by Dan Simmons
It would make no difference to Mahnmut, Orphu, and the other moravecs, even those on the Queen Mab. The dropship moravecs would be spaghettified almost instantaneously, their molecules stretched toward the center of the earth with the mini-hole as it fell, then farther, elasticating—was that a word? Mahnmut tiredly wondered—back through themselves as the black hole cut another swatch back up through the molten, spinning core of the planet.
Mahnmut closed his virtual eyes and concentrated on breathing, on feeling the dropship accelerate smoothly but constantly as it climbed. It was as if they were on a smooth, glass ramp rising to the heavens. Suma IV was good.
The sky changed from afternoon blue to vacuum black. The horizon bent like an archer’s bow. The stars seemed to explode into sight.
Mahnmut activated his vision and watched out the cockpit window as well as via the dropship’s imager feed via the umbilical connection at his jumpseat station.
They weren’t climbing to the Queen Mab, that was obvious. Suma IV leveled out the dropship at an altitude of not more than three hundred kilometers—barely above the atmosphere—and tapped thrusters to roll the Earth into the overhead cockpit windows so that full sunlight fell on the ship’s cargo bay doors. The rings and the Mab were more than thirty thousand kilometers higher and the moravec atomic spacecraft was on the opposite side of the Earth at the moment.
Mahnmut shut off the virtual feed for a second—feeling the zero-g as a physical release from the gravity of their work the last eighteen hours—and looked up through the clear overheads at the terminator moving across what had once been Europe, at the blue waters and white cloud masses of the Atlantic Ocean—the breach-gap wasn’t even a thin line from this altitude or angle—and not for the first time in the last eighteen hours, Mahnmut the moravec wondered how a living species gifted with such a beautiful homeworld could arm a submarine—themselves, any machine—with such weapons of total mindless destruction. What in any mental universe could seem worth the murder of millions, much less the destruction of an entire planet?
Mahnmut knew that they were not out of harm’s way yet. For all technical purposes, they might as well still be at the bottom of the ocean for all the good these few hundred kilometers did them. If any one of the black holes activated now, tripping the others into singularity, the ping-pong ripping-through-the-heart-of-Earth end of things would be just as certain, just as sure. Being in free fall was not the same as being out of the Earth’s gravitational field. The warheads would have to be far away—far beyond the Moon’s orbit certainly, since it was obvious the Earth’s gravity still reigned there—millions of kilometers away before the threat to Earth was over. The only difference in outcome at this measly altitude, Mahnmut knew, would be that the moravecs’ spaghettification ratio might grow a few percent in the initial minutes.
A matte-black spacecraft uncloaked—unstealthed, deforcefielded, came out of hiding—damn, Mahnmut had no word for it—appeared less than five kilometers from them on the sunward side. The ship was obviously of moravec design, but of a more advanced design than any spacecraft Mahnmut had ever seen. If the Queen Mab had seemed like some artifact from the Earth’s Lost Era Twentieth Century, this just-appeared spacecraft seemed centuries ahead of everything the moravecs had now. Somehow the black shape succeeded in seeming both stubby and deadly sleek, both simple and impossibly complicated in its fractalbatwing geometries, and there was no doubt whatsoever in Mahnmut’s mind that the ship carried awesome weapons.
He wondered for a few seconds if the Prime Integrators were actually going to risk the loss of one of their stealthed warships but…no…even as he wondered, Mahnmut saw an opening morph into being in the warship’s curved belly and a long witch’s broom of a device peroxided itself out into space, rotated along its own axis, lined up with the drop-ship, and used secondary thrusters on either side of an absurdly oversized engine bell to shove itself silently in their direction.
Orphu tightbeamed him. Why are we surprised? The Prime Integrators have had more than eighteen hours to come up with something and we moravecs have always bred good engineers.
Mahnmut had to agree. As the broomstick thrusted closer, slowing and rotating again as it came, putting on the brakes now, keeping the thrust bursts far away from the dropship’s belly, Mahnmut could see that the thing was probably about sixty meters long along its axis with a small AI brain node hitched in the center of mass like a saddle on a skinny nag, lots of silver manipulators and heavy-metal clamps, and one whomping big high-thrust engine just forward of that huge engine bell, along with scores of tiny thruster quads.
“I’m releasing the submersible now,” said Suma IV on the common band.
Mahnmut watched from the dropship hull cameras as the long cargo bays opened and The Dark Lady was floated gently out, propelled by the tiniest puff of gas. His beloved submersible began to rotate very slowly and since its own stabilization system had been shut off, she didn’t even try to stabilize herself. Mahnmut thought that he had never seen anything so out of her element—again—as the Lady was here in space, three hundred kilometers above the bright blue evening ocean of Earth.
The broomstick robot ship didn’t allow the submersible to tumble for long. The thing thrusted carefully, matched velocities perfectly, pulled The Dark Lady close to it with manipulator arms moving as gently as a lover after a long and tentative absence from his beloved, and then latched solid clamps in place—clamps built to lock into the submersible’s docking receptacles and various vents. Again with a sort of loving care, the broomstick AI—or the moravec on the warship currently controlling it—extruded a bright gold-foil molecular blanket and carefully, carefully folded the crinkling thing around the entire sub. The engineers didn’t want changes in temperature to trigger the black holes.
Quad thrusters fired and the praying mantis form of the robot ship and the foil-blanketed bulk of The Dark Lady moved away from the drop-ship, the robot aligning along its axis so that its engine bell was aimed down, toward the blue sea and white clouds and visibly moving terminator crossing Europe.
“What are they going to do about the little laser leukocytes?” Orphu of Io asked on the common band.
Mahnmut had wondered that himself—how were they going to keep the cleanup robotic laser attackers from triggering the warheads—but it hadn’t been his problem so he hadn’t tried to work it out in the past eighteen hours.
“The Valkyrie, the Indomitable, and the Nimitz are going to accompany the robot ship and destroy any approaching leukocytes,” said Suma IV. “While our warships remain stealthed, of course.”
Orphu actually laughed aloud on the common band. “Valkyrie, Indomitable, and Nimitz?” he rumbled. “My, we peaceloving moravecs are getting scarier by the minute, aren’t we.”
No one answered. To break the silence, Mahnmut said, “Which one is that…no, wait, it’s gone.” The matte-black fractal bat had restealthed, its presence not even suggested by a blotted-out patch of starfield or ringfield.
“That was the Valkyrie,” said Suma IV. “Ten seconds.”
No one counted down aloud. Everyone, Mahnmut was sure, was counting silently.
At zero, the high-thrust engine bell was illuminated by the slightest blue glow, reminiscent to Mahnmut of the Cerenkov-radiation glow of the warhead nacelles. The broomstick-mantis began to move, began to climb—with agonizing slowness. But Mahnmut knew that anything under constant thrust long enough would achieve a horrific velocity soon enough, even while climbing up out of Earth’s gravity well, and he also knew that the robot ship would be increasing that thrust as it climbed. Probably by the time the ship and the dead, thermal-blanket-wrapped hulk of The Dark Lady reached the empty orbit of Earth’s moon, the package would have achieved escape velocity. Even if the black holes activated after that point, the singularities would be a hazard in space, no longer the death of Earth.
The robot ship soon disappeared against the moving ringfield. Mahnmut saw not the slightest hint of fusion or ion exha
usts from the three stealthed moravec spacecraft that were presumably escorting the robot.
Suma IV closed the cargo bay doors. “All right, everyone, please listen up,” said the pilot. “Some strange things have been going on while our two friends have been busy under the surface of the water-ocean down there. We need to get back to the Queen Mab.”
“What happened to our reconnaissance mission…” began Mahnmut.
“You can download the recorded feed as we climb,” interrupted Suma IV. “But right now the prime integrators want us back aboard. The Mab is leaving for a while…pulling back to lunar orbit at least.”
“No,” said Orphu of Io.
The syllable seemed to echo on the comm line like the single tolling of some huge bell.
“No?” said Suma IV. “Those are our orders.”
“We need to go back down to that Atlantic gap, breach, whatever we call it,” said Orphu. “We need to go back down now.”
“You need to shut up and hang on,” said the big Ganymedan at the controls. “I’m taking the dropship back to the Mab as ordered.”
“Look at the images you shot from ten thousand meters,” said Orphu and fed the image to everyone aboard via their umbilicaled Internet.
Mahnmut looked. It was the same picture he’d looked at before they began work on cutting the warheads free: the startling gap in the ocean, the crumbled bow of the submarine emerging from the north wall of that gap, a small debris field.
“I’m blind on optic frequencies,” said Orphu, “but I kept manipulating the accompanying radar imagery and something’s odd there. Here’s the best magnification and clarification I could get on the visual photograph. You tell me if there’s something there that deserves closer examination.”
“I’ll tell you right now that nothing we see there will make me fly the dropship back there,” Suma IV said flatly. “You two haven’t got the word yet, but the asteroid isle—that huge asteroid where we dropped Odysseus off—is leaving. It’s already changed its axis and aligned itself, and fusion thrusters are igniting as we speak. And your friend Odysseus is dead. And more than a million satellites in the polar and equatorial rings—mass accumulators, the fax-teleport devices, other things—are all coming alive again. We’re leaving.”
“LOOK AT THE GODDAMNED PHOTOGRAPHS,” bellowed Orphu of Io.
All the moravecs on board, even those without ears, tried to put their hands over their ears.
Mahnmut looked at the next photograph in the digital series. It had not only been magnified far beyond their original view, but the pixels cleared up.
“That’s some sort of backpack sitting there on the dry floor of the breach,” said Mahnmut. “And next to it…”
“A pistol,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “A gunpowder slug-thrower, if my guess is correct.”
“And that looks like a human body lying next to the pack,” said one of the black-chitinous troopers. “Something that’s been dead a long time—all mummified and flattened.”
“No,” said Orphu. “I checked the best radar imagery. That’s not a human body, just a human thermskin.”
“So?” said Suma IV from his command chair at the controls. “The submarine wreck expelled one of its passengers or some of a human’s belongings. They’re part of the debris field.”
Orphu snorted loudly. “And it’s all still there after twenty-five hundred standard years? I doubt it, Suma. Look at the pistol. No rust. Look at the rucksack. No rot. That part of the breach-gap is open to the elements—including sunlight and wind—but this stuff hasn’t degraded.”
“It proves nothing,” said Suma IV as he tapped in the rendezvous coordinates for the Queen Mab. Thrusters kicked the dropship into proper alignment for the burn and climb. “Sometime in the past few years some old-style human wandered out there to die. We have more important things to deal with right now.”
“Look in the sand,” said Orphu.
“What?” said their pilot.
“Look at the fifth image I blew up. In the sand. I can’t see it, but the radar was good down to three millimeters. What do you see there—with your eyes?”
“A footprint,” said Mahnmut. “A footprint of a bare human foot. Several footprints. All distinct in the muddy soil and soft sand. All leading west. Rain would wipe away those prints in a few days. Some human has been there in the last forty-eight hours or less—perhaps even while we were working on recovering the warheads.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Suma IV. “Our orders are to return to the Queen Mab and we’re going to…”
“Take the dropship back down to the Atlantic Breach,” commanded Prime Integrator Asteague/Che from thirty thousand kilometers higher on the opposite side of the Earth. “Our review of imagery we took hastily on the last orbit shows what may be the body of a human being in the Breach approximately twenty-three kilometers to the west of the submarine wreckage. Go and recover it at once.”
85
I flick into solidity and realize that I’ve QT’d myself into Helen of Troy’s private bathing chambers deep within the palace she used to share with her dead husband, Paris, and which she now shares with her former father-in-law, King Priam. I know I have only a few minutes in which to act, but I don’t know what to do.
Slave girls and serving women shriek as I stride from room to room calling Helen’s name. I hear the servants calling for the guards and realize that I may have to QT away quickly if I don’t want to end up on the end of a Trojan spear. Then I see a familiar face in the next chamber. It’s Hypsipyle, the slave woman from Lesbos whom Andromache had used as a personal minder for crazy Cassandra. This Hypsipyle might know where Helen is, since Helen and Andromache were very close the last time I saw them. And at least this slave isn’t running away or calling for the guards.
“Do you know where Helen is?” I ask as I approach the heavyset woman. Her blunt face is as expressionless as a gourd.
As if in answer, Hypsipyle rears back and kicks me in the gonads. I levitate, grab myself, fall to the tiled floor, roll around in agony, and squeak.
She aims another kick that would take my head off if I don’t dodge it, so I try to dodge, take the kick on the shoulder, and end up rolling into the corner, not even able to squeak now, my left shoulder and arm numb all the way down to the fingertips.
I struggle to my feet, hunched over, as the huge woman approaches with her eye full of business.
QT somewhere, idiot, I advise myself.
Where?
Anywhere but here!
Hypsipyle grabs me by my tunic front, tears the tunic, and aims a ham-fisted blow at my face. I raise my forearms to block the blow and the impact of her big-knuckled fist almost breaks the radius and ulna in both arms. I bounce off the wall and she grabs me by the shirt again and punches me in the belly.
Suddenly I’m on my knees again, retching, trying to clutch both belly and balls, no longer having enough wind in me even to manage a squeak.
Hypsipyle kicks me in the ribs, breaking at least one, and I roll to my side. I can hear the slap of the guards’ sandals as they rush up the main staircase.
Now I remember. The last time I saw Hypsipyle she was protecting Helen and I sucker-punched her to drag Helen away with me.
The slave-woman lifts me like a rag doll and slaps me—first fore-hand, then backhand, then forehand again. I feel teeth loosen and find myself feeling glad that I’m not wearing the reading glasses I used to have to wear.
Jesus Christ, Hockenberry, rages part of my mind. You just watched Achilles kill Zeus-Who-Drives-the-Storm-Clouds in single combat, and here you are getting the shit kicked out of you by one lousy Lesbian.
The guards burst into the room, spearpoints raised toward me. Hypsipyle turns toward them, still holding my bunched tunic in one of her huge hands, the tops of my feet scraping the floor, and holds me out, offering me to their spears.
I QT the two of us to the top of the great wall.
A blast of sunlight around us. Trojan warriors
yards away exclaiming and leaping back. Hypsipyle is so astonished at this instantaneous change of place that she drops me.
I use the few seconds of her confusion I have left to kick her heavy legs out from under her. She scrambles to all fours, but—still on my back—I pull back my legs, coil them, and kick her clean off the open rampart into the city below.
That’ll teach you, you great muscled cow, teach you not to mess with Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D. in Classical Literature…
I get to my feet, dust myself off, and look down from the rampart. The great muscled cow has landed on the canvas roof of a marketplace stall backed to the wall, has torn through the canvas, landed again in a heap of what look to be potatoes, and is currently running toward the stairs near the Scaean Gate to scramble back up to where I wait.
Shit.
I run along the rampart toward where I now see Helen standing with the other members of the royal family on the broad reviewing area of the wall, near Athena’s Temple. Everyone’s attention is firmly fixed on the battle on the beach—my Achaeans’ doomed last stand, obviously in its last stages now—so no one interdicts me before I’m grabbing Helen by her beautiful white arm.
“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she says, marveling. “What is it? Why do you…”
“We’ve got to get everyone out of the city!” I gasp. “Now! Right now!”
Helen shakes her head. Guards have whirled and gone for their spears or swords, but Helen waves them away. “Hock-en-bear-eee…it is wonderful…we are winning…the Argives fall like wheat before our scythe…any minute now Noble Hector will…”
“We have to get everyone out of the buildings, off the wall, out of the city!” I shout.