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 straight in the eye. "You think I'd go to all this trouble to destroy you and your Olympians out of some kind of jealousy? You're mad. You've turned into a power-crazed megalomaniac — a mass-murdering monster. Someone had to stop you. Someone had to end this tyranny of yours."
"And it simply had to be you, did it?"
"I'm your father. I brought you into the world. I bear some of the responsibility for what you've done, what you've become. The blood-guilt is mine. Therefore it's only right that I should be the one who brings you down."
The lightning flashes were coming thicker and faster overhead. Hyperion took a step towards Zeus and Cronus, levelling his coilgun, but Sam restrained him with a hand.
"This is their moment. Let them be."
"I can take out Zeus while his guard's down."
"It's a standoff. It might resolve itself peacefully."
Hyperion let out a sceptical huff of breath, but stayed where he was, coilgun not fully raised.
"You're a danger to everyone," Cronus told his son.
"No, only to anyone who opposes me," said Zeus. "Do you not understand what I've managed to do here? Do you not realise how good I've made life for billions of people?"
"Do you not realise how bad you've made it, Xander? So bad it makes me ashamed. That's all I've felt these past ten years, nothing but shame."
"Your feelings aren't my concern. I don't seek your approval. I never have."
"Your mother would have been ashamed too."
"Don't bring her into this! Don't you dare!" Zeus bellowed. "You never deserved her. She was worth a thousand of you."
"You barely even knew her."
"I remember enough about her to know that she loved me more than your ever did or could."
"I loved you."
"No, you tolerated me at first. Then you resented me, and finally you despised me."
"I despise what you are now."
It struck Sam how truly alike these two men were. Their faces, pressed up to each other, were mirror images, almost. The level of antipathy radiating from both of them was near identical too.
"Then here I am, Dad," said Zeus, making the last word a vindictive snarl, a kind of accusation. "This is your chance to finish me. Take it. You won't get a better one. Or a second one."
"I don't want to kill you, Xander. I should, given how you did your level best to kill me. I ought to, in the light of all your crimes against humanity. But I don't. Can't you see that it's over? Your Olympians are dead. Olympus is overrun. You've nothing left. You're beaten. But you can still walk away from all this. Come back with me. Come home. Let's start again. I can protect you, look after you, give you a new shot at life."