Ilium (21 page)

Savi filled his goblet.

14

Mahnmut reset his systems and did a quick damage assessment. Nothing disabling to either his organic or cybernetic components. The explosion had caused rapid depressurization of three forward ballast tanks, but twelve remained intact. He checked internal clocks; he had been unconscious for less than thirty seconds before reset and he was still connected virtually to his submersible across the usual bandwidths.
The Dark Lady
was reporting wild tumbling, some minor hull breach, monitoring-system overloads, hull temperatures above boiling, and a score of other complaints, but there was nothing that demanded Mahnmut’s immediate attention. He rebooted video connections, but all he could see was the red-hot glowing interior of the spacecraft’s hold, the open bay doors, and—through those doors—tumbling starfields.

Orphu?

There was no response on the common band or on any of the tightbeam or maser channels. Not even static.

The airlock was still open. Mahnmut grabbed a personal reaction pack and coils of unbreakable microfilament rope and pulled himself out the airlock doors, fighting the vector forces of the tumbling by grabbing handholds he knew from decades of deep-sea work. On his own hull, he checked that the sub’s payload-bay doors were fully opened, estimated how much room he would need, and then grabbed some of Koros’s carefully folded machines at random and jetted them out of his sub, out of the disintegrating spacecraft, tumbling away through the blobs of molten ship metal and glowing plasma. Mahnmut didn’t know if he was jettisoning the weapons of mass destruction that Koros had been planning to bring to the surface—
on my ship!
thought Mahnmut with the same outrage he’d felt earlier—or if he was jettisoning gear that he would need for survival if he ever reached Mars. At that moment, he didn’t care. He needed the space.

Tying the rope off to brackets on
The Dark Lady’
s hull, Mahnmut jetted out into space, taking care not to collide with the shattered ship-bay doors.

Once outside and a safe hundred meters from the tumbling ship, he rotated to get his first view of the damage.

It was worse than he’d thought. As Orphu had described, the entire bow of the spacecraft was gone—the control room and everything ten meters aft of where the control room had been. Sheared off as if it had never existed. Only a glowing and dissipating cloud of plasma around the bow showed where Koros III and Ri Po had been.

The rest of the ship’s fuselage had cracked and fragmented. Mahnmut could only guess the catastrophic results if the fusion engines, hydrogen tanks, Matloff/Fennelly scoop, and other propulsion devices had not been jettisoned long before this attack. The secondary explosions would certainly have vaporized Orphu and him.

Orphu?
Mahnmut was using radio now as well as tightbeam, but the reflector antennae had been slagged off the hull for the maser relay. There was no response.

Trying to avoid the flying shrapnel, blobs of glowing metal, and the worst of the expanding plasma cloud while keeping slack in the line so that the tumbling wouldn’t fling him around the dying ship, Mahnmut used the reaction thrusters to come up and over the hull of the ship. The tumbling was so fierce now—stars, Mars, stars, Mars—that Mahnmut had to shut down his eyes and use the pack’s radar feed to find his way around the hull.

Orphu was still in his cradle. For a second, Mahnmut was joyous—the radar signature showed his friend intact and in place—but then he activated his eyes and saw the carnage.

The blast that had sheared off the bow had also scorched and fractured the upper hull of the ship all the way back to Orphu’s position and—as the Ionian had reported—had cracked and blackened his heavy carapace for a third of his length. Orphu’s forward manipulators were gone. His forward comm antennae were missing. His eyes were gone. Cracks ran the last three meters of Orphu’s upper shell.

“Orphu!” called Mahnmut on direct tightbeam.

Nothing.

Using every meg of his computational abilities, Mahnmut gauged the vectors involved and jetted over to the upper hull, all ten jets firing in microbursts to adjust his dangerous trajectory, until he was within a meter of the hull. He pulled the k-tool from the pack’s belt and fired a piton into the hull, then looped his line around it, making sure to keep it from getting tangled. He would have to pull free in a minute.

Pulling the line tight, swinging like a pendulum arm, Mahnmut arced aft to Orphu’s cradle—although scorched crater seemed a better description of the indentation in the hull now.

Hanging on to Orphu’s carapace, his short legs swinging wildly above him, Mahnmut slapped a hardline stick-on against his friend’s body just aft of where his eyes had been. “Orphu?”

“Mahnmut?” Orphu’s voice was cracked but strong. Mostly, it was surprised. “Where are you? How are you reaching me? All my comm is down.”

Mahnmut felt the kind of joy that only a few of Shakespeare’s characters ever achieved. “I’m in contact with you. Hardline. I’m going to get you out of here.”

“That’s idiotic!” boomed the Ionian’s voice. “I’m useless. I don’t . . .”

“Shut up,” explained Mahnmut. “I have a line. I need to tie you on. Where . . .”

“There’s a tie-on bracket about two meters aft of my sensor bundle,” said Orphu.

“No, there isn’t.” Mahnmut hated the idea of firing a piton into Orphu’s body, but he would if he had to.

“Well . . .” began Orphu and stopped for a terrible few seconds of silence as the extent of his own injuries obviously sank in. “Aft then. Farthest from the blast. Just above the thruster cluster.”

Mahnmut didn’t tell his friend that the external thrusters were also gone. He kicked back, found the tie-on, and tied the microfilament line with an unbreakable knot. If there was one thing that moravec Mahnmut had in common with the human sailors who had preceded him on Earth’s seas for millennia, it was knowing how to tie a good knot.

“Hang on,” said Mahnmut over the hardline. “I’m going to pull you out. Don’t worry if we lose contact. There are a lot of vector forces right now.”

“This is insane!” cried Orphu his voice still scratchy on the hardline. “There’s no room in
The Dark Lady
and I can’t do you any good if you get me there. I don’t have anything left to hang on with.”

“Quiet,” said Mahnmut, his voice calm. He added, “My friend.”

Mahnmut triggered all the reaction-pack jets, tugging loose the piton line as he did so.

The jets got Orphu up and out of his hull cradle. The tumbling of the ship did the rest, swinging both moravecs a hundred meters out and away from the ship.

Delta-v computations clouding his vision field, Mars and stars still exchanging places every two seconds, Mahnmut let the line go taut and then he fired the thrusters—using up energy at a fearsome rate—matching tumble velocities and reeling himself up the long line to
The Dark Lady.

Orphu’s mass was considerable, its pull made the worse by the tumbling, but the line was unbreakable and so was Mahnmut’s will at the moment. He ratcheted them closer to the open bay of the waiting submersible.

The spacecraft began breaking up from the stresses, pieces of the stern snapping off and flying past Mahnmut where he clung to Orphu’s carapace, two tons of metal missing the smaller moravec’s head by less than five meters. Mahnmut pulled them in.

It was no use. The ship was coming apart around
The Dark Lady,
explosions further rending the hull as trace reaction gases and internal pressurized chambers gave way. Mahnmut would never get to the sub before it was torn apart.

“All right,” muttered Mahnmut. “The mountain has to come to Mohammed.”

“What?” cried Orphu, sounding alarmed for the first time.

Mahnmut had forgotten the hardline was still operative. “Nothing. Hang on.”

“How can I hang on, my friend? My manipulators and hands are all gone. You hang on to
me
.”

“Right,” said Mahnmut and fired every thruster he had, using up the pack’s energy supplies so quickly that he had to go to emergency reserve.

It worked.
The Dark Lady
emerged from the dark ship’s bay only seconds before the belly of the spacecraft began to come apart.

Mahnmut thrusted further away, seeing blobs of molten metal splatter on Orphu’s poor battered carapace. “I’m sorry,” whispered Mahnmut as he used the last of his fuel to tug the tumbling submersible farther from the dying spaceship.

“Sorry for what?” asked Orphu.

“Never mind,” panted Mahnmut. “Tell you later.”

He tugged, shoved, thrust, and generally moravec-hauled the huge Ionian into the almost-empty payload bay. It was better in the darkness of the bay—the wildly spinning stars/planet/stars/planet no longer gave Mahnmut vertigo. He crammed his friend into the main payload niche and activated the adjustable clamps.

Orphu was secure now. It was probable that all three of them—
The Dark Lady
and the two moravecs—were doomed, but at least they’d end their existence together. Mahnmut attached the sub’s comm leads to the hardline port.

“You’re safe for now,” gasped Mahnmut, feeling the organic parts of his body nearing overload. “I’m going to cut my hardline comm now.”

“What . . .” began Orphu but Mahnmut had cut the portable line and pulled himself hand over hand to the payload bay airlock. It still cycled.

With the last of his strength, he pulled himself up the vacuum-filled internal corridor to the enviro-niche, dogged the hatch, but did not pressurize the chamber, connecting to life-support lead instead. O
₂
flowed. Comm hissed static. The ship’s systems reported ongoing but survivable damage.

“Still there?” said Mahnmut.

“Where are you?”

“In my control room.”

“What’s the status, Mahnmut?”

“The ship’s essentially spun itself to bits. The sub’s more or less intact, including the stealth wrapping and the thrusters fore and aft, but I don’t have any idea how to control them.”

“Control them?” Then it obviously dawned on Orphu. “You’re still going to try to enter Mars’ atmosphere?”

“What choice do we have?”

There was a full second or two of silence while Orphu thought about that. Finally, he said, “I agree. Do you think you can fly this thing into the atmosphere?”

“No chance in hell,” said Mahnmut, sounding almost cheerful. “I’m going to download what control software Koros put in and let you fly us in.”

There came that rumbling-sneezing noise over the hardline, although Mahnmut found it very hard to believe that his friend was laughing at this particular moment. “You
have
to be joking. I’m blind—not just eyes and cameras missing, but my whole optical network burned out. I’m a mess. Essentially, I’m a bit of a brain in a broken basket. Tell me you’re joking.”

Mahnmut downloaded the programming the sub’s banks had on the external add-on thrusters, parachutes—the whole cryptic smash. He activated all the sub’s hull cameras but had to look away. The tumbling was as terrible and vertigo-producing as before. Mars filled the view now—polar cap, blue sea, polar cap, blue sea, bit of black space, polar cap—and watching it made Mahnmut sick. “There,” he said as the download ended. “I’ll be your eyes. I’ll give you whatever navigational data the sub can crib from the reaction software. You get us stabilized and fly us in.”

This time there was no mistaking the rumbling laughter. “Sure, why not,” said Orphu. “Hell, the fall alone will kill us.”

The rings of thrusters on
The Dark Lady
began to fire on Orphu’s command.

15

Diomedes, literally driven into battle by war-geared, cloud-cloaked, horse-handling Athena, rushes to attack Ares.

I’ve never seen anything like this. First Aphrodite is wounded by the enhanced Argive, Tydeus’ son, and now the war god himself has been called to single combat with Diomedes.
Aristeia
with a god. Incredible.

Ares, in his usual fashion, had promised Zeus and Athena only this morning that he would help the Greeks and now, spurred on by the taunts of Apollo and his own treacherous nature, he has begun attacking the Argives without quarter. Minutes ago, the god of war slaughtered Periphas—Ochesius’ son, the best fighter the Aetolian contingent of the Greeks had to offer—and is in the act of stripping Periphas naked when he looks up to see the chariot driven by Athena bearing down on him. The goddess herself is hidden now by a stealth cloak of darkness. Ares must know that
some
god or goddess is driving the chariot, but he does not take time to try to see through the stealth cloud; he is too eager to kill Diomedes.

The god strikes first, casting his spear with the accuracy only a god can command. The spear flies up and over the edge of the chariot, straight at Diomedes’ heart, but Athena reaches out from her cloud of darkness and slaps it aside. For an instant, all Ares can do is stare with incredulity as his god-wrought spear goes flying off to embed its tungsten-alloy tip in rocky soil.

Now, as the chariot clatters by, it is Diomedes’ turn; he leans far out and lunges with his own energy-enhanced bronze spear. Pallas Athena’s shared sheath of Planck field allows the human weapon to penetrate first the war god’s forcefield, then the war god’s ornate belt, then the war god’s divine bowels.

Ares’ scream of pain, when it comes, makes Aphrodite’s earlier world-shaking howl seem a whisper. I remember that Homer described this noise as “a shriek, roaring, thundering loud as nine, ten thousand combat soldiers . . . when massive armies clash.” That, it turns out, is an understatement. For the second time this bloody day, both armies freeze in the grim business of their slaughter out of mortal fear at such divine noise. Even noble Hector, intent now on nothing more noble than hacking his way through Argive flesh to murder the retreating Odysseus, halts his assault and turns his head toward the patch of bloody ground where Ares has been wounded.

Diomedes jumps from his Athena-driven chariot to finish the job on Ares, but the war god, still writhing in divine pain, is shifting, growing, changing, losing human form. The air around Diomedes and the other milling Greeks and Trojans fighting over Periphas’ now-forgotten corpse is suddenly filled with dirt, debris, bits of cloth and leather, as Ares abandons his god-human shape and becomes . . . something else. Where the tall god Ares had stood a minute before, now rises a twisting, cyclone of black plasma-energy, its static electricity discharging in random lightning bolts which strike Argive and Trojan alike.

Diomedes halts his attack and cringes back, his bloodlust temporarily blunted by the cyclone’s fury.

Then Ares is gone, QTing away with his bowels held in only by his own ichor-bloodied hands, and the battlefield remains almost as frozen as if the gods have stopped time again. But no—the birds still fly, dust still settles, the air still moves. This motionlessness now is awe; nothing more, nothing less.

“Have you ever seen anything like that, Hockenberry?” Nightenhelser’s voice startles me. I’d forgotten he was there.

“No,” I say. We stand in silence a moment until the mortal battle begins anew, until Athena’s cloaked form disappears from Diomedes’ charging chariot, and then I begin to walk away from the other scholic. “I’m going to morph and see how the royal family on the walls of Ilium is taking this,” I tell Nightenhelser before disappearing from his sight.

I morph all right, but it is only a ruse to cover my real disappearance. Hidden by dust and confusion in the Trojan ranks, I lift Death’s Helmet over my head and, activating the medallion, QT after the wounded Ares, following his quantum trail through twisted space to Olympos.

I emerge from quantum shift not on the grassy swards of Olympos nor in the Hall of the Gods, but in some vast space that looks more like the control room of a late Twentieth Century medical clinic than any structure or interior space I’ve seen on Olympos. There are clusters of gods and other creatures visible in the sterile-looking space, and for half a minute after phase-shifting I hold my breath—yet again—heart pounding as I wait to see if these gods and their minions are able to detect my presence.

Evidently not.

Ares is on some sort of medical examination table with three humanoid but not-quite-human entities or constructs hovering around him and offering care. The creatures may be robots—although sleeker and more organic-looking and
alien
in appearance than any robots dreamt of in my day—and I see that one has started an IV drip while another is passing a glowing ultraviolet ray over Ares’ torn belly.

The god of war is still holding his guts in with his bloodied hands. Ares looks pained and frightened and angry. He looks, in other words, human.

Along the long white wall, giant vats rise twenty feet or more and are filled with a bubbling violet fluid, various umbilicals and filaments, and . . . gods: tall, tanned, perfect human forms in various stages of what could be either reconstruction or decomposition. I see open organ cavities, white bone, striated red flesh, the sickening flash of bare skull. I don’t recognize the other god-forms, but in the next-to-closest tank floats Aphrodite, naked, eyes closed, hair floating, body perfect except for her perfect wrist and hand almost severed from her perfect arm. A roiling cluster of green worms is spiraling around the ligaments and tendons and bones there, either devouring or suturing or both. I look away.

Zeus enters the long room and sweeps across the space between medical monitors with no dials, past robots wrapped in what looks to be synthetic flesh, between gods who bow their heads and stand back to honor him. For an instant, the great god’s head swivels my way, the startling eyes under gray brows look directly into me, and I know I have been discovered.

I wait for the Zeus-boom and lightning blast. None comes. Zeus turns away—is he smiling?—and stops in front of Ares, who still sits hunched on the examination table between hovering machines and flesh-tending robotic things.

Zeus stands in front of the wounded god with his arms crossed, toga draped, head lowered, all trimmed gray beard and untrimmed gray brows, his bare chest radiating bronze light and strength, his expression fierce—more irritated school principal than concerned father, I would say.

Ares speaks first. “Father Zeus, doesn’t it infuriate you to see such human violence, such bloody work? We’re the everlasting, immortal gods, but god
damn,
we suffer injuries and insults—thanks to our own divine arguments and conflicting wills—every time we show these stinking mortals a bit of kindness. And it’s bad enough we have to fight these nano-crazed mortal sons of bitches, Lord Zeus, but we also have to fight
you
.”

Ares takes a breath, grimaces in pain, and waits. Zeus says nothing, but continues to glower as if pondering the war god’s words.

“And
Athena,
” gasps the injured god. “You’ve let that girl go too far, O Son of Kronos. Ever since you gave birth to her from your own head—that child of
chaos
and destruction—you’ve always let her have her way, never blocked her reckless will. And now she’s turned the mortal Diomedes into one of her weapons, spurred him on to ravage against us gods.”

Ares is excited and furious now. Spittle flies. I can still see the blue-gray coils of his intestines in what appears to be golden blood.

“First she incited that . . . that . . .
mortal
to lunge at Aphrodite, stabbing her wrist, spilling her divine blood. The Healer’s attendants tell me that she’ll be in the vat for a full day, recovering. Then Athena spurs on Diomedes to charge me—
me, the god of war
—and his nano-augmented body was fast enough that he would have had me in the vats myself for days or weeks, perhaps even to need resurrection, if I hadn’t been faster still. If he had taken my heart on his spear point, I’d still be writhing among the human corpses down there, feeling more pain than I do, trying to soldier on but being beaten down by mere mortal bronze, weak as some breathless ghost from our old Earth days and . . .”

“
ENOUGH!!
” bellows Zeus and not only stops Ares’ diatribe, but freezes every god and robot in the place. “I’ll hear no more whining prattle from you, Ares, you lying, two-faced, treacherous sparrowfart, you miserable excuse for a man, much less for a god.”

Ares blinks at this, opens his mouth, but—wisely, I think—does not choose to interrupt.

“Listen to you whining and wimpering here from your little cut,” sneers Zeus, unfolding his mighty arms and holding one giant hand out as if preparing to will the war god out of existence with a command. “You—I hate you most of all the maggots chosen to become gods when it came time for our Change, you miserable hypocrite. You coward-hearted lover of death and grim battles and the bloody grist-mill of war. You have your mother’s meanness, Ares,
and
her rage—I confess that I can barely keep Hera in her place, especially when she decides on some little pet project close to her heart, such as slaughtering the Achaeans to a man.”

Ares doubles over as if Zeus’s words are hurting him, but I suspect the cause of pain is really the hovering spherical robot-thing stitching the lining of his abdomen shut with what looks to be an industrial-strength portable sewing machine.

Zeus ignores the ministrations of the medics and paces back and forth, coming within two yards of me before turning and walking back to stand in front of the hunched and grimacing Ares.

“I hope it’s your mother’s promptings, Hera’s urgings, that have made you suffer like this,
O God of War
. . .” I can hear the godly sarcasm in Zeus’s voice. “I’d just as soon have you die . . .”

Ares looks up in real shock and terror now.

Zeus laughs at the war god’s expression. “You didn’t know that we can die? Die beyond vat reconstruction or recom resurrection? We can, my son, we can.”

Ares looks down in confusion. The machine is almost finished tucking the divine bowels back in and stitching up the last of the muscle and flesh.

“Healer!” booms Zeus and something tall and very not-human emerges from behind the bubbling vats. The thing is more centipede than machine, with multiple arms, each with multiple joints, and fly-like red eyes set fifteen feet high on its segmented body. Straps and devices and odd organic bits hang from harnesses strung around the Healer’s giant bug-body.

“You are still my son,” Zeus says to the grimacing war god. The Lord of Thunder’s voice is softer now. “You are my son as I am Kronos’s son. To me your mother bore you.”

Ares reaches up his bloodied hand as if to grasp Zeus’s forearm, but the older god ignores the gesture. “But trust me, Ares. If you had sprung from the seed of another god and still grown into such a shit-eating disappointment, believe me when I say that I’d long since have dropped you into that deep, dark pit below where the Titans writhe to this day.”

Zeus waves the Healer forward and then turns and strides out of the hall.

I step back—so do the other gods in attendance—as the giant Healer lifts Ares in five of its arms, carries him to the empty tank, attaches various fibers and tentacles and umbilicals, and drops him into the bubbling violet liquid. As soon as his face is under the surface, Ares closes his eyes and the green worms flock out of apertures in the glass and go to work on the war god’s ravaged gut.

I decide it’s time to leave.

I am learning the rhythm of quantum teleportation with this medallion device. Clearly picture the place you want to go, and the device QT’s you there. I clearly picture my college campus in Indiana in the last years of the Twentieth Century. The device does nothing. Sighing once, I picture the scholic dormitory at the base of Olympos.

The medallion phase-shifts me there at once. I blink into existence—although not visibility because of the Hades Helmet—just outside the red steps in front of the green doors of the red-stone barracks building.

It’s been a damned long day and all I want to do is find my bunk, get out of all this gear, and take a nap. Let Nightenhelser report to the Muse.

As if my thought had summoned her, I see the Muse flick into existence just two yards from me and swing aside the barracks’ doors. I’m amazed. The Muse has never come to the barracks before; we always ride the crystal elevator to her.

Secure in whatever Hades-technology conceals me, I follow her into the common room.

“Hockenberry!” she yells in her powerful goddess voice.

A younger scholic named Blix, some Homer scholar from the Twenty-second Century who has been assigned the night shift at Ilium, comes from his first-floor room, knuckling his eyes and looking stunned.

“Where is Hockenberry?” demands my Muse.