Sunset of the Gods - By Steve White Page 0,20
of the acropolis of Eleusis to the west.
“Maybe we can find time for a side trip later, Bryan,” Jason consoled him.
They proceeded along the Sacred Way with the aid of their four-and-a-half-foot walking sticks, skirting the Bay of Eleusis, as the sun rose higher into the Attic sky whose extraordinary brilliance and clarity had been remarked on by thousands of years of visitors, even during the Hydrocarbon Age when Greece had been afflicted by smog. Looking about him, Jason could see that the deforestation of Greece was well advanced since he had seen it in the seventeenth century b.c. Presently the road curved leftward, turning inland and leading over the scrub-covered ridge of Mount Aigaleos, which they ascended in the growing heat. They reached the crest, turned a corner, and to the southeast Attica lay spread out before them, bathed in the morning sun. In the distance—a little over five miles as the crow flew, with the sun almost directly behind it—was the city itself. Like every Greek polis, it clustered around the craggy prominence of its acropolis, or high fortified city . . . except that this one would forever be known simply as the Acropolis. It wasn’t crowned by the Parthenon yet, but Jason knew what he was looking at, and what it meant.
He let Landry pause and stare for a few moments.
As those moments slid by, the sun rose just a trifle higher, and its rays moved to strike a certain cleft in the rocks. For a split second, Jason got a glimpse of—
At first his mind refused to accept it.
Mondrago must have been looking in same direction. He ripped out a non-verbal roar, grasped his walking stick in a martial-arts grip, and sprinted for the cleft.
Chantal’s eyes had been following Landry’s in the direction of Athens. Neither of them had seen it. Now they whirled around, wide-eyed.
“Stay here!” Jason commanded, and ran after Mondrago, who was already out of sight.
He scrambled up to the cleft and looked left and right. Mondrago was just vanishing from sight behind a boulder. Jason followed and caught up with him in a tiny glade where he stood, gripping his walking stick like the lethal weapon which, in his hands, it was. He was looking around intently and, it seemed, a little wildly.
“Gone?” Jason asked, approaching with a certain caution.
“Gone,” Mondrago exhaled. He relaxed, and something guttered out in his eyes.
“Did you see what I saw?”
“Depends on what you saw, sir.”
“I think I saw a short humanoid with wooly, goat-like legs and, possibly, horns.”
“On the basis of a very brief glimpse, I confirm that. Doesn’t seem likely that we’d both have the same hallucination, does it?”
“It’s even less likely that we’d actually see something corresponding to the mythological descriptions of the god Pan.”
“I don’t know, sir. You saw some actual Greek gods on your last trip into the past—or at least some actual aliens masquerading as gods.”
Jason shook his head. “Even if any of the Teloi are still around eleven and a half centuries after I encountered them, what we saw was definitely not one of them. It also bore no resemblance to any nonhuman race known to us in our era. And speaking of nonhuman races . . . I couldn’t help noticing your reaction to this particular nonhuman.”
Mondrago’s face took on the carefully neutral look of one being questioned by an officer. “I was startled, sir.”
“No doubt. But what I saw went a little beyond startlement.” Jason sighed to himself. This could no longer be put off. He should, he now realized, have brought it up that day in the exercise room. But his hopes had led him to avoid the issue. He paused and chose his words with care. “As I mentioned to you once before, I studied your record during our orientation period. Among other things, I learned that you served with Shahanian’s Irregulars in the Newhome Pacification.”
“I did, sir,” Mondrago said stiffly. His expression grew even more noncommittal.
As far back as the end of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War had led to a proliferation of PMCs, or “private military companies” like Executive Outcomes and L-3 MPRI, offering customized military expertise to anyone who could pay. This had proven to be a harbinger of the future. The need of fledgling extrasolar colonies for emergency military aid had soon outstripped the response capabilities of the chronically underfunded armed services, leading to a revival of the “free companies” of Earth’s history, although in a strictly