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 area where the Minotaur had most recently been sighted. They'd found tracks that could only be Minotaur tracks, the imprints of bare human feet far larger than any normal human feet, but the monster itself had proved scarce.
Base camp was a half-dozen tents clustered around a van. Divested of their suits, the Titans gathered wood for a fire, and for their supper Tsang barbecued chicken breasts coated in a marinade that he had prepared specially for this cookout, a sticky, sinfully sweet concoction akin to toffee.
"An old family recipe," he said. "The trick is to boil the soy sauce down to the consistency of tar, then add the chilli, ginger and the other spices and ladle honey on like there's no tomorrow."
"Eat enough of it and there will be no tomorrow," said Mahmoud through a mouthful. "I can feel my arteries furring up."
"You won't be having second helpings then?"
She held out her plate. "I never said that, duck."
Soon everyone had retired to their tents, the two techs included. Only Sam and Ramsay remained up.
"Not sleepy?" he asked her.
"Tired but wired," she replied. She stared into the dark, insect-throbbing landscape around them. The scent of heather was strong on the breeze. "The Minotaur's out there somewhere. Not far. And I don't have my suit on, and, to be blunt, I feel naked without it."
"And here's where I don't make some wisecrack about you being naked."
"Absolutely you don't."
"'Cause it wouldn't be right because you hate me. Again."
"No, it wouldn't be right because it would be inappropriate. If you said that kind of thing in any normal workplace, they'd have you up before a disciplinary tribunal and off on a sexual harassment awareness course before you even knew what hit you."
"So you don't hate me," said Ramsay. "Is that what I can take away from this?"
"Rick, frankly I'm not sure how I feel about you," Sam said. "Let's turn it around. How do you feel about you right now?"
"Honestly?"
She twitched her shoulders — what else?
Ramsay gazed into the fire for a time. "Honestly, what I feel is… empty. I feel I've done it now, I've killed the thing that killed my son, but all that's left me with is this sense of: is that it? Now what? I was expecting to have this great swelling in my chest of triumph, satisfaction, completion…"
"Closure?"
"Oh yeah."
"You Americans are big on your closure."
"We are. And it ain't there, or maybe it is but it doesn't feel like I was hoping. It doesn't feel solid. There's no 'Oh, OK, so that's that chapter done with, let's turn the page and start the next.' Ethan's still dead. Ain't nothing going to change that. Ain't nothing going to bring my little boy back. The Lamia being dead as well kinda balances up the scales but somehow not all the way, not even near. I'm glad it's dead, but mainly I'm glad because that's a whole bunch of other kids who won't be sucked dry by it now, a whole bunch of other parents who won't have the light taken out of their world like I did. So that's something. But it's not everything."