AN: Well folks, we're halfway done. I guess. Still not sure yet. Anyway, thanks, you reviewers. I own nothing, not even an iPad.
Camp Life, Chapter Eleven
Frigid Exigency/Intention Of Direction
He can still see her smiling at him.
He wonders how no-one else sees it- she is the embodiment of evil. Not his uncle; he'd always quite liked Hades. Not his half-brother Ares- Ares was always very blunt, never worried about hiding- well, anything; he wouldn't see the point.
But her, she always cloaked that malevolence of hers behind a sunny smile, a dignified walk, a good deed, here and there . . . to those that fit in the Family, at least.
Ever since the snakes in his crib, she'd tried to show him how useless he was, how expendable; how they had plenty of others who could do what he could do.
In the dark, he smiles back.
I showed you.
Danny can hear Jesse's teeth chattering from where she's laying and feels bad for him. He's so tiny, she thinks, this cold isn't good for him.
The bitter cold of the ice plains of central Greenland is bad enough, but the wind chill makes it nearly inescapable. Jesse, huddled inside his thick arctic sleeping bag (Rust called them mummy bags), is still frozen from the day's trek to the site of the artifact thing. Just as she's about to say something, Amanda, looking not very much better than Jesse sounds, rises from her bag and slips into Jesse's.
She shifts on her stomach and scans through rifle's scope, looking at the ice bank several hundred yards away.
Rising only a few feet from the bank is a dark-colored platform.
"You see it?" Steven Rust asks.
"Yeah," she replies, "What is it?"
Rust smiles grimly. "Our destination. I have absolutely no idea how it got here, but . . ."
She turns her head toward him. "I wish you would stop being so cryptic."
Rust chuckles. "Really? You should try it some time. It's fun."
Danny sighs. She's about to reply, but a scuffling sound comes from the sleeping bag Amanda just entered. Rust snickers quietly.
"Didn't Chiron tell you to not let the guys and girls do stuff like that?"
Steven cackles softly and looks up at the millions of stars shining over their heads. "Did he? I don't remember that. All I heard was, save the world, kill enemies, be nice to hobos, don't get pregnant, Just Say No, blah blah- something like that."
Danny shakes her head and returns her eye to the scope, but Rust taps her on the shoulder. "Go on, get some rest. I'll keep watch."
"Thanks," she murmurs, already dreaming about how sort-of-warm her sleeping bag will be. She wonders if Laurel wouldn't mind a visitor in her bag tonight- it's fucking freezing.
When Katie Gardner marches Travis and Conner up to him, holding each of them by the ear, their little sidekick Kevin trailing behind looking distraught, Percy knows he should have stayed in his cabin with Annabeth.
"Percy," the daughter of Demeter growls, pulling to a stop in front of him, "You have to do something. They just filled Vinnie Corleano's canteen with vodka because of some poem he wrote about them, and now the kid's wandering around the camp flirting and singing love songs to every girl he sees - I don't know how he missed what he was drinking, but - but that's not the point! You need to stop them! I'm not doing it any more!"
She marches away. Connor rubs his ear wistfully.
"Really, guys?"
"Hey, look, we helped him! If he scores tonight, it'll be because of us-"
Percy glares at them. "Jesus Christ, you guys! If you two spent as much time screwing with the Giants as you do your own comrades, we'd have won the war already! This has to stop!"
The Stoll's fidget uncomfortably. Percy never gets mad like this.
"I'm putting you two to work," Percy says decisively. "In fact . . . I'm going to give you to Clarisse."
Nico sighs and stretches before standing and walking over to where Rust is sitting on the crest of the moonlit hill. The cold swirls around him, but he doesn't mind too much; it's better than the eerie numbness that takes over the body during extended visits to the Underworld. Rust glances up.
"Don't you ever sleep?" he asks.
"Yeah . . . just at weird times, or after I use my powers a lot, that's all."
Nico plops down on the frost-covered ground next to the son of Aeolus.
"Hmm." Steven sighs. "I meant to warn you earlier- this place where we're going . . . it's not going to be that great for you."
Nico fixes him with a quizzical look. "What do you mean?"
"Your father. His history. The last war- not the Titan war . . . the one before that."
The son of Hades frowns, then peers over towards the ice shelf off in the distance.
His eyes widen.
"You mean that's-"
"Yeah."
Travis and Connor are begging for their lives when Annabeth shows up.
She looks furious, and Leo, lagging behind her, looks uncharacteristically subdued.
"You need to see this," she says, handing Percy Leo's iPad. He looks at the screen.
The news report reads: 'Massive 8.7 Earthquake rocks Gulf of Mexico'.
The report goes on to talk about the resulting hundreds of deaths, oil spills, billions of dollars in damage, coastal cities ravaged, widespread looting-
"She did this," Annabeth says, rage coating her words. "Gaea. She's taunting us."
Leo speaks up hesitantly. "The Gulf . . . that's where I was born. Corpus Christi. She . . . " he breaks off, looking nauseated.
Percy sits there for a moment, absorbing this.
Then he speaks. "Travis, Connor, get going. Help us stop them. I don't care how, just do it."
The brothers nod grimly and depart. Leo follows, looking lost. As he exits the tent, Piper and Jason both wrap an arm around the son of Hephaestus and lead him away.
As soon as their gone, Percy leaps to his feet and smashes his fist into the thick beam half of the canvas tent is propped up on. The wood shatters instantly, and the tent collapses, leaving Annabeth and her boyfriend draped in the canvas, standing face to face. Splinters dot Percy's hand, and blood begins to seep from his bandages. He stares down at the ground.
"I need to get stronger."
Annabeth gently leans her forehead on Percy's bare chest.
"I know."
"Okay, dear brother. What's the number one thing you have to do before pulling a job on an unknown subject?"
"Planning?"
"Well . . . yes. But before that: research."
"Ah, yes, my dear brother. How right you are!"
"Indeed. Now, I was thinking- we can fight, yes, but at heart- are we warriors?"
"Sure."
"Well, yes; but not like Clarisse or Percy, I mean."
"Ah, of course, of course."
"We're smarter then them. More patient."
"Indubitably."
"And so, we aren't going to assault the enemy directly- we're going to attack them-"
"In the rear?"
"Um . . . no. No. Never say that again."
"Ah . . . yes."
"I meant indirectly, on their peripherals. Think: They're an army. What do they need?"
"Hmm . . . well. Weapons. Communications."
"Right, right, but I was thinking more basic than that. Food. Water."
"Ah . . . yes. I like the way you think, dear brother. I do indeed."
Danny wakes when she hears Laurel laughing hysterically.
Rising from her sleeping bag, she blinks in the early morning mist until she sees what Laurel is so amused by - Rust and Nico are asleep by the rifle that was still sitting where she'd left it last night. Nico isresting his head on Steven's shoulder, their limbs intertwined.
Shaking her head in amusement, Danny, checking the time and adjusting for the zone difference, begins dressing and rolling up her bag. She can hear Rust and Nico threatening Laurel in various gruesome ways, but now Drew, Amanda, and Jesse are laughing too.
A few feet away, Jacob climbs from the sleeping bag he shared with Lily last night. The Roman riffles through his pack, then tosses her a small package.
"Breakfast," he says, yawning.
Danny thanks him and pulls her pack onto her shoulders, then walks to the rifle. Squatting down, she field-strips the Barret M107 .50 caliber high-powered rifle and reassembles it. As she completes this task, Rust calls out for them to pack up and get ready to march.
Danny's always been a bit of an over-achiever. She knows it. It was always pointed out to her, back in elementary school, when even though she could barely read from dyslexia and had to pinch herself to keep her focus on one thing at a time, she got the best grades in her class. Even after the monsters drove her out of Colombus and towards Camp Half- Blood, she was the one in Ares cabin who made sure they cleaned up for inspection, took showers, basically everything they were either too lazy or too distracted by war games to do themselves. Her siblings were fine with that; it was when Clarisse took her on as a sort of protégé, training her personally and making sure she got the best stuff in the cabin first, the cushiest jobs around Camp- her brothers weren't to hot about that.
But Danny could really care less what they, or most people, thought about it; she just liked doing things. Getting stuff done. It was her nature.
Nico joins her in line, his hair messy and his backpack half open, and she sighs, reaches over and zips the compartments closed and pats his hair into a somewhat uniform mess. Nico grins at her.
They had bonded a bit when Danny had been patching his wounds after Steven had rescued him from Octavian's cage. He was used to her slight OCD.
"Making sure I look good for the monsters?" he asks, displaying his dashing smirk.
She rolls her eyes at him and opens her breakfast.
In the dark, he watches Iphitus sail over the wall again.
Then the Nemean lion roars at him, claws shredding his armor.
Alcyoneus's head crumples and caves in under his fists, oozing golden ichor, and a savage glee rises from deep in his heart.
He feels the Earth Mother rising again. He knows something odd is happening here in the Underworld, he knows that soon, things may change.
But in the dark these things seem trivial.
He watches with vague interest as Jason's face lights up as his friend describes the Golden Fleece, the leader of the Argonauts talking a mile a minute, his hands gesticulating wildly.
He hasn't seen this one in a while, he thinks.
"There. I can see it- that tent."
"The big one?"
"The big one."
"Okay."
"So . . . what do you want to do?"
"Well . . . they are the enemy. This isn't like when we put the tabasco paste on all the dishes after they'd been washed at camp. I mean . . . should we, like, poison them?"
"Hmm . . . I actually have no idea. I mean, I don't see why not, but - do we actually have any poison?"
"Not that I remember."
"Ok. Well . . . I think we have a good start, my dear brother."
"Indeed, my dear brother."
Danny stares at the blackish steel jutting from the ice. A pair of tiny cylinders stick out from the metal, like antennae that had been torn off somehow.
A metal hatch is in the center.
"Are you going to tell us what this is now?" Amanda asks.
Nico nods fervently.
"This," says Steven, "is U-boat 479. Built in 1941, in Kiel, Germany, she was believed lost in the Gulf of Finland in 1944. As you can see, that is not the case."
He nudges the lip of the hatch with his foot.
"As I'm sure you all recall, 1944 and 45 were not pleasant times to be a son of Hades. This submarine was moving some items of precious value to Hitler- and we know that at least one of these things was a piece of the Doorway."
Drew reaches down and tugs on the handle welded on to the hatch.
"It won't budge."
Her boyfriend nods. "I figured as much."
Rust produces a small wrapped package from in his coat pocket. Unwrapping it, he places the small putty-like substance around the edge of the hatch where the hinges appear to be.
"Um," Danny says, watching as the son of the Wind King inserts small silver tubes into the putty, "Aren't those blasting caps?"
"Yes indeed," Rust says cheerfully.
"Um," Amanda says, eyes wide, "We'll just be backin' up now . . ."
"Good idea," Rust agrees.
"Okay. You've got it?"
"Yep. I have no idea why we had so much, but we do."
"They have a well. I think from that little town over there - Litochoro, the sign said. But I don't think they're using it anymore, there were armed guards around it, and it looked abandoned."
"So we'll be able to do this without hurting them?"
"Looks like it."
"Excellent."
"I know, right?"
The explosion isn't that big, not like in the movies or anything. Theres a small flash, a loud pop, a bit of smoke.
They edge forward until they can see the hatch laying askew, it's hinges blackened and smouldering.
Rust hauls the hatch aside.
"Down we go."
The interior of the U-boat is dark and gloomy. Nico, leading the way, holds his flashlight in front of him, scanning the walls. Pipes and hydraulic-looking machines are everywhere on the sides of the passage.
Danny sticks close to him, holding her sword at her side but out of its sheath. This place gives her the creeps.
"Another fork here," Nico calls to Rust, who's in the back as rearguard, "Which way?"
"Left, I think," his voice comes back distorted, echoing slightly. Danny shivers.
"What's all this brown stuff on the walls?" Jacob asks.
"Please don't tell me the sewage lines broke or something like that," Drew says, faux cheerfully, "because I'll kill you."
Rust sighs. "It's not sewage. It's dried blood."
No one has anything to say to that.
They find the first skeleton in an alcove seat halfway down the passage. Its wearing the black trenchcoat uniform of the Kriegsmarine, which has worn noticeably but not fully deteriorated. It grins at them hollowly. Danny notices that one side of it's bare skull is clearly cracked open. Nico gives the cadaver a cursory examination, then continues on. Danny supposes he's seen plenty of skeletons. There are several more down the next hallway, a much larger passage with ladders and rails and little stairways leading above and below. The skeletons are all practically identical, and they all clearly suffered blunt force trauma.
The body they find in the room below that hallway doesn't look like those ones.
This corpse is much newer; skin is still mottled and stretched over it's bones, it's eyes are glassy and miscolored in death. It's wearing a white parka and carrying a rifle in its rotting hands. The rifle looks like one Steven had in those big crates from the plane, but this rifle is also completely painted white, like the snow outside.
Nico kneels and begins examining the body. Danny joins him.
He points to the chest soberly. "Well, we know what killed him."
Danny nods numbly. Protruding from the man's chest is a human's femur bone, just like those still attached to their owners upstairs, coated with flaky brown blood.
"No insignia. No tattoo's. No dog tags, even though he looks military . . . no identifying marks, anywhere."
Rust picks up the rifle. "It's an L1A1 Self Loading Rifle. Semi Automatic. It was used by the British in the 90's, or thereabouts."
To Danny (Probably the only other one who really cares), he adds, "It's the Brit version of the FN FAL rifle Belgium and Israel use."
He ejects the magazine and examines it.
"These are regular rounds. Not celestial bronze."
"Does anybody else think we're ignoring the important fact here?" Drew demands. "This guy got a bone shoved into his chest! How?!"
Lily, a hardened warrior like the rest, looks nauseated. "Guys . . . I don't like this. This room is a dead end anyway. Let's go back up."
The others nod. Steven shrugs and sets the magazine back on the decking. Brass-coated rounds tinker and clatter onto the floor. The Camp Armorer pulls his MP5 submachine gun off his shoulder and motions Danny to precede him up the ladder.
When they return to the main hallway, the skeletons are gone.
"Hey, buddy!" Travis says brightly.
Jake Mason looks up warily from the technical manual he's reading on his hammock. Sunlight streams through the window in the tiny cabin the Hephaestus kids have claimed. deadmau5 is playing on a stereo on the floor, which is strewn with tools, CD's, a laptop computer, and blankets. The front of the thick book Jake's reading explains that it's for a CAT 325C Excavator.
"I don't want any water," he says quickly.
Travis waves his hands airily. "That was yesterday! Today, I need your help! For a project!"
Jake stares at him strangely.
"You think I want to get my ass kicked by your lady love? No thanks."
"It's for the war effort!" Travis explains patiently. "I just need some gasoline."
"Oh shit."
"No . . ."
"You have got to be fucking kidding me!"
"Nico . . ."
"This wasn't me!" Nico snaps, looking worried. Which is a lot better then his friends look, which is downright terrified.
"We need to keep going." Rust says grimly.
Danny finds herself nodding. "The others are depending on us."
"It should only be a little longer," Rust says soothingly. "All we need is to find the cargo hold."
They troop on, staring at the walls and jumping at every small noise.
A few levels farther down they find another body in white. This one appeared to have attempted to drag himself away from something, judging from the brownish-black smears on the floor, but he didn't get very far; probably because his left arm had been chewed off at the elbow.
Rust points to the walls. "Those are bullet holes."
He finds the white rifle and examines the clip. "Empty."
"Jesus," Drew murmurs, looking pale.
"What do you think chewed his arm off?" Jesse asks, peering at the stump.
Rust, Danny, and Nico exchange dark looks. "Something seriously pissed. Let's go, we shouldn't stay in one place."
Towards the end of the passageway Steven examines a large hatch with a small glass porthole. The porthole is fogged up and opaque. Rust jerks experimentally on the latch, but it doesn't budge.
"Look," Danny whispers. She points to a long red wire on the floor that leads around the corner.
"C4," Steven murmurs, examining the bottom of the door. "Whoever they were, they didn't get inside the bay."
He stands up. "Okay. Everyone but me, I want you to head around the corner, see where it leads. It should only be a few feet. When you find the detonator- or there are some in Danny's pack if there isn't one- set it off. I'll get in there, grab the Doorway part, and we'll scram."
Danny and the others nod uneasily, then troop off around the corner.
"You wouldn't believe what I had to do to get Mason to hand over the gas," Travis says, panting as he carries the big oil drum over to the Stoll's little trouble-making stash.
"Well, I got the tarps and the lighter, the binoculars, and a motorcycle from in town. I was amazed they had one, it's a bit old, but it's not exactly a moped."
"Good, good. I think we're ready. Are you ready?"
"So ready. This is gonna be raw."
It only takes a moment for the C4 to detonate against the door. The hatch swings open, smoke trailing from the hinge. Steven enters quickly, MP5 raised and ready to fire, but the hold is empty apart from a few wooden crates marked with swastikas. Steven reaches for the knife he keeps in his boot, but before he can draw it, the hatch swings shut behind him.
"Okay," says Jesse when Danny lights the fuse. "Let's get the hell out of here."
They all turn to leave, and find their way blocked by a dozen grinning, skeletal Kriegsmarines.
"Hello, little prince." the soft, musical tone is exactly how Steven remembers it from childhood.
"Hello, Khione," he says evenly.
"Looking for the Doorway?" The goddess of snow says cheerfully.
Steven shrugs. "Yeah, I was-"
He spins around, bringing the submachine gun to bear. The gunfire rakes across Khione's body, but she merely dissipates into snowy mush.
"I remember how destructive you always were, even at ten," she comments wryly from the other side of the room. "Looks like you haven't improved much."
Steven unclips the weapon from the strap holding it to his body and sets it on the ground, then draws his broadsword.
"Oh ho," Khione sneers, "look what the wittle prince has got!"
Steven hears the rasp of a sword clearing a sheath, and he twists, the sword striking for Khione's neck. Her sword, a beautiful weapon with a shiny, slender blade and a gold hilt, with elegant crosspieces and a fat sapphire on the pommel, meets his halfway.
He swings again, and she blocks again, yawning for effect.
"Does Uncle Boreas know you're hanging with the bad boys now?" Steven taunts, thrusting.
Khione rolls her eyes. "Please. I doubt he's even noticed I'm gone."
Steven grins fiercely. "I'm sure he has. And I hope he rips you to pieces and feeds you to his wolves, if I don't kill you first-"
Khione laughs. Then her blade flashes downward.
Nico is desperately trying to keep the skeletons at bay when they hear Steven's screams. His concentration snaps and his father's minions, kept here to guard his treasures, lurch forward.
"Come on!" Drew shouts frantically, charging. The others make to join her, but Danny steps in front of them, produces a grenade from inside her pack, pulls the pin, and tosses it into the corpse-filled corridor.
"Everyone down!"
Ladon's heads come snapping at him. Anasklusmos meets them, but he knows time is running out. That girl- what was her name?- said he would only have a little time-
Antaeus dies again, crushed by his arms-
Prometheus smiles gratefully-
Abderus is mauled again-
The memories keep coming, faster and faster, and he simply smiles in the darkness.
"Is it in?"
"It's in. No jokes."
"I know, I know, this is serious."
"Exactly. But next time, I want to use dynamite."
Connor snorts. "Was that in doubt?"
He shifts the dirt-colored camouflage tarp over their heads. "Can you believe that even though Rust packed the weapons, there weren't any explosives?"
"Travesty." Travis shakes his head.
"Oh well. This should work." Connor peers through the binoculars. "Okay. That Laistrogonian is going for the well. Wait, he's got his buddies . . . okay. Light it."
"Lighting . . . lit."
"Okay, come on, come on, get on the bike-"
"I'm gonna kill you slowly," Steven rasps from the floor, clutching the stump of his left hand. Blood - fresh and red - is pooling around him.
Khione chuckles. "You do that. I've got a date- with a little friend of yours. Leo, I think his name is. Ta ta!"
Before she leaves, she turns back around, as if she forgot something.
"Oh! By the way - the Keystone of the Doorway - the captain had it. Too bad he doesn't anymore - looks like you came all this way for nothing."
Beaming merrily, she turns and disappears in a sprinkle of snowflakes.
The skeletons are a pile of blackened bones when the demigods move to investigate, but Danny sees them twitching and says, "Come on, we need to leave. Now."
Drew pushes past her, her face as white as a ghost. "Move. He's screaming again."
They sprint down the corridor.
Percy watches the flames boil out of the small wooden structure on the outskirts of the Giant camp from the deck of the Argo II.
"It's been like ten minutes," he says, amazed, "Shouldn't they have stopped by now?"
Annabeht shakes her head in disbelief. "Travis and Connor must have poured an entire drum of gasoline in there. Maybe two. And apparently their food stores now have weevils."
"That sucks."
Annabeth grins. "It's funny when it's happening to other people though."
They laugh and watch the Stolls getting a heroes welcome down below.
"Are you ready to start?" Annabeth asks.
Percy nods, feeling a it of hope and excitement in his heart. "Yeah. I'm ready. Let's do it."
Megara screams in horror-
his arrow pierces Nessus the centaur-
The poisoned shirt boils away his skin- the funeral pyre burns him to dust- his father welcomes him, smiling gruffly-
"Hello, nephew."
Heracles jumps slightly. The memories cease. Even the faint light of the torch in Hades' hand hurts his eyes.
The God of the Underworld smiles. "Are you ready for another chance, nephew?"
AN: Thanks, guys. Review.
Next Time: Butch and Nyssa attempt to interpret Ella the harpy's rambling, while back at Camp Half-Blood Gardner Peck and Castor try to help the war effort, without much luck.