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 exhausts 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.”