by Dan Simmons
“If worse comes to worse,” says Hockenberry, touching the gold medallion visible through the opening in his pajama tops, “I’ll just QT away.”
“Really?” says Mahnmut. “Where would you go? Olympos is a war zone. Ilium may have been put to the torch by now.”
Hockenberry’s smile disappears. “Yeah. There is that problem. I could always go look for my friend Nightenhelser where I left him—in Indiana, circa 1000 B.C.”
“Indiana …” Mahnmut says softly. “On which Earth?”
Hockenberry rubs his chest where, less than seventy-two hours earlier, Retrograde Sinopessen had been holding his heart. “Which Earth,” repeats the scholic. “You have to admit, that sounds odd.”
“Yes,” says Mahnmut, “but I suspect we’ll all have to get used to thinking that way. Your friend Nightenhelser is on the Earth you QT’d away from—Ilium-Earth, we might call it. This spacecraft is headed toward an Earth that exists three thousand years after you first lived and… mmm…”
“Died,” says Hockenberry. “Don’t worry, I’m used to that concept. It doesn’t bother me… too much.”
“It’s amazing that you were able to visualize the engine room of the Queen Mab so clearly after you were stabbed,” says Mahnmut. “You arrived here unconscious, so you must have activated the QT medallion just as you were on the verge of passing out.”
The scholic shakes his head. “I don’t remember twisting the medallion or visualizing anything.”
“What’s the last thing you remember, Dr. Hockenberry?”
“A woman standing over me, looking down at me with an expression of horror,” says the man. “A tall woman, pale skin, dark hair.”
“Helen?”
Hockenberry shakes his head. “She’d left already, gone down the steps. This woman just… appeared.”
“One of the Trojan women?”
“No. She was dressed… strangely. In a sort of tunic and skirt, more like a woman of my era than like any female outfit I’ve seen in the last ten years on Ilium or Olympos. But not like my era either …” He trailed away.
“Could she have been an hallucination?” asks Mahnmut. He doesn’t add the obvious—that Helen’s knife blade had nicked Hockenberry’s heart, spilling blood into his chest and denying it to the human’s brain.
“She could have been… but she wasn’t. But I had the strangest sense when I stared at her and saw her looking back at me…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know how to describe it,” says Hockenberry. “A sense of certainty that she and I were going to meet again soon, somewhere else. Somewhere far away from Troy.”
Mahnmut thinks about this and the two—moravec and human—sit in comfortable silence for a long moment. The thud of the great pistons—a pounding that went through the very bones of the ship every thirty seconds followed by half-felt, half-heard hisses and sighs of the huge reciprocating cylinders—has become accustomed background noise, like the soft hiss of the ventilation system.
“Mahnmut,” says Hockenberry, touching his chest through the gap in his pajama shirt, “do you know why I didn’t want to come along on your voyage to Earth?”
Mahnmut shakes his head. He knows that Hockenberry can see his own reflection in the polished black plastic vision strip that runs around the front of Mahnmut’s red metal-alloy skull.
“It’s because I understood enough about the ship—this Queen Mab—to know her real reason for going to Earth.”
“The prime integrators told you the real reason,” says Mahnmut. “Didn’t they?”
Hockenberry smiles. “No. Oh—the reasons they gave are true enough, but they’re not the real reason. If you moravecs wanted to travel to Earth, you didn’t have to build this huge monstrosity of a ship to make the voyage in. You had sixty-five combat spacecraft in orbit around Mars already, or shuttling between Mars and the Asteroid Belt.”
“Sixty-five?” repeats Mahnmut. He’d known there had been ships in space, some of them hardly larger than the shuttle hornets, others large enough to haul heavy loads all the way from Jupiter space if necessary. He had no idea there were so many. “How do you know there were sixty-five, Dr. Hockenberry?”
“Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo told me while we were still on Mars and Ilium-Earth. I was curious about the ships’ propulsion and he was vague—spacecraft engineering isn’t his specialty, he’s a combat ‘vec—but I got the impression these other ships had fusion drives or ion drives … something much more sophisticated than atomic bombs in cans.”
“Yes,” says Mahnmut. He didn’t know much about spacecraft either—the one that had brought Orphu and him to Mars had been a jury-rigged combination of solar sails and disposable fusion thrusters, all flung initially across the solar system by the two-trillion-watt moravecbuilt trebuchet of Jupiter’s accelerator-scissors—but even he, a modest submersible driver from Europa, knew that the Queen Mab was primitive and much larger than its stated mission would demand. He thought he knew where Hockenberry was headed with this, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.
“An atom bomb going off every thirty seconds,” the human says softly, “behind a ship the size of the Empire State Building, as all the prime integrators and Orphu were eager to point out. And the Mab doesn’t have any of the exterior stealth material that even the hornets are covered with. So you have this gigantic object with a bright what do you call it?… albedo… atop a series of atomic blasts that will be visible from the surface of the Earth in daytime by the time you arrive in Earth orbit… hell, it might be visible to the naked eye there now, for all I know.”
“Which leads you to conclude …” says Mahnmut. He is tightbeaming this conversation to Orphu, but his Ionian friend has remained silent on their private channel.
“Which leads me to believe that the real purpose of this mission is to be seen as soon as possible,” says Hockenberry. “To appear as threatening as possible so as to evoke a response from the powers on or around Earth—those very powers who you claim have jiggery-pokered the very fabric of quantum reality itself. You’re trying to draw fire.”
“Are we?” says Mahnmut. Even as he says it, he knows that Dr. Thomas Hockenberry is right… and that he, Mahnmut of Europa, has suspected this all along but not confronted his own certainty.
“Yes, you are,” says Hockenberry. “My guess is that this ship is just loaded with recording devices, so that when the Unknown Powers in orbit around Earth—or wherever they’re hiding—blast the Queen Mab to atoms—all the details of that power, the nature of those superweapons, will be transmitted back to Mars, or the Belt, or Jupiter Space, or wherever. This ship is like the Trojan Horse that the Greeks haven’t yet thought to build back on Ilium-Earth—and may never build, since I’ve screwed up the flow of events and since Odysseus is your captive here on the ship. But this is a Trojan Horse that you know… or are fairly certain… that the other side is going to burn. With all of us in it.”
On the tightbeam, Mahnmut sends, Orphu, is this the truth of it? Yes, my friend, but not all of it, comes the grim reply. To the human, Mahnmut says, “Not with all of us in it, Dr. Hockenberry. You still have your QT medallion. You can leave at any time.”
The scholic quits rubbing his chest—the scar is just a line on his flesh, livid still but fading where the molecular glue is healing the incision—and now he touches the heavy QT medallion hanging there. “Yes,” he says. “I can leave at any time.”
32
Daeman had selected nine other people at Ardis—five men and four women—to help him with the warning trip, faxing to all three hundred known faxnode portals to see if Setebos had been there and to warn the inhabitants there if Setebos had not—but he decided to wait until Harman, Hannah, and Petyr returned with the sonie. Harman had told Ada that they’d be back by the lunch hour or shortly after.
The sonie wasn’t back by lunchtime or by an hour after that.
Daeman waited. He knew that Ada and the others were nervous—scouts and firewood tea
ms had noted shadowy movement of many voynix in the forests north, east, and south of Ardis, as if they were gathering for a major attack—and he didn’t want to pull ten people off their duties before Harman and the other two returned.
They didn’t return by midafternoon. Lookouts on the guard towers and palisades kept glancing toward the low, gray clouds, obviously hoping to see the sonie.
Daeman knew that he should leave—that Harman had been right, that the fax reconaissance and warning trip had to be done quickly—but he waited another hour. Then two. However illogical it might be, he felt that he would be abandoning Ada if he left before Harman and the sonie returned. If something had happened to Harman, Ada would be devastated but the community at Ardis might survive. Without the sonie, the fate of everyone might well be sealed during the next voynix attack.
Ada had been busy all afternoon, only coming outside occasionally to stand alone on Hannah’s cupola tower to watch the skies. Daeman, Tom, Siris, Loes, and a few others stood nearby but did not speak to her. The clouds grew grayer and it began to snow again. All of the short afternoon felt more and more like some terrible twilight.
“Well, I have to go in to work in the kitchen,” said Ada at last, pulling her shawl higher around her shoulders. Daeman and the others watched her go. Finally he went into the house, up to his small third-floor cubby under the eaves, and dug through his clothing chest until he found what he needed—the green thermskin suit and osmosis mask given to him by Savi more than ten months earlier.
The suit had been ripped and soiled—rent by Caliban’s claws and teeth, smeared by his blood and Caliban’s, then by the mud of their forced sonie landing the previous spring—and while cleaning had removed the stains, the suit had tried to heal all of its own rips and tears. It had almost succeeded. Here and there the green insulating overfabric was all but invisible, revealing the silver sheen of the molecular layer itself, but its heating and pressure-sealing faculties were almost intact—Daeman had faxed to an empty node at fourteen thousand feet above sea level, an uninhabited, wind-ravaged, snow-pelted node known only as Pikespik, to test it. The thermskin had kept him alive and warm and the osmosis mask had also worked, providing him with enough enhanced atmosphere to breathe easily.
Now, in his room under the eaves, he laid the almost weightless thermskin and mask in his pack next to the extra crossbow bolts and water bottles and went downstairs to assemble his waiting team.
A cry went up from outside. Daeman ran outdoors at the same time Ada and half the household did.
The sonie was visible about a mile away. It had come out through the clouds smoothly enough, circling around from the southwest, but suddenly it wobbled, dived, righted itself, then wobbled again, suddenly diving steeply toward earth just beyond the stockade on the south lawn. The silvery disk pulled up at the last minute, actually struck the top of the wooden palisade—making three guards there throw themselves to the ground to avoid the machine—and then it plowed into the frozen ground, bounced thirty feet, hit again, threw sod high into the air, bounced once more, and slid to a halt, plowing a shallow furrow into the rising lawn.
Ada led the rush from the front porch as everyone ran to the downed machine. Daeman reached it just seconds after Ada.
Petyr was the only person in the machine. He lay stunned and bleeding in the forward-center position. The other five cushioned passenger niches were filled with… guns. Daeman recognized variations on the flechette rifles that Odysseus had brought back, but also handguns and other weapons he’d never seen before.
They helped Petyr out of the sonie. Ada tore a clean strip of cloth from her tunic and pressed it against the young man’s bleeding forehead.
“I hit my head when the forcefield went off …” said Petyr. “Stupid. I should have let it land itself… I said ‘manual’ when it came off autopilot just after it came out of the clouds… thought I knew how to fly it… didn’t.”
“Hush,” said Ada. Tom, Siris, and others helped support the wobbly man. “Tell us about it when we get you in the house, Petyr. You guards… back to your posts, please. The rest of you, back to whatever you were doing. Loes, perhaps you and some of the men could bring in those weapons and ammunition magazines. There may be more in the sonie’s storage compartments. Put everything in the main hall. Thank you.”
In the parlor of Ardis Hall, Siris and Tom brought disinfectant and bandages while Petyr told his story to at least thirty people.
He described the Golden Gate under voynix siege and the meeting with Ariel. “Then the bubble went dark for several minutes, the glass gone opaque to sunlight, and when the buckyglas became transparent again, Harman was gone.”
“Gone where, Petyr?” Ada’s voice was steady.
“We don’t know. We spent three hours searching the whole complex—Hannah and I—and we found the weapons in a sort of museum room in a bubble she’d never been in before—but there was no sign of Harman or this green thing, Ariel.”
“Where is Hannah?” asked Daeman.
“She stayed behind,” said Petyr. He was bent over, holding his bandaged head. “We knew we had to get the sonie and as many of the weapons back to Ardis as quickly as possible—Ariel had said that he, she, had reprogrammed the sonie to return more slowly than we’d gone—it took about four hours on the return trip. Ariel had said that Odysseus would be out of his crèche in seventy-two hours if the machine could save his life, and Hannah said she was going to stay there until she knew… knew whether he’d made it or not. Besides, we found scores more weapons—we’ll have to go back with the sonie—and Hannah said we could pick her up then.”
“Were the voynix on the verge of getting into the bubbles?” asked Loes.
Petyr shook his head and then grimaced at the pain. “We didn’t think so. They slid right off the buckyglas and there were no exits or entrances functioning except the semipermeable garage door that sealed behind me when I flew out.”
Daeman nodded thoughtfully. He remembered both the friction-free buckyglas of the crawler canopy during their drive into the Mediterranean Basin with Savi and the semipermeable membrane doors up on Prospero’s orbital isle.
“Anyway, Hannah has about fifty flechette weapons,” said Petyr with a wry grin, “we carried them out of the museum in chests and blankets. She could kill a lot of voynix if they do get in. Plus, the room that Odysseus’ crèche is in is sort of hidden from the rest of the complex.”
“We’re not sending the sonie back tonight, are we?” asked the woman named Salas. “I mean …” She glanced out the windows at the dimming afternoon.
“No, we’re not sending the sonie back today,” said Ada. “Thank you, Petyr. Go on to the infirmary and get some rest. We’ll bring the sonie up to the house and inventory the weapons and ammunition you brought back. You may have saved Ardis.”
People went about their business. Even out on the far lawn, there was the buzz of excited conversation. Loes and others who had fired the flechette guns originally brought back by Odysseus, tested the new weapons—all those flechette guns they tried worked—and set up an ad hoc firing range behind Ardis where they could begin training others. Daeman himself oversaw the brushing off of the sonie. It hummed back to life when the controls were reactivated and resumed its hover three feet off the ground. Half a dozen men walked it back to the house. The storage compartments at the rear and sides of the machine—where Odysseus had once stored his spears while going on a hunt for Terror Birds—had indeed been filled with more guns.
Finally, by late afternoon, with the winter twilight fading the day from the sky, Daeman went out to see Ada where she was standing by Hannah’s flaming hearth tower. He started to speak, then found he didn’t know what to say.
“Go,” said Ada. “Good luck.” She kissed Daeman on the cheek and pushed him back toward the house.
In the last gray light of the snowy afternoon, Daeman and the nine others loaded their packs with more crossbow bolts, biscuits, cheese, and water bottles—they consid
ered taking some of the new flechette pistols, but decided to stay with the crossbows and knives, weapons they were familiar with—and then they quickly walked the mile and a quarter of road between the Ardis Hall stockade and the fax pavilion. At times they jogged. Shadows were moving within the deeper shade of the forest, although the ten couldn’t see any voynix in the open. There was no bird sound from the trees—not even the sparse flutters and calls common in deep winter. At the fax pavilion stockade, the nervous men and women keeping guard there—twenty of them—first welcomed them as their relief come early, then showed their displeasure when they learned the group was faxing out. No one had faxed in or out in the past twenty-four hours and the guard team had seen voynix—scores of them—moving west in the forest. They knew the faxnode pavilion was not really defensible should the voynix attack en masse and all of them wanted to be back at Ardis before nightfall. Daeman told them that Ardis was not the place they wanted to be this night—that a relief crew might not make it down to the fax pavilion before nightfall because of the voynix activity, but that someone would fly down in the sonie and check on them within the next few hours. If there was an attack here at the pavilion and the defenders here could get one messenger back to Ardis, the sonie could bring in reinforcements, five at a time.
Daeman looked at the team he’d put together—Ramis, Caman, Dorman, Caul, Edide, Cara, Siman, Oko, and Elle—and then he briefed the nine volunteers on their mission a final time: each had been assigned a list of thirty faxnode codes, codes simply rising in numerical order since distance from Ardis made no difference in the fax world, and explained again how they were to flick to all thirty sites before returning. If there was sign of the blue ice-web and the many-handed Setebos, they were to note it, see what they could from the fax pavilion there, and get the hell out. Their job was not to fight. If the community there looked normal, they were to spread the word to whoever was in charge, then fax on to the next node as quickly as possible. Even with delays in delivering their messages, Daeman hoped that each could complete his or her mission in less than twelve hours. Some of the nodes were sparsely inhabited—little more than a cluster of homes around a fax pavilion—so the stays should be short, even shorter if the humans had fled. If any of the messengers didn’t return to Ardis Hall in twenty-four hours, he or she would be presumed lost and someone sent in his or her place to notify those thirty nodes. They were to return early—before completing their circuit of thirty nodes—only if they were seriously injured or if they learned something that was important to the survival of everyone at Ardis. In that case, they were to come straight back.