“Why, that fucker …” began Orphu.

“Silence,” snapped Suma IV. The dropship rolled, dove, turned south, expanded its sphere of radar and electronic interference, and climbed again toward space. No fireballs or lightning came up from the city that was falling behind so quickly—six hundred kilometers below and behind already and getting smaller by the second.

“I guess our many-handed brain friend has weapons,” said Mahnmut.

“So do we,” came Mep Ahoo’s voice on the comm. “I think we should nuke him… warm up his nest for him a little bit. Ten million degrees Fahrenheit would do for a start.”

“Quiet!” snapped Suma IV from the cockpit.

Prime Integrator Asteague/Che’s voice came over the common band. “My friends, we… you… have a problem down there.”

“Tell us about it,” rumbled Orphu of Io, still forgetting that he was still on the common radio link.

“No,” said the Prime Integrator, “I am not speaking of the many-handed creature’s attack on you. I’m talking about a more serious problem. And just beneath your current trajectory track. Our sensors might not have picked it up if they had not been following you.”

“More serious?” sent Mahnmut.

“Much more serious,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “And not just one serious problem, I’m afraid… but seven hundred and sixty-eight of them.”

“PROCEED WITH YOUR APPEAL,” booms the Demogorgon.

Hephaestus nudges Achilles to signify that he will do the speaking, makes an awkward bow—a series of iron spheres and one glass bubble bobbling—and says, “Your Demogorgoness, Lord Kronos and other respected Titanisms, Immortal Hours, and… honorable other things. My friend Achilles and I come here today not to appeal, not to ask you for a boon, but to share essential information with all of you. Information you need to know and will want to know. Information which…”

“SPEAK UP, CRIPPLED GOD.”

Hephaestus forces a smile through his beard, grits his teeth hard, and repeats his preamble.

“SPEAK THEN.”

Achilles wonders if Kronos and the other Titans, not to mention the huge, indescribable entities surrounding them, things with odd names like the Immortal Hours and Charioteers, are going to take an active part in this meeting or if the Demogorgon has the floor until it—he—she—it—formally recognizes someone or something else to speak.

Hephaestus then surprises him.

From his bulky backpack—a clumsy iron and canvas frame holding what Achilles imagined must be tanks of air—the god of artifice pulls a brass ovoid studded with glass lenses. He carefully sets the device on the top of a boulder between him and the looming Demogorgon and fusses with various switches and settings. Then the dwarf-god says, shouting and amplifying his helmet speakers to the maximum, “Your Demogorgonoidness, most noble and frightening Hours, your most majestic Titans and Titanesses—Kronos, Rhea, Krios, Koios, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Helios, Selene, Eos, and all others of Titan-persuasion assembled here—your many-armed Healernesses, rudely shaped Charioteers—all honored Beings out there in the fog and ash—rather than make my own case today, the case for removing the pretender Zeus from the throne for attempting to usurp all divinity unto himself—asking you to depose him, or at least oppose him, for presumptuously claiming all worlds and universes his own from this day forth to the end of time, I shall allow you to see an actual event. For even as we huddle here on this lava-riddled shitheap of a world, Zeus has called all the Olympian immortals into the Great Hall of the Gods. I left my camera concealed there but broadcasting live to a repeater station in Hellas Basin—the immortal Nyx’s Brane Hole allows us to receive this broadcast with less than a second of delay time. Behold!”

Hephaestus fiddles with more switches, throws a toggle.

Nothing happens.

The god of fire bites his lip, curses into his microphone, and fiddles with the brass device some more. It blinks, whirs, flickers, and falls silent again.

Achilles begins to slide his god-killing blade from its place in his belt.

“Behold!” cries Hephaestus, again using full amplification.

This time the brass device projects a rectangle almost a hundred yards wide into the air above them all, in front of the Demogorgon and the hundreds of hulking forms in the red lava-light and smoke around them. The rectangle shows nothing but static and snow.

“Oh, fuck me,” growls Hephaestus, each word quite audible over his helmet speakers. He hurries to the device and wiggles some metal rods which remind Achilles of the ears of a rabbit.

The huge image above them leaps into clarity. It is a holographic projection, very deep, fully three-dimensional, in living color, striking the eye like a wide window into the actual Hall of the Gods itself. The visuals are accompanied by surround-sound—Achilles can hear the nearby whisper of the hundreds upon hundreds of the waiting gods’ sandals scuffing softly on marble. When Hermes softly breaks wind, it is audible to everyone here.

The Titans, Titanesses, Hours, Charioteers, insectoid Healers, unnamed monstrous shapes—everyone except the Demogorgon—gasp, each in its own inhuman way. Not at Hermes’ indiscretion, but at the immediacy and impact of the still widening and encircling holographic projection. By the time the band of light and motion closes around them here, the illusion of being among the immortals in the Great Hall of the Gods is very powerful. Achilles actually pulls his blade further free, thinking that Zeus on his golden throne and the thousand Olympian gods standing around them must certainly hear the noise in their midst and turn to see them all huddled here in the reek and gloom of Tartarus.

The Olympian gods do not turn. It’s a one-way broadcast.

Zeus—at least fifty feet tall on his throne—leans forward, scowls out at the ranks upon ranks of assembled gods, goddesses, Furies, and Erinyeses, and begins to speak. Achilles can clearly hear the god’s newfound ultimate self-importance in the archaic cadence of each slow syllable:

“You congregated powers of this Olympos, you who share the glory and the strength of him ye serve, rejoice! Henceforth I am omnipotent. All else has been subdued to me; alone the souls of man, like unextinguished fire, yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt, and lamentation, and reluctant prayer, hurling up insurrection, which might make our antique empire insecure, though built on eldest faith, and hell’s coeval, fear; And though my curses through the pendulous air, like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake, and cling to it, though under my wrath’s night it climbs the crags of life, step after step, which wound it, as ice wounds unsandaled feet, it yet remains supreme o’er misery, aspiring, unrepressed, yet soon to fall:

Zeus stands suddenly and the radiance flowing from him is so brilliant that a thousand immortal gods and one very mortal man in a sweaty chameleon suit—the stealth-suited man is quite visible to Hephaestus’ camera and thus to everyone here in Tartarus—take a hesitant step backward as Zeus continues.

“Pour forth heaven’s wine, Idaean Ganymede, and let it fill the Daedal cups like fire, and from the flower-inwoven soil divine ye all triumphant harmonies arise, as dew from earth under the twilight stars: Drink! Be the nectar circling through your veins the soul of joy, ye ever-living gods, till exaltation bursts in one wide voice like music from Elysian winds.

And thou now attend beside me, veiled in the light of the desire which makes thee one with me, as I become God Ascendant, the single God to thee, the one and true Omnipotent God, Almighty God, true Lord of all Eternity!”

Hephaestus shuts off the brass and glass projector. The huge, circular window binding Tartarus to the Hall of the Gods on Olympos flicks out of existence and everything returns to cinder, soot, stink, and red gloom. Achilles shifts his feet farther apart, hefts his shield, and holds his god-killing knife out of sight behind that shield. He has no idea what will happen next.