by Dan Simmons
“No, I meant the other things lying around on the dry ground out there,” said Orphu. “My radar data might not be as good as your optic images, but it almost looks like one of those lumps lying there is a human being.”
Mahnmut peered at his screen. The dropship had shot an extensive series of images before it had flown off and he flicked through all of them. “If it was a human being,” he said, “it’s been dead a long time. It’s flattened, limbs splayed wrong, desiccated. I don’t think it was—I think our minds are just trying to see that shape amidst random stuff. There’s quite a debris field out there.”
“All right,” said Orphu obviously aware of their priorities. “What do I have to do to get ready here?”
“Just stay where you are,” said Mahnmut. “I’m coming down to get you. We’ll go out together.”
The Dark Lady sat on its stubby legs not ten meters west of the stern of the wreck. Orphu had wondered how they would exit through the cargo bay doors set in the belly of the Europan submersible with the ship sitting on the bottom of the ocean, but that question had been settled when Mahnmut had extended the landing legs.
Mahnmut had entered the cargo bay through the interior airlock and tapped into direct comm contact with the big Ionian while the submersible pilot carefully flooded the hold with Earth ocean water, equalized pressures, and then opened the cargo bay door. They’d disconnected Orphu from his various umbilicals and the two had gently dropped to the bottom of the ocean.
As cracked and ancient as Orphu’s carapace was, he didn’t leak. When he showed curiosity at the pressure readings his shell and other body parts were reading, Mahnmut explained.
The atmospheric pressure up above, on a theoretical beach or just above the surface of the ocean here, held relatively steady at 14.7 pounds per square inch. About every 10 meters—actually every 33 feet, Mahnmut said, using the old Lost Era measurements with which Orphu was equally comfortable—that pressure increased by one atmosphere. Thus at 33 feet of depth, every square inch of the moravecs’ outer integument would feel 29.4 pounds of pressure. At 66 feet, they would be under three atmospheres, and so forth. At the depth of this wreck—more than 230 feet—the sea pressure was exerting eight atmospheres on every square inch of The Dark Lady’s hull and the moravecs’ bodies.
They were built to withstand far greater pressures, although Orphu was used to negative pressure differentials as he worked in the radiation-and sulfur-filled space around the moon Io.
And speaking of radiation, there was a lot of it around. They both registered it and the Lady monitored it and relayed her readings. It was not dangerous to moravecs of their design, but the feeling of the neutron and gamma rays pouring through them caught their attention.
Mahnmut explained that under this pressure, if they had been human beings and if they had been breathing tanked standard Earth air—a mixture of twenty-one percent oxygen with seventy-nine percent nitrogen—the multiplying and expanding nitrogen bubbles under eight atmospheres would be playing havoc with them, giving them nitrogen narcosis, distorting their judgment and emotions, and not allowing them to surface without hours of slow decompression at different depths. But the moravecs were breathing pure O-two, with their rebreathing systems compensating for the added pressure.
“Shall we look at our adversaries?” asked Orphu of Io.
Mahnmut led the way. As careful as he was climbing the curved hull of the wreck, silt rose around them like a terrestrial dust storm.
“Can you still see by fine radar?” asked Mahnmut. “This crap is blinding me on visual frequencies. I’ve read about this in all the old Earth-based diving stories. The first diver at a wreck site on the bottom or inside the wreck would get a view—all the others would have zero viz—at least until the silt and crud settles.”
“Zero viz, huh?” said Orphu. “Well, welcome to the club, amigo. The detailed radar I use in the sulphur-mess vacuum near Io serves to probe through these little silt clouds just fine. I see the hull, the hump of the missile compartment, the whatchamacallit—the broken sail—thirty meters forward. If you need help, just ask and I’ll lead you by the hand.”
Mahnmut grunted and switched his primary vision to thermal and radar frequencies.
They drifted over the missile compartment, five meters above the warheads themselves, both moravecs using their built-in thrusters to maneuver, each being careful not to squirt any thrust in the direction of the tumbled warheads.
And tumbled they were. There were forty-eight missile tubes and forty-eight missile tube hatches wide open.
These hatches look heavy, said Mahnmut over their tightbeam. Everything they said and saw, of course, including tightbeam, was being relayed up to the Queen Mab and the dropship via a relay radio buoy Mahnmut had deployed from The Dark Lady.
Ophu had been gripping one of the huge hatches—its diameter as large as the Ionian—and now he said, “Seven tons.”
Even after the crew had ordered the sub’s AI to open the forty-eight missile tube hatches, the missiles themselves still had been covered by blue fiberglass domes that held out the sea. Mahnmut saw at a glance how the missiles—propelled to the surface by huge charges of nitrogen gas, their engines to ignite only after each missile reached air—would easily burst through those fiberglass covers.
But the missiles had not exploded from their tubes in rising bubbles of nitrogen, nor had their engines ignited. The fiberglass dome-covers had long since worn away; only brittle blue fragments remained.
“What a mess,” said Orphu.
Mahnmut nodded. Whatever had hit the stern of The Sword of Allah, breaking its back just above the engine room, severing its propulsion jets, and sending the ocean rushing in through the length of the boomer as a wall of shock wave and seawater, had breached the various missile compartments and tumbled the missiles themselves. It looked like a heap of ancient straw. In some cases the warheads were still pointing vaguely upward, but in others the ancient, corroded rocket engines and their solid fuel were at the top and the warheads buried in silt.
Forget that easy six thousand nine hundred twelve hours of work, tight-beamed Orphu. It’ll take that long just to get to some of those warheads. And odds are overwhelming that any serious torch cutting or twisting on one will detonate another one.
Yeah, said Mahnmut. There was no silt obscuring his view now and he looked at the tangled mess primarily on his optical frequencies.
“Do either of you have a suggestion?” asked Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
Mahnmut almost jumped. He’d known they were being monitored by everyone on the Mab, but he had been so absorbed with studying the wreckage that the connection had almost slipped his mind.
“Yes,” said Orphu of Io, switching to the common band. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
He described the procedure as succinctly and nontechnically as he could. Rather than try to disarm each warhead through the long protocol the Prime Integrators had downloaded, the Ionian now planned for Mahnmut and him to do it the quick and messy way. Mahnmut would bring The Dark Lady right above the wreck, extending her landing legs to full length until she was squatting over the boomer like a mother hen on her nest. They’d use all the ship’s belly searchlights to illuminate their work. Then Orphu and Mahnmut would separately use the torches to cut each warhead away from its missile, using a simple chain and pulley system to haul the nose cones directly up into The Dark Lady’s cargo hold and setting them in place in cargo baffles there like eggs in a carton.
“Isn’t there a great chance of the black holes going critical during this rough and tumble process?” asked Cho Li from the bridge of the Queen Mab.
“Yeah,” rumbled Orphu over the comm, “but the odds are one hundred percent that one of the black holes will activate if we spend a year or more futzing around with them. We’re doing it this way.”
Mahnmut touched one of the Ionian’s manipulators and nodded agreement, sure that his nod would be picked up by Orphu’s close radar.
Suma IV’s stern voice broke in over the commlink. “And what do you propose to do with the forty-eight warheads with their seven hundred sixty-eight black holes once you get them loaded in your submersible?”
“You’re going to pick us up,” said Mahnmut. “The dropship will haul The Dark Lady and its bellyful of death into outer space and we’ll send the holes on their way.”
“The dropship isn’t configured to fly out beyond the rings,” snapped Suma IV. “And the leukocyte robotic attack drones in the e-and p-rings will certainly mob us on the way up.”
“That’s your problem,” rumbled Orphu. “We’re going to get to work now. It should take us ten to twelve hours to hack and cut these war-heads free and load them into The Dark Lady. When we break surface, you’d better have a plan. We know you have other spacecraft than the Mab up there on this mission—stealthed, out beyond the rings, whatever. You’d better have one ready to meet the dropship in low Earth orbit and take this mess off our hands. We don’t want to have come all this way to Earth just to destroy it.”
“Acknowledge your transmission,” said Asteague/Che. “Please be advised that we have a visitor up here. A small spacecraft—a sonie, I believe—is rendezvousing with Sycorax’s orbital isle as I speak.”
80
There was no ceremony surrounding Noman’s departure. One minute he was in the hovering sonie and chatting with Daeman, Hannah, and Tom who were standing beside it, and the next second the sonie had tilted almost vertically, its forcefield pressing Noman into the mat, and then it shot skyward like a flechette, disappearing into the low, gray clouds in seconds.
Ada felt cheated. She’d wanted her last words with the friend she’d once known as Odysseus.
The vote to allow Noman to borrow the sonie had been decided by one vote. The last vote—the deciding vote—had been cast by a man named Elian, the bald leader of the six Hughes Town refugees who had come in with Hannah and Noman on the skyraft, not even one of the Ardis survivors.
The Ardis people who had voted against losing the sonie were furious. There were demands for a recount. Flechette rifles actually had been raised in anger, along with shouting voices.
Ada had stepped into the middle of the melee and announced in a loud, calm voice that the issue had been decided. Noman was to be allowed to borrow the sonie but would return it as soon as possible. In the meantime, they would have the sky-raft that Noman and Hannah had cobbled together in the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu—the sonie could carry only six; the sky-raft could haul up to fourteen people at a time if they had to make a run for the island. This matter was settled.
The flechette rifles had been lowered, but the grumbling continued. Old friends of Ada’s refused to meet her gaze in the hours afterward and she knew that she’d used up the last of her capital as leader of the Ardis survivors.
Now Noman and the sonie were gone and Ada had never felt lonelier. She touched her slightly bulging belly and thought, Little person, son or daughter of Harman, if this was a mistake that endangers you, I shall be sorry to the last second of my life.
“Ada?” said Daeman. “Can I have a word in private with you?”
They walked out beyond the north palisade to where Hannah had once kept her scaffolded hearth working. Daeman told her about his meeting with the post-human who called herself Moira. He described how she looked exactly like a young Savi and how she was invisible to the rest of them as she stood near him during the meeting and the vote.
Ada shook her head slowly. “None of that makes any sense, Daeman. Why would a post-human appear in Savi’s body—stay invisible to the rest of us? How could she? Why would she?”
“I don’t know,” said Daeman.
“Did she have anything else to say?”
“She promised—before the meeting—to tell me something about Harman after the meeting if she could attend.”
“And?” said Ada. She felt her heart pounding so wildly that it might have been the child stirring within her, as eager as she to hear the news.
“All the Moira-ghost said afterward was ‘Remember that Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,’” said Daeman.
Ada made him repeat that twice and said, “That makes no sense either.”
“I know,” said Daeman. He looked crestfallen, shoulders slumped. “I tried to make her explain but then she was…gone. Just disappeared.”
She stared hard at him. “Are you sure this happened, Daeman? We’ve all been working too hard, sleeping too little, worrying too much. Are you sure this Moira-ghost was real?”
Daeman stared hard back at her, his gaze as angrily defensive as hers was angrily doubtful, but he said nothing else.
“Remember that Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,” muttered Ada. She looked around. People were going about their early afternoon chores, but the work groups had now broken themselves into clusters of those who had voted the same. Neither side was speaking to the bald man Elian. Ada fought off the urge to sob.
Neither Noman nor the sonie returned that day. Nor the next. Nor the next.
On the third day, Ada went up in the wobbly sky-raft with Hannah at the controls, accompanying Daeman’s hunting party out beyond the circle of voynix and trying to get an estimate of how many of the headless, carapaced killers were out there. It was a beautiful morning—no clouds at all, a blue sky and warmer winds promising spring—and she could easily see that the number of voynix pressing into their two-mile radius from the Pit had grown.
“It’s hard for me to guess,” Ada whispered to Daeman although they were a thousand feet above the monsters. “There must be three or four hundred just visible in that meadow. We never had to count large numbers of things growing up. What do you think? Fifteen thousand in the whole encircling mass? More?”
“More, I think,” Daeman said calmly. “I think there are thirty to forty thousand of the things surrounding us now.”
“Don’t they ever get tired of standing there?” asked Ada. “Don’t they have to eat? Drink?”
“Evidently not,” said Daeman. “Back when we thought they were servant-machines, I never saw one eat or drink or get tired, did you?”
Ada said nothing. Those times seemed too remote to think about, even though they had ended less than a year earlier.
“Fifty thousand,” muttered Daeman. “Perhaps there are fifty thousand here now, and more faxing in every day.”
Hannah flew them farther west to find game and fresh meat.
On the fourth day, the Setebos baby in the Pit had grown to the size of a yearling calf—one of their yearling calves, now all slaughtered by voynix, of course, but a calf that was only a pulsating gray brain with a score of pink hands on its belly, yellow eyes, pulsating orifices, and more three-fingered hands leaping out on gray stalks.
Mommy, Mommy, whispered the thing in Ada’s mind, in all their minds. It’s time for me to come out now. This pit is too small and I am too hungry to stay here any longer.
It was early evening, less than an hour from twilight and another long, dark winter night. The group gathered near the Pit. Men and women still tended to stand near only those who had voted as they had on the loan of the sonie. Everyone now carried a flechette weapon, although crossbows were kept close to hand in reserve.
Casman, Kaman, Greogi, and Edide stood over the Pit with their rifles aimed at the large thing in the hole. Others gathered close.
“Hannah,” said Ada, “is the sky-raft fully provisioned?”
“Yes,” said the younger woman. “All of the first trip crates are aboard and still room for ten people on the first trip. We can get fourteen people aboard on every trip after that.”
“And what time are you down to in rehearsing the trip to the island and the unpacking of the crates?” asked Ada.
“Forty-two minutes,” said Laman, rubbing the stumps of his missing fingers on his right hand. “Thirty-five minutes with just people. It takes a few minutes to get people aboard or off.”
“That’s not goo
d enough,” said Ada.
Hannah stepped closer to the fire they kept burning near the Pit. “Ada, the trip to the island takes fifteen minutes each way. The machine can’t fly any faster.”
“The sonie would have been there in less than a minute,” said Loes, one of the angriest of the Ardis survivors. “We could all have been delivered there in less than ten minutes.”
“We don’t have the sonie now,” Ada said. She heard the lack of affect in her own voice. Without meaning to, she glanced to the southwest, down toward the river and the island, but also toward the woods where fifty to sixty thousand voynix waited.
Noman had been right. Even if the entire colony of humans here escaped to the island, the voynix would be on them there in hours—perhaps minutes. Even though the Ardis faxnode was still nonfunctioning—they kept two people there at the pavilion day and night to keep testing it—the voynix were faxing. Somehow, they were faxing. There was nowhere on earth, Ada realized, that they would be free of the killers.
“Let’s get back to making dinner,” she called above the murmuring. Everyone could feel the Setebos spawn’s clammy voice in his or her mind.
Mommy, Daddy, it’s time for me to come out now. Open the grill, Daddy, Mommy, or I will. I’m stronger now. I’m hungry now. I want to come meet you now.
Greogi, Daeman, Hannah, Elian, Boman, Edide, and Ada sat talking late into the night. Above them the equatorial and polar rings whirled silently, turning as they always had. The Big Dipper was low in the north. There was a crescent moon.
“I think tomorrow, first light, we abandon the idea of the island and begin evacuating as many people as possible to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Ada. “We should have done it weeks ago.”
“It would take weeks for this stupid sky-raft to get to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Hannah. “And it may break down again and never get there. Without Noman to fix it, the people on the sky-raft will be stranded.”