The House of Hades (Heroes of Olympus Book 4)

ship’s controls. ‘Oars won’t retract. Get it away! Get it away!’
    Up in the rigging, Nico’s face was slack with shock.
    ‘Styx – it’s huge!’ he yelled. ‘Port! Go port!’
    Coach Hedge was the last one on deck. He compensated for that with enthusiasm. He bounded up the steps, waving his baseball bat, and without hesitation goat-galloped to the stern and leaped over the rail with a gleeful ‘Ha-HA!’
    Hazel staggered towards the quarterdeck to join her friends. The boat shuddered. More oars snapped, and Leo yelled, ‘No, no, no! Dang slimy-shelled son of a mother!’
    Hazel reached the stern and couldn’t believe what she saw.
    When she heard the word
turtle
, she thought of a cute little thing the size of a jewellery box, sitting on a rock in the middle of a fishpond. When she heard
huge
, her mind tried to adjust – okay, perhaps it was like the Galapagos tortoise she’d seen in the zoo once, with a shell big enough to ride on.
    She did
not
envision a creature the size of an island. When she saw the massive dome of craggy black and brown squares, the word
turtle
simply did not compute. Its shell was more like a landmass – hills of bone, shiny pearl valleys, kelp and moss forests, rivers of seawater trickling down the grooves of its carapace.
    On the ship’s starboard side, another part of the monster rose from the water like a submarine.
    Lares
of Rome … was that its
head
?
    Its gold eyes were the size of wading pools, with dark sideways slits for pupils. Its skin glistened like wet army camouflage – brown flecked with green and yellow. Its red, toothless mouth could’ve swallowed the Athena Parthenos in one bite.
    Hazel watched as it snapped off half a dozen oars.
    ‘Stop that!’ Leo wailed.
    Coach Hedge clambered around the turtle’s shell, whacking at it uselessly with his baseball bat and yelling, ‘Take that! And that!’
    Jason flew from the stern and landed on the creature’s head. He stabbed his golden sword straight between its eyes, but the blade slipped sideways, as if the turtle’s skin were greased steel. Frank shot arrows at the monster’s eyes with no success. The turtle’s filmy inner eyelids blinked with uncanny precision, deflecting each shot. Piper shot cantaloupes into the water, yelling, ‘Fetch, ya stupid turtle!’ But the turtle seemed fixated on eating the
Argo II
.
    ‘How did it get so close?’ Hazel demanded.
    Leo threw his hands up in exasperation. ‘Must be that shell. Guess it’s invisible to sonar. It’s a freaking stealth turtle!’
    ‘Can the ship fly?’ Piper asked.
    ‘With half our oars broken off?’ Leo punched some buttons and spun his Archimedes sphere. ‘I’ll have to try something else.’
    ‘There!’ Nico yelled from above. ‘Can you get us to those straits?’
    Hazel looked where he was pointing. About half a mile to the east, a long strip of land ran parallel to the coastal cliffs. It was hard to be sure from a distance, but the stretch of water between them looked to be only twenty or thirty yards across – possibly wide enough for the
Argo II
to slip through, but definitely not wide enough for the giant turtle’s shell.
    ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ Leo apparently understood. He turned the Archimedes sphere. ‘Jason, get away from that thing’s head! I have an idea!’
    Jason was still hacking away at the turtle’s face, but when he heard Leo say, ‘
I have an idea
,’
he made the only smart choice. He flew away as fast as possible.
    ‘Coach, come on!’ Jason said.
    ‘No, I got this!’ Hedge said, but Jason grabbed him around the waist and took off. Unfortunately, the coach struggled so much that Jason’s sword fell out of his hand and splashed into the sea.
    ‘Coach!’ Jason complained.
    ‘What?’ Hedge said. ‘I was softening him up!’
    The turtle head-butted the hull, almost tossing the wholecrew off the port side. Hazel heard a cracking sound, like the keel had splintered.
    ‘Just another minute,’ Leo said, his hands flying over the console.
    ‘We might not be here in another minute!’ Frank fired his last arrow.
    Piper yelled at the turtle, ‘Go away!’
    For a moment, it actually worked. The turtle turned from the ship and dipped its head underwater. But then it came right back and rammed them even harder.
    Jason and Coach Hedge landed on the deck.
    ‘You all right?’ Piper asked.
    ‘Fine,’ Jason muttered. ‘Without a weapon, but fine.’
    ‘Fire in the shell!’ Leo cried, spinning his