Olympos t-2

by Dan Simmons

  “Not necessarily,” said General Beh bin Adee. “We’re bringing one hundred warriors of our own. Just someone from the Trojan War era who might be an asset.”

  Helen of Troy, he thought again. She has a great… He shook his head. “Achilles would be the obvious choice,” he said aloud. “He’s invulnerable, you know.”

  “We know,” Cho Li said softly. “We covertly analyzed him and know why he is, as you say, invulnerable.”

  “It’s because his mother, the goddess Thetis, dipped him in the River …” began Hockenberry.

  “Actually,” interrupted Retrograde Sinopessen, “it is because someone… some thing … has warped the quantum-probability matrix around Mr. Achilles to a quite improbable extent.”

  “All right,” said Hockenberry, not understanding a word of that sentence. “So do you want Achilles?”

  “I don’t believe Achilles would agree to go with us, do you, Dr. Hockenberry?” said Asteague/Che.

  “Ah… no. Could you make him go?”

  “I believe it would be a riskier proposition than all the rest of the dangers involved in the visit to the third planet combined,” rumbled General Beh bin Adee.

  A sense of humor from a rockvec? thought Hockenberry. “If not Achilles,” he said, “who then?”

  “We were wondering if you would suggest someone. Someone courageous but intelligent. An explorer, but sensible. Someone we could communicate with. A flexible personality, you might say.”

  “Odysseus,” said Hockenberry with no hesitation. “You want Odysseus.”

  “Do you think he would agree to go?” asked Retrograde Sinopessen.

  Hockenberry took a breath. “If you tell him that Penelope is waiting for him at the other end, he’ll go to hell and back with you.”

  “We cannot lie to him,” said Asteague/Che.

  “I can,” said Hockenberry. “I’d be glad to. Whether I go with you or not, I’ll be your intermediary in conning Odysseus into joining you.”

  “We would appreciate that,” said Asteague/Che. “We look forward to hearing your own decision on joining us within the next forty-eight hours.” The Europan held out his arm and Hockenberry realized that there was a fairly humanoid hand on the end of it.

  He shook the hand and got into the hornet behind Mahnmut. The ramp came up. The invisible chair grabbed him. They left the bubble.

  14

  Impatient, furious, pacing in front of his thousand best Myrmidons along the coastline at the base of Olympos, waiting for the gods to send down their champion for the day so that he could kill him, Achilles remembers the first month of the war—a time all Trojans and Argives still called “the Wrath of Achilles.”

  They had QT’d down from the Olympian heights in legions then, these gods, confident in their forcefields and blood-machines, ready to leap into Slow Time and escape any mortal wrath, not knowing that the little moravec clock-people, new allies to Achilles, had their own formulas and enchantments to counter such god-tricks.

  Ares, Hades, and Hermes had leaped first, clicking into the Achaean and Trojan ranks while the sky exploded. Flame followed forcelines until both Olympos and the mortal ranks became domes and spires and shimmering waves of flame. The sea boiled. The Little Green Men scattered for their feluccas. Zeus’s aegis shuddered and grew visible as it absorbed megatons of moravec assault.

  Achilles had eyes only for Ares and his newly QT’d cohorts, Hades, red-eyed in his black bronze, and black-eyed Hermes in his barbed red-armor.

  “Teach the mortals death!” screamed Ares, god of war, twelve feet tall, shimmering, attacking the Argive ranks at a run. Hades and Hermes followed. All three cast god-spears that could not miss their mark.

  They missed their mark. Achilles’ fate was not to die that day. Or any day by the hands of an immortal.

  One immortal’s spear grazed the fleet-footed mankiller’s strong right arm but drew no blood. Another embedded itself in his beautiful shield, but the god-forged layer of polarized gold blocked it. A third glanced from Achilles’ golden helmet without making a mark.

  The three gods fired energy blasts from their god-palms. Achilles’ own nano-bred fields shed the millions of volts the way a dog shakes off water.

  Ares and Achilles crashed together like mountains colliding. The quake threw hundreds of Trojans and Greeks and gods off their feet even as the battle lines joined. Ares was the first to fall back. He raised his red sword and swung a decapitating blow at the upstart mortal, Achilles.

  Achilles ducked the blade and ran the war god through, scooping a slice through divine armor and gut until Ares’ belly opened, golden ichor covered mortal and immortal alike, and the war god’s divine bowels spilled out on the red Martian gorse. Too surprised to fall, too outraged to die, Ares stared at his own insides still unraveling and uncoiling onto the dirt.

  Achilles reached high, grabbed Ares by his helmet and jerked him down and forward until his human spittle splattered the god’s perfect features. “You taste death, you gutless effigy!” Then, working like a marketplace butcher at the beginning of a long day’s labor, he lopped off Ares’ hands at the wrists, then his legs above the knee, and then his arms.

  Screaming black whirling around the corpse, other gods gaping, Ares’ head continued to scream even after Achilles cut it off at the neck.

  Hermes, horrified but also ambidextrous and deadly, raised his second spear.

  Achilles leaped forward so quickly that everyone assumed he had teleported. Grabbing the second god’s spear, he jerked it toward him. Hermes tried to pull it back. Hades swung his black sword at Achilles’ knees but the mankiller leaped high, avoiding the blur of dark carbon-steel.

  Losing the tug of war for his spear, Hermes leaped back and tried to QT away.

  The moravecs had cast their field around them. No one would be quantum teleporting out or in until this fight was finished.

  Hermes pulled his sword, a curved and wicked thing. Achilles cut off the giant-killer’s arm at the elbow, and the sword arm and the still-grasping hand fell to Mars’ rich, red soil.

  “Mercy!” cried Hermes, throwing himself to his knees and embracing Achilles’ around the waist. “Mercy, I beg you!”

  “There is none,” said Achilles and then hacked the god into as many quivering, gold-bleeding bits.

  Hades backed away from the slaughter, his red eyes filled with fear. More gods were flicking into the human-set trap by the hundreds, and Hector and his Trojan captains and Achilles’ Mymidons and all the heroes of the Greeks were engaging them, the moravec forcefields not allowing the gods to QT away once they arrived. For the first time in the memory of anyone on the field, gods and heroes, demigods and mortals, legends and infantry grunts, all fought on something not unlike equal terms.

  Hades shifted into Slow Time.

  The world stopped turning. The air thickened. The waves froze in their curl against the rocky shore. Birds halted and hung in midflight. Hades panted and retched in relief. No mortal could follow him here.

  Achilles shifted into Slow Time after him.

  “This… is… not… possible,” the ruler of the dead said through the syrup-slow air.

  “Die, Death,” shouted Achilles and drove his father Peleus’ spear through the god’s throat, just below where the black cheek-guards curved up again toward Hades’ skull-like cheekbones. Golden ichor spurted in slow motion.

  Achilles shoved aside Hades’ black-ornamented shield and put his blade through the death god’s belly and spine. Dying, Hades still returned the thrust with a blow that could have split a mountainside. The black blade slid off Achilles’ chest as if it had not touched him. It was not Achilles’ fate to die that day, and never by the hands of an immortal. Hades’ fate was to die that day—however temporarily by human standards. He fell heavily and blackness swirled around him as he disappeared within an onyx cyclone.

  Manipulating new nanotechnology without conscious effort, playing havoc with already-battered quantum fields of probability
, Achilles flicked back out of Slow Time to rejoin the battle. Zeus had left the field. The other gods were fleeing, forgetting, in their panic, to raise the aegis behind them. More moravec magic, injected that very morning, allowed Achilles to push through their lesser energy fields and give pursuit up the cliffs of Olympos onto the lower ramparts.

  Then his slaughter of gods and goddesses began in earnest.

  But all this was in the early days of the war. Today—this day after Paris’s funeral—no gods are coming down to fight.

  So, with his ally Hector gone and the Trojans quiescent on their part of the front today, Hector’s lesser-brother Aeneas in charge of the thousands of Trojans there, Achilles is meeting with his Achaean captains and moravec artillery experts to plan an imminent attack on Olympos.

  The attack will be simple: while moravec energy and nuclear weapons activate the aegis on the lower slopes, Achilles and five hundred of his best captains and Achaeans in thirty transport hornets will punch through a lesser section of the energy shield almost a thousand leagues around the back of Olympos, make a dash for the summit, and carry the torch to the gods in their homes. For those Achaeans who are wounded or lose their nerve fighting in the very citadel of Zeus and the gods, the hornets will lift them out after the element of surprise fades.

  Achilles plans to stay until the top of Mount Olympos has been turned into a charnel house and all its white temples and god-dwellings are blackened rubble. After all, he thinks, Herakles once pulled down the walls of Ilium all by himself when angered and took the city single-handedly—why should the halls of Olympos be sacrosanct?

  All morning, Achilles has expected Agamemnon and his simpler sibling, Menelaus, to show up, leading a mob of their loyal men to try to take back control of the Achaean forces and to push the war backward into mortal-versus-mortal, befriending the murderous, treacherous gods again, but so far that dog-eyed, deer-hearted former commander in chief has not shown his face. Achilles has decided that he will kill him when he does attempt the revolt. Him and his red-bearded stripling Menelaus and anyone and everyone who follows the two Atrides. The news of the home cities being emptied of all life is—Achilles is sure—merely a ruse by Agamemnon to incite the restless and cowardly Achaeans to revolt.

  So when moravec Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, the barbed rockvec in charge of the artillery and energy bombardment, looks up from the map they are studying under the silk of a lean-to shelter and announces that his binocular vision has picked up an odd-looking army coming through the Hole from the direction of Ilium, Achilles is not surprised.

  But a few minutes later he is surprised as Odysseus—the most sharp-eyed among their command group huddled under the flapping canopy—says, “They’re women. Trojan women.”

  “Amazons, you mean?” says Achilles, stepping out into the Olympos sunshine. Antilochus, son of Nestor, Achilles’ old friend from countless campaigns, had ridden his chariot into camp here an hour earlier, telling everyone of the arrival of the thirteen Amazons and Penthesilea’s vow to kill Achilles in single combat. The fleet-footed mankiller had laughed easily, showing his perfect teeth. He had not fought and defeated ten thousand Trojans and scores of gods to be frightened by a woman’s bluster.

  Odysseus shakes his head. “There must be two hundred of these women, all dressed out in ill-fitting armor, son of Peleus. No Amazons these. They are too fat, too short, too old, some almost lame.”

  “Every day,” grumbles dour Diomedes, son of Tydeus, lord of Argos, “it seems we descend into another level of madness.”

  Teucer, the bastard master-archer and Big Ajax’s half brother, says, “Shall I advance the camp pickets, noble Achilles? Have them intercept these women, whatever the folly of their mission here, and frog-march them back to their looms?”

  “No,” says Achilles. “Let’s go out and meet them, see what brings the first women to venture through the Hole to Olympos and an Achaean camp.”

  “Perhaps they’re looking for Aeneas and their Trojan husbands leagues to our left,” says Big Ajax, son of Telamon, leader of the Salamis army supporting the Myrmidons’ left flank this Martian morning.

  “Perhaps.” Achilles sounds amused and mildly irritated, but not convinced. He walks out into the weaker Olympian sunlight, leading the group of Achaean kings, captains, subcaptains, and their most loyal fighting men.

  It is indeed a rabble of Trojan women. When they are within a hundred yards, Achilles stops with his contingent of fifty or so heroes, and waits for the clanking band of shouting women to come on. It sounds like a gaggle of geese to the fleet-footed mankiller.

  “Do you see any high-born among the women?” Achilles asks sharp-eyed Odysseus as they stand waiting for the rattling horde to cross the last hundred yards of red-gorse soil that separates them. “Any wives or daughters of heroes? Andromache or Helen or wild-eyed Cassandra or Medesicaste or venerable Castianira?”

  “None of those,” Odysseus responds quickly. “No one of worth, either born to or married into. I recognize only Hippodamia—the big one with the spear and the ancient long shield, like that which Great Ajax chooses to carry—and her only because she visited me in Ithaca once with her husband, the far-traveling Trojan Tisiphonus. Penelope took her for a tour of our gardens, but said later that the woman was as sour as a pre-season pomegranate and would take no pleasure in beauty.”

  Achilles, who can see the women clearly enough now, says, “Well, she herself is certainly no beauty to take pleasure in. Philoctetes, go forward, halt them, ask them what they are doing here on the our battleground with the gods.”

  “Must I, son of Peleus?” whines the older-archer. “After the libel spread about me yesterday at Paris’s funeral, I hardly think that I should be the one…”

  Achilles turns and silences the man with an admonishing glance.

  “I’ll go with you to hold your hand,” rumbles Big Ajax. “Teucer, come with us. Two archers and a master spearman should answer for this prickless rabble, even if they turn uglier than they already are.”

  The three men walk forward from Achilles’ contingent.

  What happens next happens very quickly.

  Philoctetes, Teucer, and Big Ajax stop some twenty paces from the obviously winded and gasping, loose-formed lines of armored women, and the former commander of the Thessalians and former castaway steps forward, holding Herakles’ fabled bow in his left hand while he holds his right palm up in peace.

  One of the younger women to the right of Hippodamia casts her spear. Incredibly, astonishingly, it catches Philoctetes—ten-year survivor of poison snakebite and the ire of the gods—full in the chest, just above his light archer’s armor, and passes clean through, severing his spine and dropping him lifeless to the red soil.

  “Kill the bitch!” screams Achilles, outraged, running forward and pulling his sword from its scabbard.

  Teucer, under fire now from wild-cast women’s spears and a hail of ill-aimed arrows, needs no such prompting. Faster than most mortal eyes can follow, he notches an arrow, goes to full pull, and sets a yard-long shaft through the throat of the woman who has cut Philoctetes down.

  Hippodamia and twenty or thirty women close with Big Ajax, thrusting spears tentatively and trying to swing their husbands’ or fathers’ or sons’ massive swords in awkward two-handed blows.

  Ajax, son of Telamon, looks back at Achilles for just an instant, giving the other men a glance of something like amusement, and then he pulls his long blade, slams Hippodamia’s sword and shield aside with an easy shrug, and lops off the woman’s head as if he were cutting weeds in his yard. The other women, maddened beyond fear now, rush at the two standing men. Teucer puts arrow after arrow into their eyes, thighs, flopping breasts, and—within a few seconds—fleeing backs. Big Ajax finishes the rest who are foolish enough to linger, wading through them like a tall man among children, leaving corpses in his wake.

  By the time Achilles, Odysseus, Diomedes, Nestor, Chromius, Little Ajax, Antilochus, and the others arrive, for
ty or so women are dead or dying, a few screaming their death agonies on the red-soaked red soil, and the rest are fleeing back toward the Hole.

  “What in Hades’ name was that all about?” gasps Odysseus as he comes up to Big Ajax and steps among the bodies thrown down in all the graceful and graceless—but all too familiar to Odysseus—attitudes of violent death.

  The son of Telamon grins. His face is spattered and his armor and sword run red with Trojan-women blood. “That’s not the first time I’ve killed women,” says the mortal giant, “but by the gods, it was the most satisfying!”

  Calchas, son of Thestor and their most able soothsayer, hobbles up from behind. “This is not good. This is bad. This is not good at all.”

  “Shut up,” says Achilles. He shields his eyes and looks toward the Hole where the last of the women are disappearing, only to be replaced by a small group of larger figures. “What now?” says the son of Peleus and the goddess Thetis. “Those look like centaurs. Has my old friend and tutor Chiron come to join our effort?”

  “Not centaurs,” says sharp-eyed, keen-witted Odysseus. “More women. On horseback.”

  “Horseback?” says Nestor, his old eyes squinting to see. “Not in chariots?”

  “Riding horses like the fabled cavalries of ancient days,” says Diomedes, who sees them now. No one rides horses in these modern days, using them only to pull chariots—although both Odysseus and Diomedes himself escaped a Trojan camp on a midnight raid some months earlier, before the truce, by riding bareback on untethered chariot horses through Hector’s half-awakened army.

  “The Amazons,” says Achilles.

  15

  Athena’s Temple. Menelaus advancing, red-faced, breathing hard—Helen on her knees, pale face lowered, paler breasts bared. He looms over her. He raises his sword. Her pale neck seems thin as a reed, offered. The endlessly sharpened blade will not even pause as it slices through skin, flesh, bone.