Free The Age Of Zeus by James Lovegrove

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!"

9. BOLDER AND BOULDER
    R amsay was right. They were becoming a team.
    Sam saw it the following day, as they took the TITAN suits outside to practise in the open air. A morning mist shrouded the island, ideal conditions for trying out the thermal imaging. Through her visor, person-shaped agglomerations of lurid colour roved through a whiteout world. She watched them mingle and interact, each indistinguishable from the other, her colleagues, and in their comings together and their gesturings and their mirrorings of movement she saw how comfortable they now were in one another's company. She heard it in the comms link chatter too - banter passing to and fro, sometimes a massed cry of "Shut up!" in response to an especially crude remark from Barrington, and plenty of bullish talk about the Pantheon, belittling references to their powers and prowess. Within the group a clear sense of purpose was coalescing. The battlesuits were all they were cracked up to be and more, and the promise of vengeance was looking like one that Landesman could make good on. After only a handful of days the recruits were lining up in the same direction, like fish in a strong current. Even Mahmoud had overcome her initial awkwardness with her suit and was bounding around like the rest of them, exulting in the sensation of power lent her by this ultra high-tech carapace and joining happily in with the deity-dissing. She was in with the gang. Only Sam remained the outsider, and she couldn't figure out why.
    Unless Ramsay was right on another count: the thing that was holding her back was herself.
    Did she really want to topple the Olympians? Did she hate them that much? Was hatred a solid enough motivation for putting herself on the front line of a conflict with them?
    She tried looking at it another way. Would the world be a better place if the Olympians were removed from it?
    Landesman, on that first day, had advanced all the arguments in the Olympians' favour, the lines of reasoning that many a politician and Pantheonic apologist had used to justify kowtowing to them. No question, people were no longer being killed in their thousands, no longer butchering one another in the name of God, politics and profit. The disease of war, which had for centuries had never failed to infect some region of the planet, had