Sam helped her fit the helmet on. "Just do what you can, Kayla — Theia. Take the fight to the Olympians. Give them no quarter. If this is to be our final clash with them, let's make it a battle to remember."
"How the hell did they find us, that's what I want to know," said Ramsay, now Hyperion. "Somebody sell us out?"
A terrible thought came to Sam. Prothero? Could it have been? She had told him everything about the Titans, after all.
But Dai Prothero would never betray her. Never. She dismissed the possibility outright, although the fact that the idea had even occurred to her left a bitter mental aftertaste.
"Ah, who cares?" said Barrington, Iapetus, slotting shells into his pump-action shotgun. "We're taking the bastards on, face to face, man to man. It's what we wanted, isn't it? Up to now all we've been doing is skirm-ishing. About time we had a proper ding-dong go."
"I couldn't agree more," said Tsang, Crius. "They've come here in numbers. That'll just make it easier to obliterate them."
"Jamie!" Cronus called out.
McCann came bounding over. "Sir!"
"Whatever happens out there, I want you to commence evac procedures."
McCann blinked. "Sir?"
"We can't guarantee the integrity of the bunker, especially with Hermes back in action, and our location has been compromised anyway. You know what to do. All noncombatant personnel up top, along with the bare essential support equipment. We're in luck — Captain Fuller's still moored at the jetty. Get everything and everyone on board the boat and set sail. We'll keep the fighting as far from you as we can. Come on, hop to it. Time's wasting."
McCann whirled and started doling out orders to the techs: dismantle this, unplug that. All at once he no longer seemed boyish.
Sam approached the Minotaur, who was bewildered by all the noise and confusion and the scent of dread in the air. He shrank from her in her battlesuit.
"It's me," she said soothingly. "You know my voice. Me."
The monster relaxed a little.
"I need you to stay put. For your own good. You can't come with me. Stay down here where you'll be safe."
But the Minotaur tagged along after her as she headed for the exit with the other Titans.
"No," she insisted, thinking this was like something out of a Lassie movie, "you can't come. It's too dangerous."
"Dangerous?" said Hyperion. "For a four-hundred-pound beast?"
"Or for us," Sam told him. "Who knows whose side he'll be on? Once he sees who's up there…"
"He'll be on our side," Hyperion stated firmly. "He'll be on whatever side you are on."
"You think?"
He nodded. "And we could surely do with the extra muscle."
Sam turned back to the Minotaur, who was showing absolutely no intention of doing anything but go with her.
"Fine," she said, and on she and her fellow Titans went, the Minotaur too, up to the entrance, where the Titans mustered in a line as the main door rolled apart in front of them.
"Comms on," Sam said. "Titans, sound off. Tethys."
"Cronus."
"Hyperion."
"Rhea."
"Crius."
"Theia."
"Iape-bloody-tus."
The Minotaur grunted.
"Out we go, then," Sam said. No big speech. No pre-battle rallying address. Nobody needed reminding how grave the situation was. All knew.
Six Olympians were marching northward up the island.
Seven Titans, and a monster, strode south to engage.
60. SCREAMERS
A shallow valley, a long spoon-scoop in the island's surface, became the battlefield. At the northern end of it there was the broken black ruin of a croft, where the Titans embedded themselves, hunkering among the jagged runs of wall and tuning their suits' camouflage to appropriately dark hues. The Olympians approached from the other end, striding in a confident phalanx. Artemis with her silver spear shouldered, her twin brother Apollo with an arrow nocked, their half-brother Ares swinging his battleaxe — these three formed the front rank. Zeus came next. Hermes and Hades hung back, the rearguard. Clouds were darkening the firmament. Drumbeats of thunder sounded.
Sam was sure of only one thing: she might be about to die but she would not sell her life cheaply. Oddly, hearteningly, the fear was not as great as she'd thought it would be. What she felt was relief more than anything. This looked like being the final showdown, the culmination of all the guerrilla attacks, the climax of the war's gradual escalation. In a way it seemed the most honest method of settling the thing. Titan versus Olympian, out in the open, in broad daylight. No more skulking around, no more hit-and-run sneakiness. Today Titanomachy II would be resolved one way or the other. In terms of raw power the Titans were outmatched, there was no question about that, but then again, so far the battlesuits hadn't been pushed to their absolute limits, nor had every weapon at the Titans' disposal been used in the field yet.
"We see you!" Ares boomed across the length of the valley. "Lurking there. Come on out. Show yourselves like proper warriors. I ache for combat. I yearn to bathe in the blood of my enemies."
"And I yearn to stick this shotgun up your arse," Iapetus muttered.
Ares beat a fist against his breastplate, making the copper ring like a gong. "How impatiently have I awaited this moment," he went on. "Since first you began your challenge to our supremacy, I have wished for nothing else. Come out and face me, you snivelling weaklings, and learn what war really means."
"Titans," said Sam. "Shock and disorientation to start with. We go out and hit them hard, screamers and rumblers on. Theia, Hyperion, Rhea, you're with me. The rest of you stay down, cover us at the flanks. Enfilading fire to keep the Olympians hemmed in. Got that? Good. On my mark. Three, two, one… Now! "
The four Titans sprang from hiding, simultaneously tapping their wristpads to activate inbuilt sonic assault arrays. High-frequency squeals shrilled like invisible drills from shoulder-mounted directional speakers, while deep bursts of infrasound pulsed outward, reverberating below the threshold of audibility, felt rather than heard, like an earthquake in the bones. The battlesuits afforded some insulation against the effects of this aural battery, but still it was like being at the heart of a squall, the world shrieking and thrumming and unsteady. Sam plunged across the grass towards the Olympians feeling as though she might stumble at any step. It didn't help that there were tussocks and rabbit holes everywhere, threatening to trip her. She forged on, and she could hear someone howling like a banshee, as loud as if not louder than her suit's screamer, and she thought it might be her.
The Olympians staggered and reeled. Apollo kept trying to loose off an arrow but his golden bow shook in his hands and he was unable to draw the string. Artemis had her hands clamped over her ears, as did Ares, while Zeus attempted to summon lightning but could not marshal his thoughts to do so, and Hades was on his knees, retching. Then bullets began to rake the hillsides to the left and right, and the Olympians instinctively closed together, a sense of survival penetrating the pain and nausea brought on by the decibel hell the Titans had unleashed.
Screamers and rumblers, however, could not be deployed for long. The infrasound bursts, in particular, were indiscriminate, affecting the suit wearers more slowly but just as surely as they did the suit wearers' opponents. The moment Sam felt her stomach start to churn, she knew it was time to shut the noise down. At least she and the other three were now within decent range of the Olympians. She went down on one knee, bringing up her recoilless submachine gun.
Plenty of targets to choose from, but with barely a second thought she singled out the twins, Apollo and Artemis, and then narrowed it down to Artemis.