But still….
It hadn’t taken his enlightenment through drowning for Harman to know that—however genetically modified and nanocytically reinforced—his species evolved from chimps and hominids. Curiosity had killed countless of those noble, knuckled ancestors, but it had also gotten them up off their knuckles.
Harman stowed the pack some yards from the bow—the thing was waterproof but he didn’t know if it was pressure-proof—pulled the ancient pistol from its stick-tite grip and held it in his right hand, activated the two bright searchlight patches on his upper chest, and squeezed his way past rended metal into the dark forward corridors of the dead machine.
73
The Greeks aren’t going to make it to nightfall.
They aren’t even going to make it to lunch at this rate. And neither am I.
The Achaeans are falling back into a tighter and tighter half circle, fighting like fiends, the sea at their backs and the surf running red, but Hector’s attack is relentless. At least five thousand Achaeans have fallen since the attack began just after dawn, among them noble Nestor—alive but carried unconscious to his tent, struck from his chariot by a lance that pierced his shoulder and shattered bone. The old hero who’d tried to step in to fill in for the absent or dead giants—Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Big Ajax, crafty Odysseus—has done his best, but the spear-point found him.
Nestor’s son Antilochus, the bravest of the Achaeans these past few days, is dead, pierced through the bowels by a well-placed Trojan bow-man’s shot. Nestor’s other captain son—Thrasymedes—is missing in action, pulled down into the Trojan-filled trench early on and not seen in the three hours since then. The trench and revetments are now in Hector’s bloody hands.
Little Ajax is wounded, a nasty sword cut to both shins just aside the greaves, and was carried from the field to the non-safety of the burned boats just minutes ago. Podalirius, fighting captain and skilled healer, son of the legendary Asclepius, is dead—cut down by a circle of killers from Deiphobus’ attacking legions. They hacked the brilliant physician’s body to pieces and hauled his bloodied armor back to Troy.
Alastor, Teucer’s friend and chieftain, who took over Thrasymedes’ command during the terrible battle of the bulge behind the abandoned trenches, fell in front of his men—still cursing and writhing for minutes with a dozen arrows in him. Five Argives fought their way forward to retrieve his body, but they were all cut down by Hector’s advance guard. Teucer himself was sobbing as he killed Alastor’s killers, firing arrow after arrow into their eyes and guts as he fell back with the slowly retreating Greeks.
There is nowhere left to retreat. We’re crammed here onto the beach, the rising tide lapping at our sandaled feet, and the rain of arrows is constant. All of the Greek horses have died loudly, except for those few whose owners, weeping, set them free and whipped them toward the advancing enemy lines. More trophies for the Trojans.
I’m going to be killed if I stay here. When I was a scholic, especially when I was Aphrodite’s secret-agent scholic, all decked out in levitation harness, impact armor, morphing bracelet, stun-baton, the Hades invisibility helmet—and whatever else I hauled around then—I felt pretty invulnerable, even when moderately close to the fighting. Except for the arrows, which are deadly enough at astounding distances, there isn’t much killing-from-afar in this war. Men smell their enemy’s sweat and breath and are splattered with his blood, brains, and saliva when they shove steel—or in most cases, bronze—into the man’s guts.
But I’ve almost been skewered three times in the last two hours: once by a cast spear that came over the lines of defenders and almost took my balls off—I leaped in the air to avoid it and when it buried itself in the wet sand here and I came down straddling it, the vibrating shaft smacked me in the gonads. Then an arrow parted my hair and a minute later another arrow, one of thousands darkening the sky and rising like a miniature forest out of the sand everywhere here, would have taken me square in the throat if an Argive I don’t even know hadn’t raised his round shield, leaned over, and deflected the barbed and poisonous shaft.
I have to get out of here.
My hand has touched the QT medallion a hundred times in the hours since dawn, but I haven’t quantum teleported away. I’m not sure why.
Yes I am. I don’t want to desert these men. I don’t want to be safe in Helen’s bathchamber or atop some nearby hill knowing that these Achaeans I’ve spent ten years watching and talking to and breaking bread with and drinking wine with are being slaughtered like proverbial cattle on this blood-dimmed bit of beach.
But I can’t save them.
Or can I?
I grab the medallion, concentrate on a place I’ve been, twist the gold circle half a turn, and open my eyes to find myself falling down a long, long elevator shaft.
No, I’m not falling, I realize—realize too late since I’ve already screamed twice—I’m in free fall in the main corridor on the deck of the Queen Mab, or at least in the main corridor on the deck where I’d had my private quarters. But there had been gravity then. Now there is only this falling and falling, tumbling in space but not really falling, flailing to get to the cubby door or to the astrogation bubble twenty yards down—or up—the corridor.
Two black and chitinous Belt moravecs, the soldiers with the built-in black armor, barbs, and masklike heads, kick out of a nearby elevator shaft—there is no elevator car in it—and grab me by the arms. They shoot back toward the shaft and I realize that the rockvecs can move in this zero-g not just because they’re used to it—it must be close to their native level of gravity in the Asteroid Belt—but because their carapaces have built-in and nearly silent thrusters that pulse expanding jets of what may just be water. Whatever it is, it allows them to move fluidly and quickly in this zero-gravity world. Without a word, they pull me into the shaft that runs the length of the Queen Mab—imagine jumping into an empty elevator shaft the height of the Empire State Building—so I do the only thing a sane man would do—I scream again.
The two soldiers jet me hundreds of feet up or down this echoing shaft—echoing to just my screams—and then pull me through some sort of forcefield membrane into a busy room. Even upside down as I am, I can recognize it as the bridge of the ship. I’d been on the bridge only once during my stay, but there was no mistaking this room’s function—moravecs I’d never seen before are busy monitoring three-dimensional virtual control boards, more rockvec soldiers are standing by holographic projections, and I recognize General Beh bin Adee, the skittery spider ‘vec—I can’t think of his name right now—as well as the strange-looking navigator, Cho Li, and the Prime Integrator, Asteague/Che.
It’s the Prime Integrator who effortlessly kicks through the zero-g bridge space to me as the two soldiers firmly set me into a mesh chair and tie me down so that I can’t escape. No, I realize, they’re not tying me down like a captive, merely attaching mesh web belts to hold me in place. It helps—just being stationary gives me a sense of up and down.