The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)(19)

We burst through the EMPLOYEES ONLY doors. Inside was a storage room/loading bay filled with more bubble-wrapped automatons, all standing silent and lifeless like the crowd at one of Hestia’s housewarming parties. (She may be the goddess of the family hearth, but the lady has no clue about how to throw a party.)

Gleeson and Grover ran past the robots and began tugging at the rolling metal garage door that sealed off the loading dock.

‘Locked.’ Hedge whacked the door with his nunchaku.

I peered through the tiny plastic windows of the employee doors. Macro and his minions were barrelling in our direction. ‘Run or stay?’ I asked. ‘We’re about to be cornered again.’

‘Apollo, what have you got?’ Hedge demanded.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’s the ace up your sleeve? I did the Molotov cocktail. Grover dropped the boat. It’s your turn. Godly fire, maybe? We could use some godly fire.’

‘I have zero godly fire up my sleeves!’

‘We stay,’ Grover decided. He tossed me his boat paddle. ‘Apollo, block those doors.’

‘But –’

‘Just keep Macro out!’ Grover must have been taking assertiveness lessons from Meg. I jumped to comply.

‘Coach,’ Grover continued, ‘can you play a song of opening for the loading-dock door?’

Hedge grunted. ‘Haven’t done one of those in years, but I’ll try. What’ll you be doing?’

Grover studied the dormant automatons. ‘Something my friend Annabeth taught me. Hurry!’

I slipped the paddle through the door handles, then lugged over a tetherball pole and braced it against the door. Hedge began to trill a tune on his coach’s whistle – ‘The Entertainer’ by Scott Joplin. I’d never thought of the whistle as a musical instrument. Coach Hedge’s performance did nothing to change my mind.

Meanwhile Grover ripped the plastic off the nearest automaton. He rapped his knuckles against its forehead, which made a hollow clang.

‘Celestial bronze, all right,’ Grover decided. ‘This might work!’

‘What are you going to do?’ I demanded. ‘Melt them down for weapons?’

‘No, activate them to work for us.’

‘They won’t help us! They belong to Macro!’

Speak of the praetor: Macro pushed against the doors, rattling the paddle and the tetherball-pole brace. ‘Oh, come on, Apollo! Stop being difficult!’

Grover pulled the bubble wrap off another automaton. ‘During the Battle of Manhattan,’ he said, ‘when we were fighting Kronos, Annabeth told us about an override command written into the firmware of automatons.’

‘That’s only for public statuary in Manhattan!’ I said. ‘Every god who’s any god knows that! You can’t expect these things to respond to “command sequence: Daedalus twenty-three”!’

Instantly, as in a scary episode of Doctor Who, the plastic-wrapped automatons snapped to attention and turned to face me.

‘Yes!’ Grover yelled gleefully.

I did not feel so gleeful. I’d just activated a room full of metal temp workers who were more likely to kill me than obey me. I had no idea how Annabeth Chase had figured out that the Daedalus command could be used on any automaton. Then again, she’d been able to redesign my palace on Mount Olympus with perfect acoustics and surround-sound speakers in the bathroom, so her cleverness shouldn’t have surprised me.

Coach Hedge kept trilling Scott Joplin. The loading-bay door didn’t move. Macro and his men banged against my makeshift barricade, nearly making me lose my grip on the tetherball pole.

‘Apollo, talk to the automatons!’ Grover said. ‘They’re waiting for your orders now. Tell them, Begin Plan Thermopylae!’

I didn’t like being reminded of Thermopylae. So many brave and attractive Spartans had died in that battle defending Greece from the Persians. But I did as I was told. ‘Begin Plan Thermopylae!’

At that moment, Macro and his twelve servants busted through the doors – snapping the paddle, knocking aside the tetherball pole and launching me into the midst of my new metal acquaintances.

Macro stumbled to a halt, six minions fanning out on either side. ‘What’s this? Apollo, you can’t activate my automatons! You haven’t paid for them! Military Madness team members, apprehend Apollo! Tear the satyrs apart! Stop that infernal whistling!’

Two things saved us from instant death. First, Macro had made the mistake of issuing too many orders at once. As any maestro can tell you, a conductor should never simultaneously order the violins to speed up, the timpani to soften, and the brass to crescendo. You will end up with a symphonic train wreck. Macro’s poor soldiers were left to decide for themselves whether they should first apprehend me, or tear apart the satyrs, or stop the whistling. (Personally, I would have gone after the whistler with extreme prejudice.)

The other thing that saved us? Rather than listening to Macro, our new temp-worker friends began executing Plan Thermopylae. They shuffled forward, linking their arms and surrounding Macro and his companions, who awkwardly tried to get around their robotic colleagues and bumped into each other in confusion. (The scene was reminding me more of a Hestia housewarming by the second.)

‘Stop this!’ Macro shrieked. ‘I order you to stop!’