The Age of Zeus

8. PAIRING OFF

By her second day trialling the TITAN suit, Sam was half convinced she would quit once the week was out. By her third day, she was fully convinced.

She couldn't seem to get the knack of using the suit. She felt as if she were fighting it rather than wearing it. The servos made her limbs want to do things she didn't want them to. When she raised an arm, the suit tried to get her to loft it into the air. When she put a foot forward to walk, the suit urged her to leap. She spent a great deal of time tottering, almost falling over, and falling over, like a novice ice skater or a little girl trying on mummy's high heels. Out of the others, only Mahmoud was having similar problems. The rest got to grips with the suits relatively easily, and Sam watched with envy as they strolled around, performed feats of strength like the one McCann had shown them, and even learned how to sprint.

The training took place almost entirely in the car-park-like area that formed the entrance hall to the bunker. It was open-plan and spacious enough to allow the recruits to move around without, on the whole, bumping into one another — although collisions did occur and Sam was the cause of more than her fair share of them. The lights could be doused, too, to create total darkness so that the night vision mode on the visors could be brought into play. Again, Sam found the ghostly green imaging difficult to get accustomed to. It was like wading through some blurry monochrome dreamscape, where anything that moved left a phosphorescent trail. Even more confusing, though, was the peripheral vision expansion mode, which stretched her field of view sideways in either direction like some kind of warped wraparound Cinemascope. Objects and people loomed from the left and right, baffling her sense of spatial awareness which was telling her they weren't where her eyes were reporting them to be. Yet further colliding went on whenever she activated the option.

McCann kept telling her she would adapt to the suit. It would just take time. "It's like a sports car," he said. "Most folk think you can just climb in one and race off. They've no idea that in most of your modern sports models the gearstick is two paddle shifters on either side of the steering column, and that the steering wheel is super sensitive, the accelerator too, and that sometimes the accelerator pedal's in the middle, not on the right. First time out everyone nearly always stalls or just misses having a crash. You have to re-learn how to drive. And it's the same here. Think of the TITAN suit as a Lamborghini Murcielago and yourself as, I dunno, a Volkswagen Golf. Forget everything your body knows about walking and so on. The suit'll teach you a new way. Listen to it. Feel it. Trust it to do what it's meant to, and soon enough you'll find it becoming second nature."

She attempted to follow this advice, and blundered headlong into the nearest support pillar.

McCann helped her to her feet.

"Aye, well," he said, "maybe it's going to take you a wee bit longer than 'soon enough.' But you'll get there, Sam."

"You're talking to a woman who failed her driving test three times," Sam said. "But thanks for the vote of confidence."

The eleven recruits ate meals together in the room with the table where they'd first met. The cuisine was good. Landesman did not scrimp on the small luxuries like that. A professional chef rustled up fine fodder from the supplies that Captain Fuller ferried over every other day.

The recruits also bunked together, in pairs, in rooms that boasted clean, simple decor, neither Spartan nor flowery, and lacked only one thing: a view. The communal washing facilities were decent. There was a well-equipped recreation room with a pool table and a plasma-screen TV. There was a library. There was even a laundry. Lillicrap had undersold things somewhat to Sam and Ramsay, or perhaps had been deliberately lowering their expectations. His "perfectly civilised" had implied basic functionality, but the bunker on Bleaney Island was actually quite a pleasant place to be, the absence of natural daylight notwithstanding. Sam had stayed at worse hotels.

Her roommate was Mahmoud, and the two of them quickly formed a bond, partly because of their background in the police but mostly because they shared the honour of being the least accomplished with the battlesuits. Each evening at bedtime they would go over the disasters of that day and compare fresh aches and blisters. Mahmoud remarked that the two of them would be completely covered in bruises if it wasn't for the suits' impact-absorbing abilities. Sam, in turn, lamented the sad irony that an invention designed to put her on a par with gods was making her feel more of a clumsy mortal than ever. She didn't confess that she doubted she was going to stay beyond the end of the week, but she had a feeling Mahmoud knew and was thinking much the same.

They found another point of similarity in the fact that they were both bereft of immediate family. Sam was an only child whose parents had both passed away while she was in her late teens, her father of a massive coronary, her mother of complications from the type 1 diabetes that had dogged her all her life. At the end of a torturous period of hospitals, hospices and funeral parlours Sam was left with the freehold on a house on Kensal Rise, enough in the way of inherited savings to last her through university, and an abiding sense of the fragility and unfairness of life. Mahmoud's parents hadn't survived the deaths of her two brothers. Her father's despair had driven him to seek consolation in his religion, but neither the Qur'an nor frequent visits to the mosque and long talks with the imam had provided him with the answers he wanted. So he had turned to another common source of consolation, alcohol, and it, at least, had ended his torment — by killing him. A fatality on the M602 near Salford. A lone driver, late at night, in a head-on collision with the central reservation. Straight through the windscreen. Not wearing his seatbelt. DUI, judging by the shards of broken bottle and the reek of whisky all over the upholstery. No other vehicle involved. Mahmoud had been on duty that night, and a colleague, having identified the victim by means of his wallet and recognising the name, had called her to the scene. She wished he hadn't.

"What was lying across the bonnet of that car wasn't my dad," she told Sam. "It didn't even look like a person, not any more."

The fatal pulmonary embolism Mahmoud's mother had suffered in her sleep a week later came as a direct consequence of the crash. The doctors had said it was merely a tragic coincidence, there was no medical correlation between the two events, it was something that had just been waiting to happen. A blood clot had been there all along, they said, lurking in her mother's artery, waiting for its moment to break free and make its catastrophic journey to her lungs. But Mahmoud knew better.

"No boyfriend, no husband," Mahmoud said. "Friends don't come to see me. I scared them all away. I'm on a permanent sabbatical from the force. You could say I'm unattached."

"Snap," Sam replied. "But we're not just unattached. We're totally detached. And I don't think we're alone in that here. Remember what Landesman said? 'Few burdens and even fewer emotional ties.' That's another reason why he wanted us, why he chose us."

The other recruits paired off too. Hamel and Eto'o were often to be found in each other's company, speaking French, the first language for both of them. Harryhausen and Sparks established a rapport, united not least by the aplomb with which they took to using the suits. They were by far the most proficient and the most at-ease in the armour. Tsang and Chisholm seemed a mismatched duo but had in common the fact that they were by some margin the most cultured of the group, Tsang having received his higher education at one of Hong Kong's most prestigious and expensive private academies. Sondergaard and Barrington made for an even odder couple — the slim, reserved Scandinavian and the burly, coarse Antipodean — and their bickering became a fixture of bunker life, whether it was Sondergaard nagging Barrington over his habit of farting malodorously at all times of day and night, or Barrington having a go at Sondergaard for his fastidiousness when it came to room tidying and bed making. The mutual antagonism seemed real enough. It was just possible, however, that it masked a growing, grudging friendship.

That left Ramsay, who had a room to himself and who, when it was pointed out to him how lucky he was not to have to share accommodation, said, "Yeah, but think about it. I'd have had to double up with that asshole Pugh. So it's only fair I get to sleep on my own, on account of the possibility of how bad it might have been." Which as an argument had no logic to it whatsoever but was still somehow perversely persuasive.

Ramsay did his utmost to encourage Sam to keep trying with the suit. By the end of the fifth day he could see how frustrated she was. He invited her to come outside with him, take a walk round the island, explore. The night was cloudless, the moon full and the stars bright, so that everything was bathed in a pristine, icy brilliance. The mainland twinkled in the distance. They tramped along the shoreline, over pebble beach and smooth rocks, their breaths coming out in wispy white curls. Their journey took them past the locations of a number of security cameras, part of a host of such devices mounted round the island perimeter, all facing outward and mostly camouflaged or hidden, disguised to merge with the landscape. Landesman had said these were a precaution against an Olympian attack, which he considered highly improbable. The cameras fed to a computer equipped with facial recognition software that had the features of all of the Pantheon on its database. Only an Olympian appearing on the island would trip the bunker alarms, no one else.

Soon the ground sloped up and Ramsay and Sam were trekking across a field of tussocky, ankle-deep grass. This took them to Bleaney's southernmost tip, where a high promontory afforded a panoramic view of a sea like a glittering plain of black diamonds.

"Don't give up, girl," Ramsay said, as they stood there gazing out.

"Don't call me 'girl,'" Sam replied. "Unless you'd like me to start calling you 'boy.'"

"There are several reasons why I wouldn't want that," Ramsay said. "But I take the point. Don't give up, Sam."

"I can't see why I should carry on. I'm rubbish at this. Landesman wants a squad of crack troops, not crap troops. The way I am in that suit, I'd only be a liability."

"Landesman wants you to be a part of this more than anyone. Don't do yourself down. Just keep at it, and meantime cut yourself a little slack."

"But this is so typical of me. I was always the one at school who'd have to have the quadratic equation explained to me one more time, always the one the teachers would single out to make sure I'd completely understood the reproductive cycle of the frog or how an oxbow lake is formed or whatever. The slow one. If I'd got it, that meant everyone else in the class had."

"What I've seen, you're the smartest among us."

"Which might be taken as an indictment of the rest of you."

Ramsay snorted.

"I'm thorough, that's my thing," Sam said. "I'm good with details — assessing them, sifting through them, arriving at a conclusion. I don't get there fast but I do get there in the end."

"Then that'll be the case here, won't it? You'll need a little longer than the rest of us, but once you catch up there'll be no stopping you."

"You believe that?"

"You just told me that's how you are, so of course I believe it."

Had there been less of a moon, more darkness for concealment, Sam would have smiled.

"You were on your way to becoming a top cop, weren't you?" Ramsay continued. "That's proof of how able you are. The only person who's stopping you right now, Sam, is Sam. You just need to have faith in yourself. Be a bit more confident."

"Like you, you mean?"

"Hell yeah."

"Where's the line between confident and cocksure?"

"No idea, but if I cross it, I'll let you know."

Ramsay gave that gurgling-downpipe chortle of his. It was becoming the thing that Sam most liked about him, after his perma-flared nostrils. It was an ungraceful sound but so full of authentic amusement that you couldn't help but warm to it.

Hot on the heels of that thought came another: the memory of a man who had loved to laugh and whose laugh she had loved. And with that Sam felt a familiar brittleness inside, a sense of breaking, as a structure built to contain grief suddenly gave in to its own frailty — yet again — unable to support the weight of anything much that came to rest on it, any emotion, whether it be sadness or joy, regret or hope.

"Sam? You OK?"

"Hmm? Yes."

"You went quiet there."

"Getting chilly. I should have worn something warmer. Can we go back in?"

Halfway back to the bunker, Ramsay said, "That business between Landesman and Pugh. What's your take on what happened?"

"What do you mean?"

"It's been bugging me. When Landesman paid Pugh off — I don't know how much it was but I glimpsed a fair few zeroes on that cheque — but when he did that, didn't the whole thing strike you as kinda, well, staged?"

"You're saying Pugh was a ringer? Landesman planted him in that room?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"I was hoping you might be able to tell me."

"It all looked pretty above board to me. Pugh's a waster, a liar, a crook. He realised he didn't want to be there after all, and Landesman realised he didn't want him there. The cheque was compensation but also to buy silence. Just in case."

"You reckon? You don't reckon Landesman hired Pugh to play the part of a screwup so that it'd help the rest of us pull together — make us feel better about ourselves and about the idea of enlisting with him. You want to unite people, give them someone they can all look down on."

Sam shrugged. "It's possible, I suppose. Landesman is devious, no doubt about it. But I don't think he's that devious, not in that way. And I don't think Pugh was acting."

"Still, Pugh could have been chosen because it was more'n likely he'd do what he did. That's why Landesman was so calm about losing him. Pugh was meant to drop out. He was never going to be one of the twelve."

"Landesman was calm because, like he said himself, he has reserve candidates."

"I still think there's something else going on there."

"Me too. But I don't believe Landesman set Pugh up as a patsy. That isn't my reading of it at all."

They were approaching the bunker entrance.

"So you're going to stick with us?" Ramsay said.

"For another couple of days."

"And then?"

"We'll see."

"It would be…" Ramsay, uncharacteristically, fumbled for words. "It would be a great shame not to have you on the team, Sam."

"We're a team? Already?"

"We're getting there. And in my not so humble opinion, Landesman is onto something with this project of his. Maybe the bunch of us stand a cat's chance in hell of getting rid of the Olympians. Maybe the whole thing's pure craziness. But I'm itching to give it a shot, you know? And I'd feel a whole lot more certain of success if I knew you were coming along for the ride."

"No pressure then."

He chortled, as she'd expected he would — hoped he would. "None whatsoever!"