I blink and shake my head, then grab the hulking fire god by his heavy leather vest. “What will happen now?” I ask.
Hephaestus shrugs. “Just what we agreed on, Hockenberry. Nyx and the Fates, who have always ruled the universe—this universe, at least—will allow me to sit on the gold throne of Olympos after this mad second war with the Titans is over.”
“How do you know who will win?”
He shows me his uneven white teeth against his black beard.
From the courtyard comes a commanding voice. “Here, dog… here Argus… here, boy. That’s a nice pup. I have something for you… good dog.”
“They don’t call them ‘the Fates’ for nothing, Hockenberry,” says Hephaestus. “It will be a long and nasty war, fought more on Ilium Earth than on Olympos, but the few surviving Olympians will win… again.”
“But the thing… the cloud-thing… the Voice thing…”
“Demogorgon has gone home to Tartarus,” rumbles Hephaestus. “It cares not the least fucking fig what happens now on Earth, Mars, or Olympos.”
“My people…”
“Your pretty Greek friends are fucked up the ass,” says Hephaestus and then he smiles at his own wit. “But, if it makes you feel any better, so are the Trojans. Anyone who stays on Ilium Earth will be in the crossfire for the next fifty to a hundred years while this war goes on.”
I grab his vest harder. “You have to help us…”
He removes my hand as easily as an adult male would remove the clinging hand of a two-year-old child. “I don’t have to do a goddamned thing, Hockenberry.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looks at the twitching thing on the floor behind, and says, “But in this case I will. QT back to your pitiful Achaeans and your woman, Helen, in the city and tell them to get their asses out of all high towers, off the walls, out of the buildings. There’s going to be a nine-point quake in old Ilium Town in a very few minutes. I need to burn this… thing… and get our hero back to Olympos so he can try to talk the Healer into waking his dead bimbo.”
Achilles is coming back. He is whistling and I can hear Argus’s nails scrabbling on stone as the dog eagerly follows.
“Go!” says Hephaestus, god of fire and artifice.
I reach for my medallion, realize it’s not there, realize I don’t need it, and QT well away from there.
84
Their estimated twelve hours of continuous work took a little more than eighteen hours. The forty-eight tumbled missiles and missile tubes were more trouble to sort out, separate, and cut up than either Orphu or Mahnmut could have guessed. Some of the metal warhead casings had cracked completely away, leaving only the plastoid-alloy MRV cradles and the containment fields themselves, each glowing blue from its own Cerenkov radiation.
The sight would have been interesting if anyone other than the silent moravecs on the Queen Mab had been watching: the submersible The Dark Lady crouching over the hull of the sunken death sub, its belly searchlights illuminating mostly a world filled with silt, fanning anemones, torn cables, twisted wiring, and lethal, greengrown missiles and warheads. Brighter than the dappled daylight coming in through the Breach wall, brighter than the super-halogen bright searchlights aimed on the work area, brighter than the sun itself were the fires of the 10,000-degree-Fahrenheit cutting torches that both the blind Orphu and the silt-blinded Mahnmut were wielding as delicately as scalpels.
Girders, winches, pulleys, and chains were all in place and now in heavy use as the two moravecs and The Dark Lady herself supervised the winching-up of each MRVed warhead as it was cut away from the missile itself. The cargo hold of Mahnmut’s Europan submersible was never really empty; it was honeycombed with a programmable flowfoam that formed itself into fluted cathedral buttressings of internal bracing against terrible pressures when the hold was “empty” of cargo, but that could and did flow tight around any cargo—including Orphu of Io when he rode in the corner of the cargo bay. Now the flowfoam was adapting itself to cushion and support each ungainly lump of warhead as Mahnmut and Orphu ratcheted and cursed it into place.
At one point a little beyond halfway through the exhausting work, Mahmut pretended to pat the containment-field-glowing warhead itself as the flowfoam closed around it, as he said—
“What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”
“Your old friend Will?” asked Orphu as both moravecs dropped back into the confusion of agitated silt below to begin cutting away the next warhead.
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “Sonnet Fifty-three.”
About two hours later, just after they had secured another blue-glowing warhead in the now-crowded hold—they were spacing the black holes as far apart as they could—Orphu said, “This answer to our problem is costing you your ship. I’m sorry, Mahnmut.”
The Europan nodded, trusting his huge friend’s deep radar to pick up the motion. As soon as Orphu had suggested this approach, Mahnmut had realized that it meant losing his beloved Dark Lady forever—there was no way they could take the chance of removing the warheads from the Lady’s flowfoam cushioned hull and putting them into a different cargo bay. The very best case scenario now was that the moravecs would have another spacecraft up there in low earth orbit that could boost The Dark Lady and her planet-lethal cargo out and away from Earth, into deep space, as gently but quickly as possible.
“I feel that I just got her back,” said Mahnmut, hearing the pathetic tone in his own radio voice.
“They’ll build you another someday,” said Orphu.
“It wouldn’t be the same,” said Mahnmut. He had spent more than a century and a half in this little sub.
“No,” agreed Orphu. “Nothing will ever be the same after all this.”
At the end of the eighteen hours, after the last Cerenkov-glowing cluster of nascent black holes was loaded away, flowfoamed into place, and The Dark Lady’s cargo bay doors were shut, both moravecs were in a state of near total physical and nervous exhaustion as they hovered together above the wreck of the boomer.
“Is there anything we need to investigate or bring back from The Sword of Allah?” asked Orphu.
“Not at this time,” sent Prime Integrator Asteague/Che from the Queen Mab. The ship had been conspicuously quiet during the last eighteen hours.
“I never want to see the goddamned thing again,” said Mahnmut, too exhausted to care that he was speaking on the common channel. “It’s an obscenity.”
“Amen,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from the dropship circling above.
“Is there anything you guys want to tell us about what’s been going on up there with Odysseus and his girlfriend over the last eighteen hours or so?” asked Orphu.
“Not at this time,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che again. “Bring the warheads up. Be careful.”
“Amen,” said Mep Ahoo again, and there seemed to be no irony in the soldier ‘vec’s voice.
Suma IV was a damned good pilot, one had to grant him that—and Orphu and Mahnmut did. Suma IV actually hovered the dropship so that The Dark Lady remained fully submerged as the aircraft-spaceship’s much larger bay doors closed under it. Then Suma IV slowly drained out the seawater, but only as the dropship’s own flowfoam took the water’s place, encysting the submersible and its blue-glowing cargo in another layer of wrapping.