'
'We got two of them, base,' Cronus said. 'That's not bad going for a day's work.'
'Only one of the kills is confirmed,' Sam replied. 'And they've got Coeus's body.'
'Yes, about that. Here's what you'll need to do. Implement the Myrmidon Protocol.'
'The what?'
'One of you there knows what I'm referring to.'
Baffled looks from Sam and Ramsay were met with a not so baffled look from Patanjali.
The IT wizard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. 'Before I say anything else, it wasn't my idea. It's nothing to do with me. I didn't come up with it, I just made it possible.'
'What is the Myrmidon Protocol, Rajesh?' Sam demanded.
'It's, er… It's preset remote reprogramming of the battlesuit nanotech. We send a command signal to the bots that reassigns their function from defence and camouflage to, um, to a process of intromittent erasure.'
'In English,' said Ramsay.
'Basically? We turn them into eating machines. They consume their way through everything they come into contact with for a period of exactly five minutes, self-replicating as they go, making new bots that are also eating machines. 'Everything' means battlesuit structure, weapons and, um, other stuff. Then, when time's up, they deactivate and go inert. They turn into a big heap of grey goop.'
'It's a self-destruct mechanism,' Sam said.
'In layman's terms, yes.'
'In anyone's terms.'
'And the body,' said Ramsay. 'Anders's body. That gets eaten too.'
'Superficially,' said Patanjali. 'Enough to make identification difficult, if not impossible. It's pretty brilliant, really. Don't you agree?' Their faces told him they didn't. 'In a cold-hearted way. I mean, obviously, from a certain viewpoint it could seem kind of callous. But to repurpose the nanobots like that — inspired. They become like ants, submicroscopic ants, munching their way through their environment. Myrmidons were a band of mythical Greek soldiers, led by Achilles. It's in the Iliad. Their armour made them look like ants. Myrmex — that's Ancient Greek for ant. Hence the…'
He trailed off.
