“An orbital linear accelerator with a wormhole collector at its snout,” said Asteague/Che. “Notice that someone—or something—on the asteroid city has sent masered commands to this unmanned linear accelerator, overriding countless safety protocols, and is driving it right toward the asteroid.”
“Why?” asked Orphu.
No one answered. The five moravecs watched and Orphu listened as the long, girdered orbital machine continued accelerating until it crashed into the asteroid island. Asteague/Che slowed the recording. The glowing towers and domes exploded and flew apart in extreme slow motion, then the asteroid itself broke up as the wormhole accumulator at the end of the linear accelerator exploded with the force of countless hydrogen bombs. There came a final series of slow-motion, silent explosions as the fuel tanks, thrusters, and main drive engines of the linear accelerator ignited themseves.
“Now watch,” said Suma IV.
A second telescopic view, then a radar plot, joined the holographic explosions. Mahnmut tightbeamed a description of the blaze of thruster tails from throughout the plane of the equatorial orbital ring as dozens, then hundreds of small spacecraft hurried toward the exploding orbital asteroid.
“What’s the scale on those?” asked Orphu.
“They’re each about six meters long by three meters wide,” said Cho Li.
“Unmanned,” said Orphu. “Moravecs?”
“More like the servitors the humans used centuries ago,” said Asteague/Che. “Simple AI’s with one purpose, as you will see.”
Mahnmut saw. And he described what he saw to Orphu. The hundreds, then thousands of tiny devices rushing toward the expanding asteroid and accelerator debris field were little more than high-powered lasers each with a brain and aiming device. The recording fast-forwarded through the next hours with the servitor-lasers scooting through, under, and over the debris field, zapping every piece of asteroid or accelerator that posed a serious threat of surviving reentry through the Earth’s atmosphere.
“The post-humans weren’t fools,” said Asteague/Che. “At least when it came to engineering. The mass they accumulated in the two rings they built around Earth, if gathered together, would build a sizeable fraction of another Luna—more than a million separate objects, some like the one that hailed us, almost as massive as Phobos. But they had near foolproof failsafes for keeping them in orbit and a defense in depth if they threatened to fall—these high-boost laser hornets that break up any debris are the last line of that defense. Meteors are still falling on Earth more than eight standard months later, but there have been no catastrophic impacts.”
“Orbital leukocytes,” said Orphu of Io.
“Precisely,” said the Prime Integrator of the Five Moons Consortium.
“I understand,” Mahnmut said at last. “You’re afraid that if we use the dropship carrying The Dark Lady the way we planned, these little robot leukocytes will scurry out and zap us as well.”
“The mass of the dropship and your submersible combined would be a threat to Earth,” agreed Asteague/Che. “We watched the…leukocytes, as Orphu put it…laser to plasma or boost uphill much smaller pieces of the destroyed asteroid.”
Mahnmut shook his metal-and-plastic head. “I don’t get it. You’ve had this recording and this knowledge for more than eight months, yet you hauled the Lady and us all this way…what’s changed?”
General Beh bin Adee pointed to something in the rerunning holo recording of the asteroid breakup.
The image zoomed. The computers enhanced the grainy, pixilated image.
What? tightbeamed Orphu.
Mahnmut described the enhanced image. There in the midst of all the explosions and zapped debris was a small craft with three human figures lying prone in what appeared to be an open cockpit. Only the slight shimmer of a forcefield showed why the three were not dying in a vacuum.
“What is that thing?” asked Mahnmut after he had described it to Orphu.
It was Orphu who answered. “An ancient flying vehicle used by both old-style humans and post-humans millennia ago. It was called an AFV—All Function Vehicle—or sometimes they just called it a sonie. The post-humans used them to shuttle to and from the rings.”
The recording sped up, paused, sped up again. Mahnmut described to Orphu the image of the sonie twisting and turning as segments of the asteroid exploded—were lasered—all around it.
The holo showed the trajectory of the sonie as it entered the atmosphere, spiraled across the center of North America, and landed in a region below one of the Great Lakes.
“That was one of our destinations,” said Asteague/Che. He tapped some icons and telescopic still images appeared of a large human home on a hill. The huge house was surrounded by outbuildings and what looked to be a defensive wooden wall. Human beings—or what appeared to be human beings—were visible near the walls and house. Several dozen could be seen in the still photograph.
“That was one week ago as we began decelerating,” said General Beh bin Adee. “These were taken yesterday.”
Same telescopic view, but now the house and wall were in ruins, burned. Corpses were visible scattered across a charred landscape.
“I don’t understand,” said Mahnmut. “It looks as if the humans are being massacred there where the sonie landed eight months ago. Who or what killed them?”
Beh bin Adee brought up an another telescope image, then magnified it. Scores of non-human bipeds were visible between bare branches of trees. The things were a dull silver-gray, essentially headless, with a dark hump. The arms and legs were articulated wrong to be either human or known moravecs.
“What are those?” asked Mahnmut. “Servitors of some kind? Robots?”
“We don’t know,” said Asteague/Che. “But these creatures are killing old-style human beings in their small communities all over Earth.”
Mahnmut said, “This is terrible but what does it have to do with canceling our mission?”
“I understand,” said Orphu of Io. “The issue is how do you get to the surface to see what’s going on. And the question is—why didn’t the laser leukocytes fire on the sonie in the first place? It was large enough that it might survive reentry and pose a threat to those on the ground. Why was it spared?”
Mahnmut thought for several seconds. “There were humans on board,” he said at last.
“Or post-humans,” said Asteague/Che. “The resolution isn’t fine enough for us to tell which.”
“The leukocytes allow a ship with human or post-human life aboard to pass into the atmosphere,” Mahnmut said slowly. “You’ve known this for more than eight months. That’s why you had me kidnap Odysseus for this mission.”
“Yes,” said Suma IV. “The human was going down to Earth with us. His human DNA was to be our passkey.”
“But now the voice from the other orbital isle is demanding that we deliver Odysseus to her or it,” said Orphu with a deep rumble that may have signified irony or humor or indigestion.
“Yes,” said Asteague/Che. “We have no idea if our dropship and your submersible will be allowed to enter Earth’s atmosphere if there is no human life on board.”
“We can always just ignore the invitation from the asteroid-city in the polar ring,” said Mahnmut. “Bring Odysseus down to Earth with us, maybe send him back up in the dropship…” He thought another few seconds. “No, that won’t work. Odds are that the asteroid-city will fire on us if the Queen Mab doesn’t rendezvous as requested.”
“Yes, it seems a real possibility,” said Asteague/Che. “This imperative to deliver Odysseus to the orbital city and the views of a massacre of humans on Earth by non-human creatures are new factors since we planned your dropship excursion.”
“Too bad Dr. Hockenberry QT’d away on us,” said Mahnmut. “His DNA may have been rebuilt by the Olympian gods or whomever, but it probably would have gotten us through the orbital leukocytes.”
“We have a little less than eleven hours to decide,” said Asteague/Che. “At that point w
e’ll be rendezvousing with the orbital city in the polar ring and it will be too late to deploy the dropship and submersible. I suggest we reconvene here in two hours and make a final decision.”
As the two stepped and repellored into the cargo elevator, Orphu of Io set one of his larger manipulator pads on Mahnmut’s shoulder.
Well, Stanley, sent the Ionian, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.
46
Harman experienced the attack on Ardis Hall in real time.
The turin-cloth experience—seeing, hearing, watching from the eyes of some unseen other—had always been a dramatic but irrelevant entertainment for him before this. Now it was a living hell. Instead of the absurd and seemingly fictional Trojan War, it was an attack on Ardis that Harman felt—knew—was real, either happening simultaneously to his viewing of it or very recently recorded.
Harman sat under the cloth, lost to the real world, for more than six hours. He watched from the time the voynix attacked a little after midnight until just before sunrise, when Ardis was ablaze and the sonie flew away to the north after his wounded, bleeding, unconscious, beloved Ada had been dragged aboard like a sack of suet.
Harman was surprised to see Petyr there at Ardis with the sonie—where were Hannah and Odysseus?—and he cried aloud in pain when he watched as Petyr was struck by a voynix-thrown rock and fell to his death. So many of his Ardis friends dead or dying—young Peaen falling, beautiful Emme having her arm torn off by a voynix and then burning to death in a ditch with Reman, Salas dead, Laman struck down. The weapons Petyr had brought from the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu had not turned the tide against the rampaging voynix.
Harman moaned under the blood-red turin cloth.
Six hours after he activated the microcircuit embroidery, the turin images ended and Harman rose and flung the cloth from him.
The magus was gone. Harman went into the small bathing room, used the strange toilet, flushed it with the porcelain handle on the brass chain, splashed water on his face and then drank prodigously, gulping handfuls of tap water. He came back out and searched the two-story cablecar-structure.
“Prospero! PROSPERO!!” His bellow echoed in the metal structure.
On the second floor, Harman threw open the doors to the balcony and stepped out. He jumped to the rungs—indifferent to the long fall beneath him—and climbed quickly to the roof of the moving, rising car.
The air was freezing. He’d turined away the night and a cold, gold sun was just rising to his right. The cables stretched away due north and they were rising. Harman stood at the edge of the roof and looked straight down, realizing that both the cablecar and the eiffelbahn must have been rising—climbing in altitude—for hours. He’d left the jungle and the plains behind in the night and climbed first into foothills and now into real mountains.
“Prospero!!!!” Harman’s shout echoed from the rocks hundreds of feet below.
He stood atop the cablecar until the sun was two handspans above the horizon, but no warmth came with the rising sun. Harman realized he was freezing. The eiffelbahn was carrying him into a region of ice, rock, and sky—all green and growing things had been left behind. He looked over the edge and saw a huge river of ice—he knew the word from his sigling, glacier—winding like a white serpent between rock and ice peaks, the sunlight blinding from it, the great white mass wrinkled with black fissures and pocked with rocks and boulders it was carrying downhill.
Ice fell from the cables above him. The turning wheels took on a new, cold hum. Harman saw that ice had formed on the roof of the rocking car, lined the rungs going down the outside wall, gleamed on the cables themselves. Crawling to the edge, hands aching, body shaking, he made his way carefully down the rung ladder, swung to the ice-encrusted balcony, and staggered into the heated room.
There was a fire in the iron fireplace. Prospero stood there, warming his hands.
Harman stood by the ice-latticed doorpanes for several minutes, shaking as much from rage as from the cold. He resisted the urge to rush the magus. Time was precious; he did not want to wake up on the floor ten minutes from now.
“Lord Prospero,” he said at last, forcing his voice to be sweet with reason, “whatever you want me to do, I will agree to do it. Whatever you want me to become, I agree to become—or to try my best to do it. I swear this to you on the life of my unborn child. But please allow me to return to Ardis now—my wife is injured, she may be dying. She needs me.”
“No,” said Prospero.
Harman ran at the old man. He would beat the fucking old fool’s bald head in with his own walking staff. He would…
This time Harman did not lose consciousness. The high voltage threw him back across the room, bounced him off the strange sofa, sent him falling to his hands and knees on the elaborate carpet. His vision still blinded by red circles, Harman growled and rose again.
“Next time I will burn your right leg off,” the magus said in a flat, cold, completely convincing tone. “If you ever get home to your woman, you’ll do so hopping.”
Harman stopped. “Tell me what to do,” he whispered.
“Sit down…no, there at the table where you can see outside.”
Harman sat at the table. The sunlight was very bright as it reflected from vertical ice walls and the rising glacier; much of the ice had melted from the glass panes. The mountains were growing taller—a profusion of the tallest peaks Harman had ever seen, much more dramatic than the mountains near the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. The cablecar was following a high ridgeline, a glacier dropping farther and farther below to their left. At that moment the car rumbled through another eiffelbahn tower and Harman had to grab the table as the two-story car rocked, bounced, ground against ice, and then continued creaking upward.
The tower fell behind. Harman leaned against the cold glass to watch it recede—this tower was not black like the others, but resplendently silver, gleaming in the sunlight, its iron arches and girders standing out like a spider’s web in morning dew. Ice, thought Harman. He looked the other way, to his right, in the direction the cables were climbing and rising, and could see the white face of the most amazing mountain imaginable—no, beyond imagination. Clouds massed to the west of it, piling against a ridge as serrated and merciless looking as a bone knife. The face they were rising toward was striated with rock, ice, more rock, a summit pyramid of white snow and gleaming ice. The cablecar was grinding and slipping on icy cables following a ridgeline to the east of this incredible peak. Harman could see another tower on a swooping ridge high above, the rising cables connecting this mountain ridge to the higher peak. High above that—on and around the summit of the impossibly tall mountain—rose the most perfect white dome imaginable, its surface tinted a light gold from the morning sun, its central mass surrounded by four white eiffelbahn towers, the entire complex set on a white base cantilevered out over the sheer face of the mountain and connected to surrounding peaks by at least six slender suspension bridges arching out into space to other peaks—each of the bridges a hundred times higher, slimmer, and more elegant than the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu.
“What is this place?” Harman whispered.
“Chomolungma,” said Prospero. “Goddess Mother of the World.”
“That building at the top…”
“Rongbok Pumori Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng Dudh Kosi Lhotse-Nuptse Khumbu aga Ghat-Mandir Khan Ho Tep Rauza,” said the magus. “Known locally as the Taj Moira. We’ll be stopping there.”
47
The voynix didn’t come scuttling up Starved Rock by the hundreds or thousands that first cold, rainy night Daeman was there. Nor did they attack on the second night. By the third night everyone was weak from hunger or seriously sick with colds, flu, incipient pneumonia, or wounds—Daeman’s left hand ached and throbbed with a sick heat where the calibani at Paris Crater had bitten off two of his fingers and he felt light-headed much of the time—but still the voynix did not come.
Ada had regained consciousness that second day o
n the Rock. Her injuries had been numerous—cuts, abrasions, a broken right wrist, two broken ribs on her left side—but the only ones that had been life threatening had been a serious concussion and smoke inhalation. She’d finally awakened with a terrible headache, a rough cough, and hazy memories of the last hours of the Ardis Massacre, but her mind was clear. Voice flat, she had gone through the list of friends she was not sure she’d dreamt she’d seen die or actually watched die, only her eyes reacting when Greogi responded with his litany.
“Petyr?” she said softly, trying not to cough.
“Dead.”
“Reman?”
“Dead.”
“Emme?”
“Dead with Reman.”
“Peaen?”
“Dead. A thrown rock crushed her chest and she died here on Starved Rock.”
“Salas?”
“Dead.”
“Oelleo?”
“Dead.”
And so on for another twoscore names before Ada sagged back onto the dirty rucksack that was her pillow. Her face was parchment white beneath the streaked soot and blood.
Daeman was there, kneeling, the Setebos Egg glowing unseen in his own backpack. He cleared his throat. “Some important people survived, Ada,” he said. “Boman’s here…and Kaman. Kaman was one of Odysseus’ earliest disciples and has sigled everything he could find on military history. Laman lost four fingers on his right hand defending Ardis but he’s here and still alive. Loes and Stoman are here, as well as some of the people I sent on my fax-warning expedition—Caul, Oko, Elle, and Edide. Oh, and Tom and Siris both made it.”
“That’s good,” said Ada and coughed. Tom and Siris were Ardis’s best medics.
“But none of the medical gear or medicines made it here,” said Greogi.
“What did?” asked Ada.
Greogi shrugged. “Weapons we were carrying but not enough flechette ammunition. The clothes on our back. A few tarps and blankets we’ve been huddling under during the last three nights of cold rain.”