Ilium (69 page)

“Pure oxygen,” he said to the sonie as the air-rush began. The clean, cold air became thicker, making Daeman’s head swim it was so rich. He fumbled in the virtual control panel, setting off several caution alarms before finding the heat. Warm air radiated from the console and various vents.

Harman began coughing first, then Hannah a few seconds later. Their eyes flickered, opened, finally focused.

Daeman grinned stupidly at them.

“Where . . . where . . .” gasped Harman.

“Take it easy,” said Daeman, slowly moving the sonie toward the firmary exit. “Take your time.”

“Time . . . the time . . .” gasped the older man. “The linear . . . accelerator.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Daeman. He’d forgotten about the onrushing structure, never once looked up or over his shoulder in space to see it coming.

Daeman twisted the sonie’s throttle full open, slammed through the hole where the membrane had been, and accelerated toward the tower exit.

There was no sign of Caliban in the tower. Daeman slewed a wide curve, threaded the needle through the tower exit pane, and climbed from the outside terrace into space.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” breathed Harman.

Hannah screamed—the first sound she’d made since being fished out of the healing tank.

The two-mile-long linear accelerator was so close that the wormhole collection ring at its bow filled two-thirds of the sky above them, blotting out sun and stars. Thrusters were firing in quad-pods all along its absurd length, making final course corrections before impact. Daeman didn’t know the names of everything at that moment, but he could make out every detail of the gleaming cross-braces, polished rings now cratered with countless micrometeorite strikes, racks of cooling coils, the long, copper-colored return line above the main accelerator core, the distant injector stacks, and the swirling, earth-and-sea-colored sphere of the captured wormhole itself. The thing grew larger as they watched, blotting out the last of the stars above, and the shadow of it fell across the mile-long crystal city beneath them.

“Daeman . . .” began Harman.

Daeman had already acted, twisting the throttle ring full over and looping up and over the tower, the city, the asteroid, diving for the great blue curve of the Earth even as the linear accelerator covered the last few hundred meters behind them.

For an instant the city towers were above them as the sonie looped, and then just slightly behind when the hurtling mass struck the city and the asteroid, the wormhole sphere crashing into the towers and the long city a second or two before the exotic-metal structure of the accelerator itself. The wormhole silently collapsed into itself and the accelerator seemed to accordion neatly into nothing, but then the full force of the impact became apparent as all three of the humans turned in their couches and craned their necks to see behind them.

There was no sound. That struck Daeman the hardest—the pure silence of the moment. No vibration. None of the usual earthly clues that some great cataclysm was taking place.

But taking place it was.

The crystal city exploded into millions upon millions of fragments, glowing glass and burning gas expanding outward in all directions. Great, ballooning balls of flame bulged outward a mile, two miles, ten miles, as if trying to catch the diving sonie, but then the huge fires seemed to fold inward—like a video image running in reverse—as the flames consumed the last of the escaping oxygen.

The city on the opposite side of the asteroid from the impact was propelled off the surface of the stony worldlet, coming apart in a thousand discrete trajectories as the glass and steel and pulsing exotic materials flew and blew apart, most sections celebrating their own separate orgies of destruction, punctuated everywhere with more silent explosions and self-consuming fireballs.

A second after the first impact, the entire, mile-long asteroid shuddered, sending concentric waves of dust and gas into space after the city debris. Then the asteroid broke apart.

“Hurry!” said Harman.

Daeman didn’t know what he was doing. He’d dived the ship toward Earth at full velocity, staying just ahead of the flames and debris and waves of frozen gases, but now various red and yellow and green alarms were showing all over the virtual control board. Worse than that, there was sound outside the sonie at long last—a suspicious hiss and crackle growing in seconds to a terrifying roar. Worst of all, an orange glow around the edges of the sonie was quickly turning into a sphere of flame and blue electrical plasma.

“What’s the matter?” shouted Hannah. “Where are we?”

Daeman ignored her. He didn’t know what to do with the throttle and attitude control. The roar rose in volume and the sheath of flames thickened around them.

“Are we damaged?” shouted Harman.

Daeman shook his head. He didn’t think so. He thought perhaps it had something to do with coming back into the Earth’s atmosphere at such speed. Once, at a friend’s house in Paris Crater, when Daeman was six or seven, despite his mother’s admonitions not to do so, he’d slid down a long banister, popped off onto the floor at high speed, and then slid on his bare hands and knees along his mother’s friend’s thick carpet. It had burned him badly and he’d never done that again. This friction felt something like that to Daeman.

He decided not to tell Harman and Hannah his theory. It sounded a little silly, even to himself.

“Do something!” shouted Harman over the roar and crackle all around them. Both men’s hair and beards were standing on end in the center of all this electrical madness. Hannah—bald, even her eyebrows gone—stared around her as if she’d wakened to madness.

Before the noise drowned out everything else, Daeman shouted at the virtual controls, “Autopilot!”

“Engage autopilot?” The sonie’s neutral voice was almost inaudible under the entry roar. Daeman could feel the heat through the forcefield and knew that couldn’t be good.

“Engage autopilot!” shouted Daeman at the top of his lungs.

The forcefield fell in on the three humans, squeezing them tightly to their couches as the sonie flipped upside down and the stern engines fired so fiercely that Daeman thought his teeth were going to rattle out of his head. His arm hurt terribly under the deceleration pressure.

“Re-enter on pre-programmed flight path?” the sonie asked calmly, speaking like the idiot savant it was.

“Yeah,” shouted Daeman. His neck was aching from the terrible pressure and he was sure that his spine was going to snap.

“Is that an affirmative?” asked the sonie.

“Affirmative!” screamed Daeman.

More thrusters fired, the sonie seemed to bounce like a thrown rock skipping off a pond’s surface, was wrapped twice more in reentry fire, and then somehow straightened itself out.

Daeman raised his head.

They were flying—flying so high that the edge of the Earth was still curved ahead of them, so high that the mountains far beneath them were visibly mountains only by the white snow texture against the brown and green earth colors—but flying. There was air out there.

Daeman cheered, reached over and hugged Hannah in her blue thermskin suit, then cheered again, raising his fist toward the sky in triumph.

He froze with his fist and eyes raised. “Oh, shit,” he said.

“What?” said Harman, still naked except for the osmosis mask now dangling around his neck. Then the older man looked up, following Daeman’s gaze. “Oh, shit,” he said.

The first of a thousand fireballs—debris from the city or the linear accelerator or the broken asteroid—roared by them less than a mile away, trailing a vertical wake of flame and plasma ten miles behind it, almost flipping the sonie over with the violence of its passage. More meteors roared down at them from the burning sky above.

61

Mahnmut arrived on the Thicket Ridge just as nine tall black figures stepped out of the spacecraft that had landed amidst the hornet fliers, all nine striding down the ramp into the swirling dust storm created by their landing. The figures were humanoid by way of insectoid, each about two meters tall, each covered with shiny, chitinous duraplast armor and a helmet that reflected the world around them like polished onyx. The individuals’ arms and hands reminded Mahnmut of images he’d seen of a dung beetle’s appendages—painfully curved, hooked, barbed, and blackly thorned. Each carried a complex, multibarreled weapon of some sort that looked to weigh at least fifteen kilograms. The figure in the lead paused in the swirling dust and pointed directly at Mahnmut.

“You there, little moravec, is this Mars?” The amplified voice spoke in inter-moon Basic English and arrived via both sound and tightbeam.

“No,” said Mahnmut.

“It’s not? It’s supposed to be Mars.”

“It’s not,” said Mahnmut, sending all this to Orphu. “It’s Earth. I think.”

The tall soldierly form shook its helmeted head as if this was an unacceptable answer. “What kind of moravec are you? Callistan?”

Mahnmut drew himself up to his full bipedal height. “I’m Mahnmut from Europa, formerly of the exploration submersible
The Dark Lady
. This is Orphu of Io.”

“Isn’t that a hard-vac moravec?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to his eyes, sensors, manipulators and legs? Who cracked his shell like that?”

“Orphu is a war veteran,” said Mahnmut.

“We’re supposed to report to a Ganymedan named Koros III,” said the armored form. “Take us to him.”

“He was destroyed,” said Mahnmut. “In the line of duty.”

The tall black figure hesitated. It looked at the other eight onyx warriors and Mahnmut had the idea they were conferring via tightbeam. The first soldier turned back. “Take us to the Callistan Ri Po then,” he ordered.

“Also destroyed,” said Mahnmut. “And before we go any further, who are you?”

They’re rockvecs,
sent Orphu on his private tightbeam channel. “Aren’t you rockvecs?” the Ionian asked on the common tightbeam wavelength. It had been so long since Orphu had communicated with anyone except Mahnmut that the smaller moravec was shocked to hear his voice on the common band.

“We prefer to be called Belt moravecs,” said the leader, turning to address Orphu’s shell. “We should medevac you to a combat repair center, Old Timer.” He gestured to some of the other combat moravecs and they began moving toward the Ionian.

“Stop,” commanded Orphu, and his voice held enough authority to freeze the tall forms in their booted tracks. “I’ll decide when to leave the field. And don’t call me Old Timer, or I’ll have your gears for garters. Koros III was in charge of this mission. He’s dead. Ri Po was second in command. He’s dead. That leaves Mahnmut of Europa and me, Orphu of Io, in command. What’s your rank, rockvec?”

“Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, sir.”

Mep Ahoo
? thought Mahnmut.

“I’m a commander,” snapped Orphu. “Is the chain of command clear here, trooper?”

“Yes, sir,” said the rockvec.

“Brief us on why you’re here and why you think this is Mars,” said Orphu in the same tone of absolute command. Mahnmut thought his friend’s voice on tightbeam was dipping into the subsonic the bass was cranked so deep. “
Immediately,
Centurion Leader Ahoo.”

The rockvec did as he was told, explaining as quickly as he could while more hornet fliers buzzed overhead and hundreds of Trojan warriors came out of the city and slowly advanced up the ridge toward the landing party, shields raised, spears poised. At the same moment, hundreds more Achaeans and Trojans were flowing through the circular portal a few hundred meters to the south, all of them running toward the icy slopes of Olympos visible through the slice taken out of the sky and ground.

Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo was succinct. He confirmed Orphu’s earlier statement to Mahnmut—from their discussion when they’d been passing over the Asteroid Belt on their way to Mars—that sixty e-years ago the Ganymedan Koros III had been sent to the Belt by the Pwyll-based moravec Asteague/Che and the Five Moons Consortium. But Koros’s mission had been as a diplomat, not as a spy. Spending more than five years in the Belt, hopping from rock to rock and losing most of his Jovian-moravec support team in the process, Koros had negotiated with the belligerant rockvec clan leaders, sharing the Jovian-space moravec scientists’ concerns about the rapid terraforming of Mars and the early signs of quantum tunneling activity just detected there. The rockvecs wanted to know who was doing this dangerous QT tunneling—post-humans from Earth? Koros III and the Belt moravecs agreed on the acronym UME’s—Unknown Martian Entities.

The rockvecs were already concerned, although more about the visible—and impossible—rapid terraforming of Mars than about the quantum activity, which their technology could not easily detect. Confrontational and bold by nature, the Belt moravecs had already dispatched six expeditionary fleets of spacecraft on the relatively short hop to Mars. None of their ships had returned or survived translation to Mars orbit. Something on the Red Planet, or on what had been the Red Planet until recently—the rockvecs had no idea what—was destroying their fleets before arrival.

Through diplomacy, guile, courage, and some single combat, Koros III had earned the rockvec clan leaders’ trust. The Ganeymedan explained the Five Moons Consortium’s plan—first, the rockvecs would design and biofacture dedicated warrior-vecs over the next fifty years or so, using their already tough rockvec DNA as a breeding base. The rockvecs would also be responsible for designing and constructing advanced space and atmospheric fighting vehicles. Meanwhile, the more advanced Five Moons moravec scientists and engineers would divert cutting-edge technology from their interstellar program to the building of a quantum-tunneler and wormhole stabilizer of their own. Second, when the time was right and the quantum activity on Mars reached alarming levels, Koros himself would lead a small contingent of moravecs from Jupiter space, its goal to arrive undetected on the Red Planet. Third, once on Mars, Koros III would place the quantum-tunneler at the vertex of the current QT activity, stabilizing not only those quantum tunnels already in use by the UME’s, but opening new tunnels to the Asteroid Belt, where other Five Moons’-designed tunneling devices would be waiting for his maser signal before activating.

Fourth, finally, the rockvecs would send their fleets and fighting men through these quantum tunnels to Mars, where they would confront, identify, overpower, subdue, and interrogate the Unidentified Martian Entities and eliminate the threat to the solar system from the excessive quantum activity.

“It sounds simple,” said Mahnmut. “Confront, identify, overpower, subdue, and interrogate. But in reality, your group didn’t even make it to the right planet.”

“Navigating the quantum tunnels was more complicated than expected,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “Our groups obviously connected to one of the UME’s existing tunnels and overshot Mars, arriving . . . here.” The chitinous onyx figure looked around. His troopers were raising their heavy weapons as a hundred or so Trojans came onto the crest of the ridge.

“Don’t shoot at them,” said Mahnmut. “They’re our allies.”

“Allies?” said the rockvec soldier, his shiny visor turned toward the advancing wall of shields and spears. But in the end he nodded, tightbeamed his troopers, and the complex weapons were lowered.

The Trojans did not lower their weapons.

Luckily, Mahnmut recognized the Trojan commander from the long introductions of captains earlier in the day. In Greek, Mahnmut called out, “Perimus, son of Megas, do not attack. These black fellows are our friends and allies.”

The spears and shields stayed high. Archers in the second row had their bows lowered but arrows nocked and the bows at half-pull, ready to lift and fire on command. The rockvecs might feel secure from meter-long barbed arrows dipped in poison, but Mahnmut didn’t want to test the strength of his own integument that way.

“ ‘Friends and allies,’ “ mocked Perimus. The man’s polished bronze helmet—noseguard, cheek flaps, round eyeholes, and low ridge in the back—showed only Perimus’ angry gaze, narrow lips, and strong chin. “How can they be ‘friends and allies,’ little machine, when they aren’t even men? For that matter, little toy, how can
you
?”

Mahnmut didn’t have a good answer for that. He said, “You saw me with Hector this morning, son of Megas.”

“I saw you with man-killing Achilles as well,” called the Trojan. The archers had raised their bows now and there were at least thirty arrows aimed at Mahnmut and the rockvecs.

How do I win this guy’s trust?
Mahnmut tightbeamed Orphu.

Perimus, son of Megas,
mused the Ionian.
If we’d let things go the way the
Iliad
said they should, Perimus would be dead in two days—killed by Patroclus along with Autonous, Echeclus, Adrestus, Elasus, Mulius, and Plyartes in one wild melee.

Well,
sent Mahnmut,
we don’t have two days, most of the Trojans you mentioned—Autonous, Mulius, and the rest—are standing there right now with shields raised and spears poised, and I don’t think Patroclus is going to help us out here, according to Hockenberry, unless Achilles’ friend has been swimming back from Indiana. Any ideas on what we can do
now?

Tell them that the rockvecs are
attendants,
forged by Hephaestus and summoned by Achilles to help win the war against the gods.

“Attendants,” Mahnmut said, repeating the word in Greek.
I don’t know that particular form of the noun—it doesn’t mean “servant” or “slave” and . . .

Just
say
it,
growled Orphu,
before Perimus has them put a shaft through your liver.

Mahnmut didn’t have a liver, but he understood the thrust of Orphu’s suggestion.

“Perimus, noble son of Megas,” called Mahnmut, “these dark forms are
attendants,
forged by Hephaestus but brought here by Achilles to help us win this war against the gods.”

Perimus glowered. “Are you then also an
attendant
?” he demanded.

Say yes,
sent Orphu.

“Yes.”

Perimus barked at his men and the bows were lowered, the arrows unnocked.

According to Homer,
sent Orphu,
“Attendants” are sort of androids created in Hephaestus’ forge from human parts and used like robots by the gods and some mortals.

Are you telling me that the
Iliad
has androids and moravecs in it?
demanded Mahnmut.

The
Iliad
has everything in it,
said Orphu. To the rockvec leader, Orphu barked, “Centurion Leader Ahoo, did you bring forcefield projectors with you in that ship?”

The tall onyx rockvec clicked to its full height. “Yes, Commander.”

“Send a squad into the city—that city, Ilium—and set up a full-strength forcefield to protect it,” ordered Orphu. “Set up another to protect the Achaean encampment you see along the coast.”

“Full-strength field, sir?” asked the centurion leader. Mahnmut knew that it would probably take the spacecraft’s entire fusion reactor’s output to power such a field.

“Full-strength,” said Orphu. “Able to repel lance, laser, maser, ballistic, cruise, nuclear, thermonuclear, neutron, plasma, antimatter, and arrow attack. These are our allies, Centurion Leader.”

“Yes,
sir
.” The onyx figure turned and tightbeamed. A dozen more troopers descended the ramp carrying massive projectors. The dark troopers jogged double-time in both directions from the ridge until only Centurion Leader Ahoo remained there next to Mahnmut and Orphu. The landed hornet fliers buzzed into the air and circled, weapons still swiveling.

Perimus walked closer. The crest on the man’s polished but battered helmet barely came up to Centurion Leader Ahoo’s chiseled chest. Perimus lifted his fist and rapped on the rockvec’s duraplast breastplate with his knuckles. “Interesting armor,” said the Trojan. He turned back to Mahnmut. “Little attendant, we’re going to go join Hector in the fight. Do you want to join us?” He pointed to the huge circle bitten out of the sky and ground to the south. More Trojan and Achaean units were marching—not running, but marching in orderly fashion, chariots and shields gleaming, banners flying—through the quantum portal, their speartips catching Earth’s sunlight on this side of the slice, Martian light on the other.

“Yes,” said Mahnmut, “I want to join you.” To Orphu he tightbeamed,
You going to be okay here, Old Timer?

I have Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo to protect me,
sent the Ionian.

Mahnmut marched next to Perimus down the slope—the thickets there trampled almost flat now by nine years of the ebb and flow of battle—leading the small contingent of Trojans to join Hector. At the bottom of the hill, they paused as an odd figure staggered toward them—a naked, beardless man with mussed hair and slightly wild eyes. He was walking gingerly, picking his way over the stones on bloody feet, and wore only a medallion.