by Dan Simmons
“My enemy is the enemy of Ilium,” says Hector. “My allies are those who kill the enemies of Ilium.”
“You will fight alongside Aphrodite?” presses old Priam. “You will ally yourself with the gods you’ve tried to kill these last many months? Kill those Achaeans, those Argives, whom you’ve learned to call friend?”
“My enemy is the enemy of Ilium,” repeats Hector, his jaw set. He lifts the golden helmet and sets it on. His eyes are fierce through the circles in polished metal.
Priam rises, hugs Hector, kisses his hand with infinite gentleness. “Lead our armies to victory this day, Noble Hector.”
Hector turns, clasps Deiphobus’ forearm for a second, and speaks loudly, addressing all the ranked and weary captains and their men.
“This day we bring fire to the enemy. This day we roar with war cries, all together! Zeus has handed us this day, a day worth all the rest in our long lives. This is the day we seize the ships, kill Agamemnon, and end this war forever!”
The silence echoes for a long pause and then suddenly the great hall is filled with a roar that frightens Helen, makes her step back behind Cassandra, who is smiling ear to ear in a sort of death rictus.
The hall empties then as if the people in it have been carried off by the roar—a roar that does not die but that begins anew and then grows even louder as Hector leaves Helen’s former palace and is cheered by his thousands of men waiting outside.
“Thus it begins again,” whispers Cassandra, her terrible grin frozen in place. “Thus the old futures come ‘round again to be born in blood.”
“Shut up,” hisses Helen.
“Get up, Ada! Get up!”
Ada threw the turin cloth aside and sat up in bed. It was Emme in her room, shaking her. Ada raised her left palm and saw that it was only a little after midnight.
Outside there came shouts, screams, the rip-crack of flechette rifles and the twang-thud of heavy crossbows firing. Something heavy smashed into the wall of Ardis Hall and a second later a window in the room next door exploded inward. There were flames lighting the win-dow—flames outside and below.
Ada jumped out of bed. She hadn’t even taken her boots off, so she tugged her tunic straight and followed Emme out into a hallway filled with running figures. Everyone had a weapon and was heading for his or her assigned positions.
Petyr met her at the base of the stairs.
“They’ve broken through the west wall. We have a lot of people dead. The voynix are in the compound.”
35
Ada emerged from Ardis Hall into confusion, darkness, death, and terror.
She and Petyr and a group of others had rushed out through the front door onto the south lawn, but the night was so dark that she could see only torches on the palisades and the vague shapes of people running toward the Hall, hear only shouts and screams.
Reman jogged up to them. The powerfully built bearded man—one of the earliest of those who came to Ardis to hear Odysseus’ teachings while he was still teaching—was carrying a crossbow with no bolts left in it. “The voynix came in over the north wall first. Three or four hundred of them at once, concentrated, en masse …”
“Three or four hundred?” whispered Ada. The previous night’s attack had been the worst, and they’d estimated that no more than a hundred and fifty of the creatures, spread out, had attacked all four sides of the compound.
“There are at least a couple of hundred coming over each wall,” gasped Reman. “But they came over the north wall first, behind a fusillade of stones. A lot of our people were hit… we couldn’t see the rocks in the dark… and when our numbers on the ramparts dropped, we had to keep our heads down, some ran, the voynix came leaping over, using each other’s backs as springboards. They were in among the cattle before we could bring up the reserves. I need more quarrels for the crossbow and a new spear…”
He started to brush past them into the foyer where the weapons were being dispensed, but Petyr caught his arm.
“Did you get the injured back from the wall?”
Reman shook his head. “It’s crazy up there. The voynix butchered those that fell, even those with just light head wounds or bruises from the rocks. We couldn’t… we couldn’t… get to them.” The big man turned away to hide his face.
Ada ran around the house toward the north wall.
The huge cupola was on fire and the flames illuminated the confusion. The temporary wooden barracks and tents where more than half the people at Ardis slept were also on fire. Men and women were running back toward Ardis Hall in total panic. The cattle were lowing as shadowy, flick-fast shapes of voynix slaughtered them—that was what voynix once did, Ada well knew, slaughter animals for humans, and they still had their deadly manipulator blades at the ends of those powerful steel arms. More cows went down in the mud and snow as Ada watched in horror, and then the voynix began hopping and leaping her way, quickly covering the hundred yards toward the house in giant grasshopper bounds.
Petyr grabbed her. “Come on, we have to fall back.”
“The fire trenches …” said Ada, pulling out of his grasp. She made her way across the current of running people until she reached one of the torches along the back patio, caught it up, and ran back toward the nearest trench. She had to dodge and weave her way against the crowd of men and women running toward the house—she could see Reman and others trying to stem the flight, but the panicked, defeated mob ran on, many of them throwing down their crossbows, bows, and flechette weapons. The voynix were past the burning cupola now, their silvery forms leaping across the burning scaffolding, striking down men and women trying to put out the fire. More voynix—scores of them—were hopping, scuttling, and running toward Ada. The trench was fifty feet away, the voynix less than eighty.
“Ada!”
She ran on. Petyr and a small group of men and women followed her to the trenches, even as the leading voynix leaped across the first ditch.
The kerosene drums were in place, but no one had poured the fluid into the trench. Ada pried the top off and kicked a heavy drum over, then rolled it along the edge of the trench as the strong-smelling fuel poured sluggishly into the shallow ditch. Petyr, Salas, Peaen, Emme, and others seized more of the heavy drums of lamp oil and began tipping and pouring them.
Then the voynix were on them. One of the creatures leaped the ditch and slashed Emme’s arm off at the shoulder. Ada’s friend did not even scream. She looked down at her missing arm in silent astonishment, her mouth hanging open. The voynix raised its arm and its cutting blades flashed in the light.
Ada dropped the torch into the trench, picked up a fallen crossbow, and fired a bolt into the voynix’s leather hump. The creature turned away from Emme and coiled, crouching, ready to leap at Ada. Petyr sloshed half a can of kerosene across its carapace at almost the same time that Loes threw his torch at the thing.
The voynix exploded into flame and staggered in circles, its infrared sensors overloaded, metal arms flapping. Two men near Petyr fired clouds of flechettes into it. Finally it fell into the ditch and ignited that entire section of the trench. Emme collapsed and Reman caught her, lifting her easily, and turned to carry her back to the house.
A fist-sized rock came hurtling out of the darkness, fast as a flechette and almost as invisible, and smashed in the back of Reman’s head. Still holding Emme, he tumbled backward into the burning ditch. Their bodies burst into flame.
“Come on!” shouted Petyr, grabbing Ada’s arm. A voynix leaped through the flames and landed between them. Ada fired the remaining crossbow bolt into the voynix’s belly, grabbed Petyr’s wrist, dodged past the staggered voynix, and turned to run.
There were fires all over the compound now, and Ada could see voynix everywhere—many past the flame trenches already, all of them within the walls. Some fell to flechette fire or were slowed by well-placed crossbow bolts and arrows, others were flung back when hit by flechette bursts, but the human firing was sporadic, individual, and poorly aimed. People were panicked. Disciplin
e was not holding. The hail of flung rocks from the unseen voynix beyond the walls, on the other hand, was incessant—a constant and deadly barrage out of the darkness. Ada and Petyr tried to help a very young redheaded woman to her feet before the voynix overran them all. The woman had been struck in the side by a rock and was coughing blood onto her white tunic. Ada threw down her empty crossbow and used both hands to help the woman get to her feet and begin staggering back toward the Hall.
Flame trenches were being ignited on all four sides of Ardis Hall now by the retreating humans, but Ada saw the voynix run through the fire or leap over it. Wild shadows leaped everywhere on the lawn and the temperature rose a dozen degrees or more in a few seconds.
The woman sagged against Ada and almost pulled her down as she fell. Ada crouched next to her—amazed at the amount of blood the redheaded girl was vomiting onto her tunic—but Petyr was trying to pull her to her feet, guide her away. “Ada, we have to go!”
“No.”
Ada bent low, got the bleeding girl over her shoulder, and managed to stand. There were five voynix surrounding them.
Petyr had lifted a broken spear from the ground and was holding them back with feints and stabs, but the voynix were faster. They dodged back and lunged forward more quickly than Petyr could turn and thrust. One of the creatures grabbed the spear and wrenched it out of his hands. Petyr fell onto his stomach almost at the voynix’s feet. Ada looked around wildly for any weapon she could grab or use. She tried to set the girl on her feet so she could free her own hands, but the redhead’s knees buckled and she fell again. Ada rushed at the voynix standing over Petyr, ready to use her bare hands on it.
There came a rip of flechette fire and two of the voynix, including the one ready to behead Petyr, went down. The other three creatures whirled to meet the attack.
Petyr’s friend Laman—who had lost four fingers on his right hand in the last voynix attack—was firing a flechette pistol with his left hand. His right arm held up a wood-and-bronze shield and rocks ricocheted off it. Behind Laman came Salas, Oelleo, and Loes—all friends of Hannah’s and disciples of Odysseus—also using shields for defense and flechette weapons to kill. Two of the voynix went down and the third leaped back across the flaming ditch. But dozens more were running, leaping, and scrabbling around Ada’s group.
Petyr staggered to his feet, helped Ada lift the girl, and they headed toward the house still more than a hundred feet away, with Laman leading the way and Loes, Salas, and the petite Oelleo giving them protection on each side with their shields.
Two voynix landed on Salas’s back, driving her into the muddy, churned-up soil and tearing her spine away. Laman turned and shot the voynix in the hump with a full spread of flechettes. The creature was blasted sideways across the frozen ground, but Ada could see that Salas was dead. At that instant, a rock caught Laman in the temple and he fell lifeless.
Ada let Petyr support the girl’s weight while she snatched up the heavy flechette pistol. A solid volley of rocks came flying out of the darkness, but the humans crouched behind Loes’s and Oelleo’s shields. Petyr grabbed the fallen Laman’s shield and added it to the defensive barricade. One of the larger stones smashed Oelleo’s left arm through the wood and leather shield, and the woman—the absent Daeman’s close friend—threw back her head and screamed with the pain.
There were scores—hundreds—of voynix around them now, scrabbling, leaping, killing the wounded humans on the ground, with more rushing toward Ardis Hall.
“We’re cut off!” cried Petyr. Behind them, the flames in the trenches had lost much of their intensity and the voynix were leaping across without problem. The ground was littered with more human bodies than voynix corpses.
“We have to try!” shouted Ada. One arm around the unconscious girl, firing the flechette pistol with her right hand, she yelled for Oelleo to raise her shield with her right arm and to set it next to Loes’s. Behind that flimsy barricade, the five of them ran toward the house.
More voynix saw them coming and leaped to join the twenty or thirty blocking the way. Some of the creatures had crystal flechette darts lodged in their carapaces and leather humps; the light from the flames caught the crystal and danced in red and green flashes. A voynix grabbed Oelleo’s shield, pulled her off her feet, and cut her throat with a powerful slash of its left arm. Another pulled the girl away from Ada, who set the muzzle of the flechette pistol against the thing’s hump and squeezed the trigger four times. The blast blew out the front of the voynix’s carapace and it collapsed on top of the unconscious girl in a flood of its own blue-white blood-fluid, but Ada could hear the pistol click on an empty chamber as a dozen more voynix leapt closer.
Petyr, Loes, and Ada were kneeling now, trying to protect the fallen girl with the shield, Loes firing with the one remaining flechette gun, Petyr holding out the shortened, broken spear against the next attack, but there were scores of voynix converging.
Harman, Ada had time to think. She realized that she said his name with a mixture of total love and total anger. Why wasn’t he here? Why had he insisted on going away on her last day of life? Now the child growing in her belly was as doomed as Ada was, and Harman was not here to protect either of them. At that second she loved Harman beyond words and hated him at the same time. I’m sorry, she thought—not to Harman, not to herself, but to the fetus inside her. The closest voynix leaped at her and she threw her empty flechette pistol at its metal carapace.
The voynix flew backward, smashed to bits. Ada blinked. The five voynix on either side either fell or were flung backward. The dozen voynix around them crouched, raising their arms, as a withering hail of flechette fire rained down on them from the sonie. There were at least eight humans on the disk, overloading it, firing wildly.
Greogi brought the machine lower, chest height—Foolish! thought Ada. The voynix could leap on it, drag it down. If they lost the sonie, Ardis was lost.
“Hurry!” shouted Greogi.
Loes shielded them with his body as Petyr and Ada extricated the unconscious redheaded girl from the voynix carcass and tossed her into the center of the crowded sonie. Hands pulled Ada up. Petyr crawled on. Rocks were pelting around them. Three voynix leaped, higher than the heads of the people on the sonie, but someone—the young woman named Peaen—fired a flechette rifle and two of them were knocked aside. The last one landed on the front of the disk, directly in front of Greogi. The bald pilot stabbed the thing in the chest. The voynix pulled the sword with it when it fell away.
Loes turned and jumped aboard. The sonie wobbled from the weight, staggered, dropped, hit the frozen earth. Voynix were rushing from all sides now and they seemed much larger than usual from Ada’s perspective lying on the bloodied surface of the downed sonie.
Greogi did something with the virtual controls and the sonie bobbed, then rose vertically. Voynix leaped at them but those with rifles in the outer niches blasted them away.
“We’re almost out of flechettes!” shouted Stoman from the rear.
“Are you all right?” asked Petyr, leaning over Ada.
“Yes,” she managed. She’d been trying to stem the girl’s bleeding, but it was internal. Ada couldn’t find a pulse on the girl’s throat. “I don’t think …” she began.
The rocks hit the underside and edges of the sonie like a sudden hailstorm. One caught Peaen in the chest and knocked her backward, across the girl’s body. Another caught Petyr behind the ear, snapping his head forward.
“Petyr!” cried Ada, rising to her knees to grab him.
He lifted his face, looked at her quizzically, smiled slightly, and fell backward off the sonie, dropping into the scuttling mass of voynix fifty feet below.
“Hang on!” cried Greogi.
They circled high once, flew around Ardis Hall. Ada leaned out to see the voynix at every door, scuttling over the porch, beginning to climb every wall, smashing at every shuttered window. The Hall was surrounded by a giant rectangle of flame, and the burning cupola and barracks ad
ded to the light. Ada was never good at numbers and estimating, but she guessed that there were a thousand voynix inside the walls down there, all converging on the main house.
“I’m out of flechettes,” cried the man at the right front of the sonie. Ada recognized him—Boman—he’d cooked breakfast for her yesterday.
Greogi looked up, his face white behind streaks of blood and mud. “We should fly to the faxnode pavilion,” he said. “Ardis is lost.”
Ada shook her head. “You go if you want. I’m staying. Let me out there.” She pointed at the ancient jinker platform up between the gables and skylights on the roof. She remembered the day when she was a young teenager, leading her “cousin” Daeman up the ladders to show him that platform—he’d peeked up her skirt and discovered that she didn’t wear underwear. She’d done it deliberately, knowing what a lecherous boy-man her older cousin was in those days.
“Let me out,” she said again. Men and women—hunched shadows like lean and leaning gargoyles—were firing down from the gables, broad gutters, and the jinker platform itself, firing flechettes and bolts and arrows into the growing mob of skittering voynix below. Ada realized that it was like trying to stop an ocean’s tide by throwing pebbles at it.
Greogi hovered the sonie over the crowded platform. Ada jumped out and they lowered the girl’s body to her—Ada couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. Then they handed her the unconscious but moaning Peaen. Ada lowered both bodies to the platform. Boman jumped down just long enough to throw four heavy bags of flechette magazines into the sonie and clamber back aboard. Then the machine pivoted silently on its axis and dived away, Greogi’s hands working the virtual controls gracefully, his face rapt with attention, reminding Ada of her mother’s focus when she used to play the piano in the front parlor.
Ada staggered to the edge of the jinker platform. She was very dizzy, and if someone in the dark hadn’t steadied her, she would have fallen. The dark figure who’d saved her moved away, back to the edge of the platform, and continued firing a flechette rifle with its heavy thunk-thunk-thunk. A rock flew up out of the darkness and the man or woman fell backward off the jinker platform, the body sliding down the steep roof and dropping away. Ada never saw who it was who had saved her.