Diomedes halts his attack and cringes back, his bloodlust temporarily blunted by the cyclone’s fury.
Then Ares is gone, QTing away with his bowels held in only by his own ichor-bloodied hands, and the battlefield remains almost as frozen as if the gods have stopped time again. But no—the birds still fly, dust still settles, the air still moves. This motionlessness now is awe; nothing more, nothing less.
“Have you ever seen anything like that, Hockenberry?” Nightenhelser’s voice startles me. I’d forgotten he was there.
“No,” I say. We stand in silence a moment until the mortal battle begins anew, until Athena’s cloaked form disappears from Diomedes’ charging chariot, and then I begin to walk away from the other scholic. “I’m going to morph and see how the royal family on the walls of Ilium is taking this,” I tell Nightenhelser before disappearing from his sight.
I morph all right, but it is only a ruse to cover my real disappearance. Hidden by dust and confusion in the Trojan ranks, I lift Death’s Helmet over my head and, activating the medallion, QT after the wounded Ares, following his quantum trail through twisted space to Olympos.
I emerge from quantum shift not on the grassy swards of Olympos nor in the Hall of the Gods, but in some vast space that looks more like the control room of a late Twentieth Century medical clinic than any structure or interior space I’ve seen on Olympos. There are clusters of gods and other creatures visible in the sterile-looking space, and for half a minute after phase-shifting I hold my breath—yet again—heart pounding as I wait to see if these gods and their minions are able to detect my presence.
Evidently not.
Ares is on some sort of medical examination table with three humanoid but not-quite-human entities or constructs hovering around him and offering care. The creatures may be robots—although sleeker and more organic-looking and alien in appearance than any robots dreamt of in my day—and I see that one has started an IV drip while another is passing a glowing ultraviolet ray over Ares’ torn belly.
The god of war is still holding his guts in with his bloodied hands. Ares looks pained and frightened and angry. He looks, in other words, human.
Along the long white wall, giant vats rise twenty feet or more and are filled with a bubbling violet fluid, various umbilicals and filaments, and . . . gods: tall, tanned, perfect human forms in various stages of what could be either reconstruction or decomposition. I see open organ cavities, white bone, striated red flesh, the sickening flash of bare skull. I don’t recognize the other god-forms, but in the next-to-closest tank floats Aphrodite, naked, eyes closed, hair floating, body perfect except for her perfect wrist and hand almost severed from her perfect arm. A roiling cluster of green worms is spiraling around the ligaments and tendons and bones there, either devouring or suturing or both. I look away.
Zeus enters the long room and sweeps across the space between medical monitors with no dials, past robots wrapped in what looks to be synthetic flesh, between gods who bow their heads and stand back to honor him. For an instant, the great god’s head swivels my way, the startling eyes under gray brows look directly into me, and I know I have been discovered.
I wait for the Zeus-boom and lightning blast. None comes. Zeus turns away—is he smiling?—and stops in front of Ares, who still sits hunched on the examination table between hovering machines and flesh-tending robotic things.
Zeus stands in front of the wounded god with his arms crossed, toga draped, head lowered, all trimmed gray beard and untrimmed gray brows, his bare chest radiating bronze light and strength, his expression fierce—more irritated school principal than concerned father, I would say.
Ares speaks first. “Father Zeus, doesn’t it infuriate you to see such human violence, such bloody work? We’re the everlasting, immortal gods, but god damn, we suffer injuries and insults—thanks to our own divine arguments and conflicting wills—every time we show these stinking mortals a bit of kindness. And it’s bad enough we have to fight these nano-crazed mortal sons of bitches, Lord Zeus, but we also have to fight you .”
Ares takes a breath, grimaces in pain, and waits. Zeus says nothing, but continues to glower as if pondering the war god’s words.
“And Athena,” gasps the injured god. “You’ve let that girl go too far, O Son of Kronos. Ever since you gave birth to her from your own head—that child of chaos and destruction—you’ve always let her have her way, never blocked her reckless will. And now she’s turned the mortal Diomedes into one of her weapons, spurred him on to ravage against us gods.”
Ares is excited and furious now. Spittle flies. I can still see the blue-gray coils of his intestines in what appears to be golden blood.
“First she incited that . . . that . . . mortal to lunge at Aphrodite, stabbing her wrist, spilling her divine blood. The Healer’s attendants tell me that she’ll be in the vat for a full day, recovering. Then Athena spurs on Diomedes to charge me—me, the god of war—and his nano-augmented body was fast enough that he would have had me in the vats myself for days or weeks, perhaps even to need resurrection, if I hadn’t been faster still. If he had taken my heart on his spear point, I’d still be writhing among the human corpses down there, feeling more pain than I do, trying to soldier on but being beaten down by mere mortal bronze, weak as some breathless ghost from our old Earth days and . . .”
“ENOUGH!!” bellows Zeus and not only stops Ares’ diatribe, but freezes every god and robot in the place. “I’ll hear no more whining prattle from you, Ares, you lying, two-faced, treacherous sparrowfart, you miserable excuse for a man, much less for a god.”
Ares blinks at this, opens his mouth, but—wisely, I think—does not choose to interrupt.
“Listen to you whining and whimpering here from your little cut,” sneers Zeus, unfolding his mighty arms and holding one giant hand out as if preparing to will the war god out of existence with a command. “You—I hate you most of all the maggots chosen to become gods when it came time for our Change, you miserable hypocrite. You coward-hearted lover of death and grim battles and the bloody grist-mill of war. You have your mother’s meanness, Ares, and her rage—I confess that I can barely keep Hera in her place, especially when she decides on some little pet project close to her heart, such as slaughtering the Achaeans to a man.”
Ares doubles over as if Zeus’s words are hurting him, but I suspect the cause of pain is really the hovering spherical robot-thing stitching the lining of his abdomen shut with what looks to be an industrial-strength portable sewing machine.
Zeus ignores the ministrations of the medics and paces back and forth, coming within two yards of me before turning and walking back to stand in front of the hunched and grimacing Ares.
“I hope it’s your mother’s promptings, Hera’s urgings, that have made you suffer like this, O God of War . . .” I can hear the godly sarcasm in Zeus’s voice. “I’d just as soon have you die . . .”
Ares looks up in real shock and terror now.
Zeus laughs at the war god’s expression. “You didn’t know that we can die? Die beyond vat reconstruction or recom resurrection? We can, my son, we can.”
Ares looks down in confusion. The machine is almost finished tucking the divine bowels back in and stitching up the last of the muscle and flesh.
“Healer!” booms Zeus and something tall and very not-human emerges from behind the bubbling vats. The thing is more centipede than machine, with multiple arms, each with multiple joints, and fly-like red eyes set fifteen feet high on its segmented body. Straps and devices and odd organic bits hang from harnesses strung around the Healer’s giant bug-body.