Chapter 6

Hyperion stood on the sand, feeling the fine particles between his toes, and sighed. It seemed like a fantasy, standing outside in the bright light of the day, not hiding, apparently with nothing to fear. He was still on edge, he could feel that truth within himself. He was still poised and anxious. A lifetime of learned behaviour told him that he absolutely could not expose himself like this.

But that was his old life.

This was a new chapter in his existence. No more was he to be a slave, was he to be ashamed of who and what he was. His daily thoughts no longer needed to revolve so completely around the idea that he was a secret, a terrible mystery that could not be seen, could not be touched. He turned his head and looked along the beach. The dense jungle came to stop right at the edge of the beach and his eyes followed the line created by the wall of trees. There, perhaps 300 yards away, he could see an infant playing in the sand. The child’s mother stood in the shade, watching her child, patient and content.

He did not need to conceal himself from them. He could simply watch. They were his kind. The youngster's body was long and thin, covered entirely in dark blonde fur. The mother was as small as a large human, a little heavy set, her fur was dark grey,

Hyperion shook his head in wonder. He hardly dared to accept this new version of reality he had arrived in. It had been promised as a paradise and it seemed to be coming true. He allowed his thoughts to wander forward and brush upon the notion of one day standing at this spot and watching his own child play in the sand. It was an idea that made him shudder. It was at once incredibly appealing and at the same time almost too sweet to endure.

A voice spoke from behind him, incredibly deep and booming, even by his standards.

‘How are you finding your new home?’

Hyperion immediately shut down the impulse to react urgently to the newcomer, a newcomer that had approached him from behind with perfect stealth. Instead, he turned casually around to face the other being.

The hybrid before him was monstrously huge. Hyperion could feel the immensity of the creature bearing down on him, a perpetual threat borne of that physique. Outwardly showing none of the intimidation that he felt, Hyperion said, ‘Hercules.’

Hercules smiled thinly and walked up to join Hyperion in gazing out at the beach.

Hyperion said, ‘I think I’m enjoying it an awful lot.’

Hercules nodded. He said, ‘It takes some getting used to, doesn’t it.’

Hyperion nodded, ‘Yes. That’s quite the understatement.’

Hercules said, ‘There is now an entire generation of our people here that have been born without ever stepping foot from this island. An entire generation that does not know how it feels to be a freak and a monster. They have none of our instinctive urge to hide and conceal ourselves. They were born free and have lived free their entire lives.’

Hyperion said, ‘But not you?’

Hercules made a tiny shake of his head and pointed out across the sea. ‘No, not I. I was born out there, in the human world. I lived most of my life as you have, slinking in the shadows, hiding from beings so incredibly inferior to me. Like a cat hiding from the mice.’

Hyperion hesitated and said, ‘There are an awful lot of those mice, and they have a lot of powerful machinery.’

‘For now,’ said Hercules.

Hyperion turned to look up at Hercules. The bigger creature continued to stare out to sea but Hyperion could sense that Hercules was aware of the movement.

After another moment’s silence, Hyperion said, ‘What do you mean, for now?’

Hercules took a deep breath and said, ‘This is kind of a paradise is it not.’

Hyperion nodded.

Hercules said, ‘There is space here for us to roam freely, room for our homes, resources, water. But our population is growing very fast.’ He pointed to the female with the youngster and said, ‘She should have another infant at her breast but she miscarried. She is pregnant again and will soon produce another. Every female on the island is breeding at that rate. We will outgrow the island soon and then what will happen to us? I suppose father could arrange the purchase of another one, but how many islands are there that can avail us this kind of privacy. And what is he to do when he exhausts them all? What will he do when we count our population in the millions instead of the thousands?’

Hyperion looked down at the sand and frowned, ‘We can’t stay here permanently?’ He said it as a question, but felt it grow into a statement in his mind.

Hercules said, ‘Did you really expect to?’

Hyperion smiled sheepishly. He said,’I think I did.’

Hercules said, ‘Maybe father should have been clearer about that when he convinced you to come here. Maybe you would have stayed with The Maker.’

Hyperion shook his head. He said, ‘No. I couldn’t have stayed there any longer.’

‘You left your brothers and sisters behind,’ Hercules said. ‘At least, that’s what you call them.’

Hyperion nodded sadly, ‘I did. But I had something better available to me. I had my eyes opened to this possibility. They don’t. They just have Father… The Maker… They don’t have any options, and they didn’t have Zeus talking to them, opening their eyes. I would have tried to, I really would, but I think they would have reported me. And the second they did, I would have been caged.’

‘That is no way to live.’

Hyperion agreed, ‘No, it’s not. It was that realization that finally sprang me into leaving. How could I stay with a family where dissent meant imprisonment. I thought I was free there, that we were his children. But I realized that we were just tools.’

They stood together a while and watched the youngster running from and chasing the ebbing waters of the waves.

Hyperion said, ‘What did you mean when you said “for now”?

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Hercules said, ‘We are at war, Hyperion. We have a mountain to climb. Do you think a time is going to come when the humans will respect us and let us live among them as our population grows? Have you seen how they treat members of their own species for simply having a different color of skin, or a different creed? Can you imagine what would happen to us if we exposed ourselves to them?’

‘So we’re going to fight them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hercules… We might be the cats and they the mice, and there might be a lot of us here now… but we can’t fight them. There are billions of them. They have guns. They have bombs.’

Hercules smiled, more broadly than before. He said, ‘Oh, we’re not going to fight them like that. If we could, we would. It would be better that way, more appropriate. No, unfortunately we can’t. We have other means. That’s what you and I are for, Hyperion. We’re soldiers. I know what you can do in action, and I think you know what I can do. We are our people’s argonauts. We will go out there and move the pieces around. We will do the difficult things for father and, in the end, the whole world will be ours.’

‘You’re talking about wiping them all out? How, with chemicals? Germs? Nukes?’

Hercules said nothing.

Hyperion said, ‘You’re talking about genocide.’

Hercules shook his head. He spoke patiently, almost condescendingly. He said, ‘No, I’m just talking about nature. It’s the way of nature to replace the old version with the new. We occupy the same niche, and that can’t continue. We can’t exist alongside them, so may the best species win. I know it sounds brutal, but we don’t have a choice.’

Hyperion opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.

Hercules said, ‘Think on it Hyperion, we won’t take you to battle with us if you’re not comfortable with what has to be done. But think on it. If you do then I believe you’ll see. We have no other choice.’

Chapter 7

Homer stared, his mouth dangling open. His expression was confusion and apprehension. Beside him, Ardia was smiling.

‘What is it?’ Homer asked, hesitantly, already knowing the answer and not caring for it.

‘Homer…’ Ardia said. ‘That’s not how we accept gifts. The appropriate thing to say is “thank you”.’

‘I haven’t decided to accept it,’ Homer replied to her without taking his eyes from the object in Razmik’s hands.

Razmik said, ‘Come over here and take it from me. It weighs a tonne.’

Homer reluctantly shifted his massive bulk from the couch to his feet and approached Razmik and his gift. He looked over his shoulder at Ardia.

Ardia, growing a little tired with the display, said, ‘It’s not going to bite you, Homer.’

Homer didn’t seem to hear her.

Razmik extended his arms and they trembled slightly at the effort of having to hold such a substantial weight. What he held was a monstrous suit of modern body armor. The armor was sheathed in dark fabric and arranged in huge sections. To the trained eye this was clearly an incredibly expensive and advanced piece of equipment, custom made for Homer’s monstrous size. To Homer’s eye it was just a mess of straps, pads and sections which looked, in his humble opinion, completely ridiculous.

Homer took the armor from Razmik and hefted it. To him the weight was nothing, but he could appreciate how heavy it must have been for a normal human to pick up. It felt to his hands to weigh as much as a grown man.

Slightly humbled, and quite honored, by the gesture, Homer resigned himself to accepting it. He said, ‘What should I do with it?’

‘Put it on, of course,’ Ardia said.

Stryker made a disgruntled noise, blowing air through his pursed lips.

‘What’s wrong, Stryker?,’ Razmik asked. ‘Are you jealous? I will have some for you before long as well.’

Stryker made the noise again. He said, ‘I’ll bet you paid through the nose for that.’

‘I did,’ Razmik agreed, puzzled. ‘I spent more money on that item than most people will spend on buying a house.’

‘Just a shame then,’ said Styker.

‘What’s a shame?’ Razmik asked.

Stryker was unsure about how to respond to that. He suddenly looked as though he wished he’d never begun the conversation in the first place. He said, ‘Nevermind.’

‘No, please Stryker,’ Razmik said. ‘I am very eager to hear your criticism of this very expensive piece of equipment.’

Stryker shook his head, his cheeks taking on a warm glow. ‘Nevermind, I forget. It’s very nice.’

Razmik stared at him and shook his head with wonder.

Suddenly Ardia burst out, ‘Oh my God! I know what he doesn’t like!’

The other’s looked at her and Stryker tried to retract his head into his shoulders like a turtle retreating into a shell.

Ardia said, ‘It’s the tailoring! He doesn’t like the sewing work! He thinks he could have done a better job.’

The room was suddenly filled with pleasant laughter. Stryker’s face glowed crimson with embarrassment, but a shy smile plucked at the corners of his mouth as well.

Chapter 8

An Entry from the Diary of Damien Slayer.

What was the Crucible? We went to so much trouble to find and destroy it, all that time Troy and Zeus both seemed to be hunting it with competing vigor in order to put it to use. I know that the properties of the Crucible were somehow involved in producing Stryker, Homer and Ardia. I know it leaves some kind of detectable trace. And that is where the knowing ends and the speculation begins.

The automatic assumption is that The Crucible is radioactive. Metis was able to use her powers to do something to my brain that now allows me to sense an aura around the Crucible, and the things it has been in contact with. I can tell where it has been. I can tell when someone or something has interacted with it. I have often thought of my brain as a kind of a Crucible geiger counter that can measure trace radiation. And that makes a kind of sense too, because I believe that mutagens are frequently radioactive and my friends are quite clearly the product of some kind of advanced experimentation in genetics.

But I’m not so sure about that. I know it makes sense, but there are flaws in that thinking. For one, why would that particular source of radiation be so very very valuable to Zeus and Troy. How unique a radiation can an object produce and how valuable can one kind of radiation be when compared with another. Another point is that my brain doesn’t tick over when I’m exposed to a microwave oven, or that glow-in-the dark paint on some watches. Or cell phones, high voltage lines, laptops. None of those things gives me so much as a neurological tickle. That makes me wonder if the Crucible had been something else.

Metis can talk to me without sound. She can reach out and do it. It may have taken me some time to adjust to the idea, but I now understand that psychic phenomena are not just perfectly possible but are also perfectly real. The monster that assaulted my brain in Germany is more evidence of this.

Well… What are psychic powers? Are they energy? Do they leave a trace or signature like radiation? While I’m not asserting that it is the case, I do wonder if the aura left by the Crucible might be related to psychic energy. I wonder if the unique and seemingly irreplaceable value placed on it by Zeus and Troy might be for this energy source.

Homer and Ardia are the products of an experiment. That’s fine. Hercules is a gigantic muscle bound machine. But pound for pound, I think he is still unnaturally strong. I don’t believe there is any muscle fibre in nature that would allow him to possess the kind of strength he possesses. And he healed far too quickly from his wounds. They all seem to heal too quickly. Again, I’m not saying that there is something entirely unnatural, or otherworldly, about them. I do feel like I need to acknowledge the possibility of it.

The Crucible had some sort of one-of-a-kind property attached to it that allowed it to be used in the creation of beings the likes of which I had never imagined could exist. There are surely uncounted laboratories the world over that are using every imaginable kind of radiation to produce every imaginable kind of mutation and none of them seem to be able to produce the kinds of things that the Crucible has. When I think about my friends, or Metis, or any of the other monsters, I see things that seem otherworldly.

These are thoughts I must continue to have. What was The Crucible? Where did it come from? What is its nature?