Olympos t-2

by Dan Simmons

  The flechettes struck by the thousands, crystal facets gleaming in the rising sun, but the hits seemed to make no difference. Voynix must be dropping, but there so many thousands still leaping, scuttling, jumping, running, scrambling, that Ada couldn’t even see the wounded and dead ones fall. The gray-silver wall of death had covered half the distance from the woods in a few seconds and the things would be over the low palisade walls in another few seconds.

  Daeman may have been the first to go over the wall—Ada couldn’t swear to it, since it seemed to be an almost simultaneous decision. Grabbing up one weapon and screaming, he jumped from the parapet, vaulted over the tops of the logs, landed, rolled, and began rushing toward the voynix.

  Ada laughed and wept. Suddenly it was the most important thing in the world to her that she join in that charge—the most important thing in the world to die attacking this mindless, vicious, stupid, programmed-for-murder enemy, and not wait here behind wood walls to be killed cowering.

  Absurdly taking care because she was, after all, five months pregnant, Ada jumped, rolled, got to her feet, and rushed after Daeman, firing as she ran. She heard a familiar voice screaming to her left and she turned just long enough to see Hannah and Edide running not far behind, stopping to shoot, then running again.

  She could see the humps on the gray-carapaced voynix bodies now. They were covering twenty or twenty-five feet at a leap, their killing claws extended. Ada ran and fired. She no longer knew that she was screaming or what words she might be screaming. Briefly, very briefly, she summoned an image of Harman and tried to send a message his direction—I’m sorry, my darling, sorry about the baby—but then she paid attention only to running and firing and the gray forms were almost on them, rising above them like a silver-gray tidal wave….

  The explosions threw Ada ten feet back and burned off her eyebrows.

  Men and women were lying all around her, thrown backward with her, too stunned to speak or rise. Some were trying to put out flames on their clothing. Some were unconscious.

  The Ardis compound was encircled by a wall of flame that rose fifty, eighty, a hundred feet into the air.

  A second wave of voynix appeared, running and leaping through the flames. More explosions erupted along this line of running gray-silver figures. Ada blinked as she watched carapaces and claws, legs and humps flying in every direction.

  Then Daeman was pulling her to her feet. He was panting, his face blistered from flash burns. “Ada… we have to get… back… to…”

  Ada pulled her arm free and stared up at the sky. There were five flying machines in the air above the Ardis clearing and none of them were sonies—four smaller, bat-winged devices were dropping canisters toward the tree line while a much larger winged machine was descending toward the center of their palisaded compound—the palisade walls mostly tumbled inward now from the multiple explosions.

  Suddenly cables dropped from the bat-winged shapes and black, humanoid but not human shapes whizzed down the lines, hitting the ground faster than a human could and running to establish a perimeter. When some of these tall, black forms ran past Ada, she saw that they were not humans—nor even humans in combat armor of some sort—but taller creatures, strangely jointed, covered with barbs, thorns, and a chitinous ebony armor.

  More voynix came through the flames.

  The black figures between her and the voynix had gone to one knee and raised weapons that looked too heavy for human beings to lift. The guns suddenly exploded into action—chuga-chink-ghuga-chuga-ghink—sounding like some chain-driven cutting machine while pulses of pure blue energy raked the oncoming ranks of voynix. Wherever a blue pulse struck, the voynix exploded.

  Daeman was pulling her back toward the compound.

  “What?” she shouted over the din. “What?”

  He shook his head. Either he couldn’t hear her or didn’t know the answer himself.

  Another round of explosions knocked all the retreating humans down again. This time the mushrooms of flame rose two or three hundred feet into the cold morning air. All of the trees to the west and east of Ardis were burning.

  Voynix leaped through the flames. The chitinous black soldiers shot them down by the score, then by the hundreds.

  Then one of the black things was looming over her. It reached out a long, barbed arm and extended a hand that seemed more black claws than hand. “Ada Uhr?” it said in a calm, deep voice. “I am Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. Your husband needs you. My squad and I will accompany you back to the compound.”

  The large ship had landed next to the Pit. This flying machine was too large for the palisade and had knocked down most of the rest of the wooden wall on its landing. It stood on high, multiply jointed metal legs and some sort of bay doors had opened in its belly.

  Harman was on a litter on the ground with several different creatures huddled around it. Ada ignored the creatures and ran to Harman.

  Her beloved’s head was on a pillow and his body had been covered by a blanket, but Ada had to thrust her palm in her mouth to keep from screaming. His face was ravaged, cheeks hollow, gums all but empty of teeth. His eyes were bleeding. His lips had cracked until they looked as if something had chewed them to bits. His bare forearms were visible above the blanket and Ada could see the pooled blood under the skin—red skin that was sloughing off as if he had received the world’s worst sunburn.

  Daeman, Hannah, Greogi, and others were huddled near her. She took Harman’s hand, felt the slightest pressure in return to her soft squeezing. The dying man on the litter tried to focus his cataract-covered eyes on her, tried to speak. He could only cough blood.

  A small humanoid figure wrapped in red-and-black metal and plastic spoke to her. “You are Ada?”

  “Yes.” She did not turn to look at the machine-boy. Her gaze was just for Harman.

  “He managed to say your name and give us the coordinates for this place. We’re sorry we didn’t find him earlier.”

  “What …” she began and did not know what to ask. One of the machine-things nearby was huge. It was delicately holding an intravenous bottle that fed something into Harman’s emaciated arm.

  “He received a lethal dose of radiation,” said the boy-sized figure in its soft voice. “Almost certainly from a submarine he encountered in the Atlantic Breach.”

  Submarine, thought Ada. The word meant nothing to her.

  “We’re sorry, but we simply don’t have the medical facilities for human beings in this condition,” said the little person-machine. “We called the hornets down from the Queen Mab when we saw your problems here and they brought painkillers, more intravenous bottles, but we can do nothing for the radiation damage itself.”

  Ada didn’t really understand anything the little person was saying. She held Harman’s hand with both of hers and felt him dying.

  Harman coughed, obviously could not make the speech sounds he was trying to make, coughed again, and tried to pull his hand away. Ada clung but the dying man was insistent, pulling…

  She realized that the pressure of her grip must be hurting him. She released his hand.

  “I’m sorry, my darling.”

  Behind them, more explosions, farther away now. The bat-shaped flying machines were firing into the surrounding forests with that constant chain-rattling noise. The tall, chitinous troopers ran back and forth through the camp—some administering aid to slightly injured human beings, mostly for flash burns.

  Harman did not pull his right hand back but held it up toward her face.

  Ada tried to hold his hand again, but he batted her hand away with his left hand. She kept her hands still and let him touch her neck, her cheek—he laid the palm flat against her forehead, then used all of his strength to mold his hand to her skull, clutching at her almost desperately.

  Before she could even think to pull away, it began.

  Nothing, not even the explosion that had just thrown her ten feet backward through the air, had ever struck Ada as this did.

  Fi
rst there was Harman’s clear voice—It’s all right, my love, my darling. Relax. It’s all right. I must give you this gift while I can.

  And then everything around Ada disappeared except for the pressure from her beloved’s damaged hand and bleeding fingers, pouring images in to her—not just to her mind, but filling her with words, memories, images, pictures, data, more memories, functions, quotes, books, entire volumes, more books, more memories, his love for her, his thoughts about her and their child, his love, more information, more voices and names and dates and thoughts and facts and ideas and…

  “Ada? Ada?” Tom was kneeling over her, splashing water on her face while he gently slapped her face. Hannah, Daeman, and others knelt nearby. Harman had dropped his arm. The little metal-plastic person still fussed over Harman, but her darling looked dead.

  Ada stood. “Daeman! Hannah! Come here. Lean close.”

  “What?” asked Hannah.

  Ada shook her head. No time to explain. No time to do anything but share. “Trust me,” she said.

  She reached out her left and right hands, gripped Daeman’s forehead with her left hand, Hannah’s with her right, and activated the Sharing function.

  It took no more than thirty seconds—no more than the time it had taken for Harman to share the functions and essential data with her, the data he’d spent the hours of his walk west in the Breach compartmentalizing, preparing for transmission—but the thirty seconds seemed like thirty eternities to Ada. If she could have done the next part alone, she wouldn’t have bothered, wouldn’t have taken the time—not even if the future of the human race depended on it—but she couldn’t do the next part alone. She needed one person to continue the Sharing and one person to help her try to save Harman.

  It was done.

  All three—Ada, Daeman, Hannah—fell to their knees, eyes closed.

  “What is it?” asked Siris.

  Someone ran shouting into the compound. It was one of their volunteers at the pavilion a mile and a quarter away. The faxnode was working! Just as the voynix were closing in there, shouted the messenger, the faxnode had come alive.

  There’s no time for the fax pavilion, thought Ada. And nowhere to go among the numbered faxnodes either. Everywhere the humans were in retreat or under direct attack. There was no other place on a known node where her darling could be saved.

  The large creature that looked like some sort of giant metallic horseshoe crab was rumbling in English. “There are human rejuvenation tanks in orbit,” it was saying. “But the only tanks we know about for certain are on Sycorax’s orbital asteroid, and it just passed the moon under full thrust. We’re sorry we don’t know any other…”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Ada, kneeling next to Harman again. She touched his forearm. There was no reaction but she could feel the last embers of life in him—his biomonitors speaking to her new biometric functions. She was madly sorting through all the thousands of freefax nodes, the freefax function procedures itself.

  There were the post-human storage depots in the Mediterranean Basin—they had medicines even for such radiation death—but the depots were sealed in stasis and Ada saw from the allnet monitors that the Hands of Hercules had slowly disappeared, refilling the Mediterranean. She would need machines—submersibles—to get to the depots there. Too long. There were other post storage areas—on the steppes of China, near the Dry Valley in Antarctica… but all would take too long to reach and the medical procedures were too complicated. Harman wouldn’t live long enough to…

  Ada grabbed Daeman’s arm, pulled him down next to her. The man seemed dazed, transfixed. “All the new functions …” he said.

  Ada shook him. “Tell me again what the Moira ghost said!”

  “What?” Even his stare was unfocused.

  “Daeman, tell me again what the Moira ghost said to you on the day that we voted on letting Noman leave. Was it ‘Remember …’ Tell me!”

  “Ah… she said …’Remember, Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,’ ” he said. “How can that…”

  “No,” cried Ada. “The second Noman was meant to be two words. ‘Noman’s coffin was no man’s coffin.’ Hannah, you waited while that sarcophagus at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu cured Odysseus. You’ve been to the Bridge more often than any of us. Will you go with me? Will you try?”

  Hannah took only a second to understand what her friend was asking. “Yes,” she said.

  “Daeman,” said Ada, rushing not only against time, but against Death, who was already among them, who already was holding Harman in his dark claws, “you need to do the Sharing with everyone here. At once.”

  “Yes,” said Daeman, moving away quickly, calling others to him.

  The moravec troopers—Ada knew them all now by form if not by name—were still firing around the perimeter, still killing the last of the attacking voynix. Not one voynix had gotten through.

  “Hannah,” said Ada, “we’ll need the litter, but if it doesn’t freefax, put Harman’s blanket over your shoulder, we’ll use that if we have to.”

  “Hey,” cried the small Europan morevac when Hannah roughly pulled the blanket off their dying human patient. “He needs that! He was shivering…”

  Ada touched the little moravec’s arm, felt the humanity and soul even through the metal and plastic. “It’s all right,” she said at last. She pulled its name—his name—from his cybernetic memory. “Friend Mahnmut, it’s all right,” she said. “We know what we’re doing. After all this time, we finally know what we’re doing.”

  She gestured for the others to stand back.

  Hannah knelt on one side of the litter, one of her hands on Harman’s shoulder, the other on the metal handle of the litter itself. Ada did the same on her side.

  “I think we just visualize that main room—the one where we met Odysseus—and the coordinates come to us,” said Ada. “It’s important that we’ve both been there.”

  “Yes,” said Hannah.

  “On the count of three?” said Ada. “One, two… three.”

  Both women, the litter, and Harman winked out of existence.

  Even though the dying Harman looked as if he weighed nothing, it took all of their strength for the two women to carry him and the litter from the main museum area of the Golden Gate Bridge at Machu Picchu, down several flights of stairs through the green bubble into the sarcophagus area, past Savi’s old-time sarcophagus and down the final flight of curved stairs to Odysseus-Noman’s coffin.

  Ada’s palm could find only the slightest flicker of living response when she set her hand against her beloved’s ravaged chest, but she did not waste more time in searching for life.

  “On the count of three again,” she panted.

  Hannah nodded.

  “One, two… three.”

  They gently lifted the naked Harman out of the litter and lowered his body into Noman’s coffin. Hannah pulled the lid down and snapped it shut.

  “How do you …” began Ada in a panic. She could interrogate all the various machinery here, her new functions told her that, but it would take too long…

  “Here,” said Hannah. “Noman showed me after he revived.” Her sculptor’s fingers tapped a series of glowing virtual buttons. The old-style human functions interacted with the crèche controls.

  The coffin sighed, then began to hum. A mist flowed into the sleeping chamber through unseen vents and hid most of Harman’s body from view. Ice crystals formed on the clear cover. Several new lights came on. One winked red.

  “Oh!” said Hannah. Her voice was very small.

  “No,” said Ada. Her tone was calm but firm. “No. No. No.” She set her palm across the plastic control nexus of the coffin as if she were reasoning with the machine.

  The red light winked, changed to amber, switched back to red.

  “No,” Ada said firmly.

  The red light wavered, dimmed, switched to amber. Stayed amber.

  Hannah’s and Ada’s fingers met briefly above the coffin and then Ada
returned her palm to the glowing curve of the AI nexus.

  The amber light stayed on.

  Several hours later, as late afternoon clouds moved in to obscure first the ruins of Machu Picchu and then the roadway of the suspension bridge six hundred feet below them, Ada said, “Hannah, freefax back to Ardis. Get some food. Rest.”

  Hannah shook her head.

  Ada smiled. “Then at least head up to the dining area and get us some fruit or something. Water.”

  The amber light burned all that afternoon. Just after sundown, as the Andes valleys were bathed in alpenglow, Daeman, Tom, and Siris freefaxed in, but they stayed only a few moments.

  “We’ve already reached thirty of the other communities,” Daeman said to Ada. She nodded, but her gaze never left the amber light.

  The others eventually faxed away with promises to return in the morning. Hannah pulled the blanket around her and fell asleep there on the floor next to the coffin.

  Ada remained—sometimes kneeling, sometimes sitting, but always thinking, and always with her palm on the coffin control nexus, always sending word of her presence and her prayers through the circuits separating her and her Harman, and always with her eyes on the amber monitor light.

  Sometime after three a.m. local time, the amber light turned to green.

  Part 4

  88

  One week after the Fall of Ilium:

  Achilles and Penthesilea appeared on the empty ridgeline that rose between the Plain of the Scamander and the Plain of the Simois. As Hephaestus promised, there were two horses waiting—a powerful black stallion for the Achaean and a shorter but even more muscular white mare for the Amazon. The two mounted to inspect what was left.

  There was not much left.

  “How can an entire city like Ilium disappear?” said Penthesilea, her voice as contentious as always.

  “All cities disappear,” said Achilles. “It is their fate.”

  The Amazon snorted. Achilles had already noted that the blonde human female’s snort was similar to that of her white mare’s. “They aren’t supposed to disappear in a day … an hour.” The comment sounded like a complaint, a lament. Only two days after Penthesilea’s resurrection from the Healer’s tanks, Achilles was getting used to that constant tone of complaint.