"You'll need to be fast," Hercules noted. "Not all of us are resistant and the land and road out there could get messed up."
Jules had already begun running a search for speed enhancements in his "Centaur 2.0 V3 alpha" interface and loaded them 2.4 nanoseconds before Derrick got his own speed enhancements online. It took another 40 nanoseconds for the acceleration field to flow out over their bodies from the thamatronic nodes that looked like gemstones set in their skin, and less than 30 nanoseconds to reach the large, dirty nuke. It was already counting, giving the army barely enough time to escape -- a comfortable 2 minutes and 41 seconds remaining. Phaeton-Apollo appeared next to them, and spoke, in an equally accelerated frame. He was wearing a very large wrist-watch with a fancy Swiss nameplate and an utterly non-Swiss movement: Chronus. It was named for the Titan who embodied and drew on time, and was able to play with the flow of moments.
"Well, fancy that," Apollo-Phaeton said. "It's supposed to be too big to move. I think this is a copy of the Tsar Bomb, lads."
"What do we do about it?" Derrick asked.
"Well, we move it obviously. My chariot won't be ready for another three hours, and it'll go off before that, but we really can't allow it to do so. So, I'm going to strap my watch to it, set for 'stop' and you two will carry it back to the paddock. Stay at the speed you are, and don't drop it."
"Don't drop it, got it," the centaur twins said. Apollo adjusted the watch, and placed it on the bomb, then became like a statue to the twins, as the chronon field warped around the bomb, and it became dull and grey. It took them a good 50 nanoseconds to figure out where to take hold of it to carry it, as the carrier it was mounted on had been disabled so that it couldn't be used to remove the thing. They tried carrying it and got half a mile down the road in a minute, but the effort was incredible. They set it on the ground carefully, resting for 12 nanoseconds.
"We need a sled," they said in unison. It took them 400 nanoseconds to get the Gymnasion, grab the largest "training sled" unit, strip off the weights, and carry it back to the bomb, which was flickering lightly, but still in effective stasis. Loading it onto the sled and making sure it couldn't tip took 10 nanoseconds. Dragging it using a properly designed centaur-yoke meant that Derrick could pull it half way while Jules balanced it from behind, and Jules could pull it the rest of the way to the paddock while Derrick balanced it; this took 890 nanoseconds total.
They were both nearly exhausted, but dropping back to normal temporal alignment let them begin to recover. The bomb was ticking at one second per thirty minutes, plenty of time for it to be loaded into the Sun Chariot where it would be harmless, or at least, that's what Apollo-Phaeton had implied. Apollo appeared as a biped moments later, separated from Phaeton, who was resting in his stable. Jules and Derrick had started a hacky-sack game to work on their four-legged coordination.
"You two still have too much energy. How'd you like to help us out in the morning?" the Sun-god asked.
"What kind of help?"
"Nothing beyond your current forms. Phaeton will need an assist pulling the chariot, and that'll let us rest the second team a day longer."
"Uh, sure, why not?" Jules said. 'Rick thought for a minute, and said, "Just as long as our folks know we're OK."
"I'll make sure before sunrise. Now, are either of you hungry?"
"No." "Not really."
"I'll bring some water and oats for you an hour before sunrise. See if you can recover a bit from hauling that thing."
The twins played around with their cybernetic interfaces, going through most of the major systems, before deciding to try the speed-sleep system. It was entirely unlike normal sleep. They entered a sort of one-track-mind concentration on what was around them, but with the constant stream of what the 'sleep' was doing to them, fizzing in their awareness. It was theoretically fascinating to observe from their zen state. The fatigue toxins that they'd generated were being flushed from their muscles and organs, processed by modified kidneys and liver into useful building blocks, and excess materials stored temporarily for offloading in a useful form. The same was happening to their food-wastes.
Unlike normal horses (the "manual" explained) their Centaur bodies used a streamlined system that converted food completely into complex energy-fuel and building blocks for their body repair systems. Building blocks and energy-fuel was delivered to a compounding system in the second liver (in the horse part) that turned fuel into specific fuel for each organ and muscle, then sent it out to their bodies, where their highly efficient muscles directly transformed that energy into movement, resulting in a secondary and then tertiary energy supply that could supply the muscles again, or provide power to other tissues. The final result was water and hydrocarbons that their repair systems would use to repair their cells, organs, and connective tissues.
Jules examined how their "being toyed with" had changed that system -- it was less biological and much more machinery using carbon and metals but the biological part was integrated tightly. The interesting part for Derrick was the magical subsystem, because Hephaustus had "toyed" with that as well. They had the innate human magic but that had been sent off-line... and there was something new and interesting hidden away in the pop-up information fields in the help system for magic. Examining his current magic and the link to his "human" magic let him check definitions, and Olympus popped up as multiple separate places: The volcano in Greece where the Greeks and Romans thought their gods lived, a mirage-type reflection of the same mountain that sometimes appeared over the mountain, and the original home of the Powers who were eventually syncretized by the Greeks and other peoples into those god-identities. Their original home had shattered when their power was broken and locked down. That had happened because they were abusing their positions to play games with mortals and neglecting to care for the Earth and to properly guide their followers.
They had a second home drawn from the Chaos, that connected to the Shattered Olympus, as well as a number of Reflections of Olympus that had been created as retreats in other areas where they had been worshiped. But the Mount Olympus Spa was a new thing, recently dragged from the Chaos and anchored by four of the faceless fire-wheels in order to help the Olympians to redeem themselves and regain their place. The "weave of fate" which allowed it to exist was separate from that of Earth, and when humans came here to be guests, it was known that their bodies, at least, were very likely to be transformed, so their magic and their forms were copied into the new weave, and any changes of magical origin were flagged for review and very close revision by the set of Fates who had been assigned to this small world. They would allow only the physical changes that were approved -- minor rejuvenation, for instance -- to be copied into the Earth weave, under the direction of Ananke. They would be returned to human. But the "Centaur V2" machinery would be very likely to become a part of their human lives on Earth -- without magic, because magic would be locked on Earth.
He flagged that information and packed it all into an information memory unit, and sent it on the combat-communication link -- along with a note, "why are we engineered as super-soldiers?" -- to Jules, while Jules packed up the fine details of how their bodies worked now. They both enjoyed a moment of disorientation as they unpacked their respective memory units, and had a moment of trouble with blurring identity. But that went away quickly enough.
Hephaustus was standing in the paddock, doing something to the bomb while the time-stopper slowly ran out of energy.
He smiled at the twins and said, "Be careful how much you give away, and think about what you want to keep."
Derrick spoke first. "Do you mean any harm to humanity?"
"No," Hephaustus replied. "Of all my brothers and sisters, I am the one who least wished harm to you, because I was one of the first who saw that you would eventually match and surpass us in power over the world."
"Then why?"
"Heroes, I suppose. Your world needs them. You are out of balance and the principles of chaos and order are no longer homogeneous in your governments and societies. You need examples of people with integrity who work toward the common good, and you need people who can survive the actions of people who are selfishly working against that good. And you need people who can see what things are harmful to your world. You only get one world, you know."
"Then what will we ..."
"Hush now. Phoebus is nearly here."
They discovered that they couldn't say anything, and when they started looking for the controls to undo that, Hephaustus said in a teasing voice, "Toy Horsie override: Sensory replay the Bonding Upgrade from 0210 hours, seek to orgasm and loop until external interrupt. Initiate."
Still in their "repair sleep" they couldn't move at all while their minds were suddenly reliving several hours earlier in the evening when they were engaged in enthusiastic and extremely pleasant sex with the Sons of Hercules and the two conspiring gods who had remade them. Much more rapidly than they remembered they hit the explosive, mind-blanking sensation of orgasm from having sex with four Olympian beings. They couldn't think of anything else, so they didn't.
When the celestial stallion Phaethon came outside and nudged them, they woke with a shudder. The objections of earlier had faded from their memories for now. Dazed, they let the grooms lead them to positions just behind and to either side of the powerful stallion and they were attached with centaur-harness to the traces of the chariot. Once locked in, they abruptly felt tremendously awake and energized. The bomb was already loaded up into a carrier next to the solar focus. A young woman appeared in the chariot behind them, and they were instantly somewhere else than the paddock. A faint transparent road spread before them, and the woman lightly tapped the reins, and they began pulling. The chariot was extremely heavy, since it contained the Sun. For whatever reason, the heat did not bother them at all, nor the intense brilliance.
"Welcome brothers," Phaethon said to them, and they somehow understood him. "We'll have a good day's work today."
The chariot began moving, at a slow pace, and the young woman started to sing a simple and lovely song that ripped past them with the force of a hurricane, and the sky began to glow behind them and around them as they started up the hill.
Back on Mount Olympus Spa, and not at all coincidentally, on the Earth country which had sent the bomb, the world began to experience another dawn. The colors were a riot of joy, the clouds brilliant and gorgeous with purple, green, red, gold, and as they could see the light reveal the very top of Olympus, Jules and 'Rick could sense a movement, a more intense presence in the carriage behind them and a lighter but more energetic touch on the reins.
"As always, my thanks, Lady Eos, for getting things on their way."
"Good journey, Lord Phoebus."
Another movement, and the presence of the woman was gone. The light began to spread out below them over the lands below.
"I foresee that Hephaustus play will cause you some challenges, lads," the driver said as they continued up hill. The pulling was hard but not exhausting, and they felt an intense pleasure in the physical labor.
"However, I've a request for you. The army that attacked us, it belongs to a small country, but it was assisted by a larger one, that is not currently one of your country's allies. We will pause for a very brief time at the crest, and I will be firing an arrow. Hephaustus gave you the name and location of a target while you rested. You will manifest bows and fire a non-lethal arrow at your target. Then, we'll consume their bomb and cause a bit of disturbance below."
"Yes, sir," they said, not sure at all what this was about. Each looking at his brother, they noticed something had happened while they were looped in ecstasy. They looked very much more like machines, their human half anyway, while their Celestial Shire Drum Horse Stallion part looked like it was made from nuclear fire. Somehow, they could see without being blinded. Their skin was coated in metal, there was a singular long arrow in a quiver on each of their backs. Between and in front of them, Phaethon was a brilliant horse-shape of light too bright for human eyes, but no brighter than their own horse parts. They could see the earth below them, but they could also see it as a distant, tiny speck, from which they were able to focus in closer and closer until they could see individual birds and even insects.
"Bringing targeting online," Derrick and Jules said in one voice. They had different targets, while Apollo would be wielding the nuclear fire of the bomb that had been left behind with the intention of destroying the Mount Olympus Spa, along with all who were guests there. They weren't sure who had been guesting there besides themselves, but it seemed a reasonable thing to find out once they were done hauling the Sun across the sky.
Derrick's target was a General. He was not young, but he was fit, supported by drugs and a regimen of exercises, and regular infusions of the nearly pure explosive death that they made from potatoes and sour small apples in his country. It was one of the three exports that the rest of the world couldn't get better versions from elsewhere.
Jules target was the Party Chairman, who was also somehow tentant to four other offices, all of them minor of themselves, but between the five he had near-absolute power in his country. He was a proud man, perhaps a little vain, but then he had punched out a bear once -- the bear being caught by surprise while stealing the sour small apples from a tree in the man's back garden.
The gates had been slowed down. A brilliant flare of light around them made the human-side watchers believe the bomb might have gone off. The Earth spun below/above them, while Hermes spun a quantum thread between the council of Olympus, and Apollo, and the three targets. Ananke appeared between the two centaurs, standing poised on the traces between them and one arm on each brother's back.
"The assault on Olympus has been judged by the Metatron and we are permitted to issue a warning. The two who were most responsible are your targets. The arrows of the Sun will strike them down, but will not kill them. Instead they will be enlightened. If their minds are strong enough, and their hearts not twisted, they will not be destroyed. If they accept judgement, they will be changed. If they are obstinate and insist on their rightness, they will be sent to their own judges. But the ones in charge of that country are not kind."
They were almost to the crest. The brothers each pulled their arrow from the sheaths on their backs. The bows formed in their hands as they drew the shafts into position.
Apollo released the giant bomb, and it was nothing at all by comparison with the ferocity of the nuclear fires of the sun, but there was a perfectly timed hiccup in a magnetic line that snapped the explosion into a flare, and the flare spat cooler but more violently accelerated flame at the Earth in a momentary petulance.
In a large country where the rule of a handful of powerful, wealthy, entrenched men recently gave way to a populist uprising, only to be returned to a slightly different handful of powerful entrenched men, the strongman and the behind-the-scenes meddlers and the General have the true power. The General is Derrick's target. The Strongman is Jules' target. They take aim, their magical enhancements and cybernetic augmentations leaving the certainty of their strike beyond doubt - especially when the magnetic storm strikes the skies directly above them. The aurora will be visible for most of the world, that night; it's visible in daytime to the citizens of the country that invaded.
Their leaders are in a meeting. Brilliant, blinding streaks of light are caught on a dozen dashboard cameras and by accidental phone cameras as the building where the leaders meet is struck twice by what look like arrows from the sky, made out of excruciatingly bright light.
The next morning, the news will come of what has happened there. For now, though, Derrick and Jules have paused long enough at the peak of noon and are now pulling the Solar Chariot downwards. This is not easier than pulling it upwards had been; it still doesn't want to move over the Celestial Spheres of the Mythic Representation. It has to be dragged. They are finding themselves quite hungry as they saw a collection of young women dancing around the path as light began to leave parts of Olympus below them. They threw brilliant washes of color into the sky that saturated every cloud, and a golden light wavered around them.
"Blessed Hesperides," Apollo said. "When we reach the Gates please arrange for those Centaurs who wish to celebrate the brave acts of our two guest chariot horses, to gather at the paddock. Thank you for your beautiful work."
The gold light gradually turned to greens and blues, and the clouds picked up a brilliant rose color that lingered a bit longer than the rest of the fading light, as the chariot reached a wide arched gateway covered with climbing flowers. Three of the young women brought brightly polished, shining yellow apples, one each for Phaethon and the two centaur brothers, and they cut them up and fed them to the brothers, while others were uncoupling and removing the traces and harnesses, which looked burned and smoking. Their bodies were no longer glowing, the metal was slowly retracting back into the glowing gem points, and they were aware of how tired they were. The apples were unusually refreshing though, and the women took them to a stable area where there was a huge trough filled with warm sudsy herb-scented water, and went over them with sponges, cleaning off the scorch marks and what Derrick assumed was stardust, which had packed in their hooves. Their usual hoof-boots had been replaced by a contraption that they weren't allowed to examine too closely, that had the same color and subtle glow as the chariot had.
"This is nice," Jules commented. "I mean, we've always scrubbed each other up, but this is more relaxing."
"It is one of the up-sides of being a Celestial Draft Steed," Phaethon told them. "Though honestly, it would be good being human again. I still have two millennia on my sentence before I can do that though."
"This is because of screwing up with the chariot before?"
"Yes."
"I'm nod sure how that was fair."
"My father was punished more harshly. The judgement had him subsumed into Apollo."
"So he doesn't exist as a separate entity now?" Jules asked.
"No. When Apollo conjoins with me to form a centaur, I can commune with him, but otherwise, he exists only in shades and echoes."
"I prefer our kind of existence," Derrick said.
"I'm afraid that you've become demigods, though," Phaethon said quietly. "The apple tasted sweet to you? Not bitter?"
"Yeah," they both answered.
"Then you're at least half Olympian. I hear they have a way to pull that out when you go back, but I'm not sure how that would be possible. But then, I'm a horse."
"And a very chatty horse," Apollo said, appearing in his 'stableboy' guise to assist in the grooming. "It's all right though. the two of you have done us a tremendous service. We wish to repay you with a celebration party."
He helped them put their usual hoof-boots on, once they were cleaned and dried and their hooves had been checked.
The stable door opened to the paddock, and there was a party under way.