“No,” said Orphu. “I checked the best radar imagery. That’s not a human body, just a human thermskin.”
“So?” said Suma IV from his command chair at the controls. “The submarine wreck expelled one of its passengers or some of a human’s belongings. They’re part of the debris field.”
Orphu snorted loudly. “And it’s all still there after twenty-five hundred standard years? I doubt it, Suma. Look at the pistol. No rust. Look at the rucksack. No rot. That part of the breach-gap is open to the elements—including sunlight and wind—but this stuff hasn’t degraded.”
“It proves nothing,” said Suma IV as he tapped in the rendezvous coordinates for the Queen Mab. Thrusters kicked the dropship into proper alignment for the burn and climb. “Sometime in the past few years some old-style human wandered out there to die. We have more important things to deal with right now.”
“Look in the sand,” said Orphu.
“What?” said their pilot.
“Look at the fifth image I blew up. In the sand. I can’t see it, but the radar was good down to three millimeters. What do you see there—with your eyes?”
“A footprint,” said Mahnmut. “A footprint of a bare human foot. Several footprints. All distinct in the muddy soil and soft sand. All leading west. Rain would wipe away those prints in a few days. Some human has been there in the last forty-eight hours or less—perhaps even while we were working on recovering the warheads.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Suma IV. “Our orders are to return to the Queen Mab and we’re going to…”
“Take the dropship back down to the Atlantic Breach,” commanded Prime Integrator Asteague/Che from thirty thousand kilometers higher on the opposite side of the Earth. “Our review of imagery we took hastily on the last orbit shows what may be the body of a human being in the Breach approximately twenty-three kilometers to the west of the submarine wreckage. Go and recover it at once.”
85
I flick into solidity and realize that I’ve QT’d myself into Helen of Troy’s private bathing chambers deep within the palace she used to share with her dead husband, Paris, and which she now shares with her former father-in-law, King Priam. I know I have only a few minutes in which to act, but I don’t know what to do.
Slave girls and serving women shriek as I stride from room to room calling Helen’s name. I hear the servants calling for the guards and realize that I may have to QT away quickly if I don’t want to end up on the end of a Trojan spear. Then I see a familiar face in the next chamber. It’s Hypsipyle, the slave woman from Lesbos whom Andromache had used as a personal minder for crazy Cassandra. This Hypsipyle might know where Helen is, since Helen and Andromache were very close the last time I saw them. And at least this slave isn’t running away or calling for the guards.
“Do you know where Helen is?” I ask as I approach the heavyset woman. Her blunt face is as expressionless as a gourd.
As if in answer, Hypsipyle rears back and kicks me in the gonads. I levitate, grab myself, fall to the tiled floor, roll around in agony, and squeak.
She aims another kick that would take my head off if I don’t dodge it, so I try to dodge, take the kick on the shoulder, and end up rolling into the corner, not even able to squeak now, my left shoulder and arm numb all the way down to the fingertips.
I struggle to my feet, hunched over, as the huge woman approaches with her eye full of business.
QT somewhere, idiot, I advise myself.
Where?
Anywhere but here!
Hypsipyle grabs me by my tunic front, tears the tunic, and aims a ham-fisted blow at my face. I raise my forearms to block the blow and the impact of her big-knuckled fist almost breaks the radius and ulna in both arms. I bounce off the wall and she grabs me by the shirt again and punches me in the belly.
Suddenly I’m on my knees again, retching, trying to clutch both belly and balls, no longer having enough wind in me even to manage a squeak.
Hypsipyle kicks me in the ribs, breaking at least one, and I roll to my side. I can hear the slap of the guards’ sandals as they rush up the main staircase.
Now I remember. The last time I saw Hypsipyle she was protecting Helen and I sucker-punched her to drag Helen away with me.
The slave-woman lifts me like a rag doll and slaps me—first forehand, then backhand, then forehand again. I feel teeth loosen and find myself feeling glad that I’m not wearing the reading glasses I used to have to wear.
Jesus Christ, Hockenberry, rages part of my mind. You just watched Achilles kill Zeus-Who-Drives-the-Storm-Clouds in single combat, and here you are getting the shit kicked out of you by one lousy Lesbian.
The guards burst into the room, spearpoints raised toward me. Hypsipyle turns toward them, still holding my bunched tunic in one of her huge hands, the tops of my feet scraping the floor, and holds me out, offering me to their spears.
I QT the two of us to the top of the great wall.
A blast of sunlight around us. Trojan warriors yards away exclaiming and leaping back. Hypsipyle is so astonished at this instantaneous change of place that she drops me.
I use the few seconds of her confusion I have left to kick her heavy legs out from under her. She scrambles to all fours, but—still on my back—I pull back my legs, coil them, and kick her clean off the open rampart into the city below.
That’ll teach you, you great muscled cow, teach you not to mess with Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D. in Classical Literature…
I get to my feet, dust myself off, and look down from the rampart. The great muscled cow has landed on the canvas roof of a marketplace stall backed to the wall, has torn through the canvas, landed again in a heap of what look to be potatoes, and is currently running toward the stairs near the Scaean Gate to scramble back up to where I wait.
Shit.
I run along the rampart toward where I now see Helen standing with the other members of the royal family on the broad reviewing area of the wall, near Athena’s Temple. Everyone’s attention is firmly fixed on the battle on the beach—my Achaeans’ doomed last stand, obviously in its last stages now—so no one interdicts me before I’m grabbing Helen by her beautiful white arm.
“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she says, marveling. “What is it? Why do you…”
“We’ve got to get everyone out of the city!” I gasp. “Now! Right now!”
Helen shakes her head. Guards have whirled and gone for their spears or swords, but Helen waves them away. “Hock-en-bear-eee… it is wonderful… we are winning… the Argives fall like wheat before our scythe… any minute now Noble Hector will…”
“We have to get everyone out of the buildings, off the wall, out of the city!” I shout.
It’s no good. The guards are all around us now, ready to protect Helen, King Priam, and the other royal family members here by killing me or dragging me off in an instant. I’ll never convince Helen or Priam to warn the city in time.
Panting, aware of Hypsipyle’s heavy running footsteps coming down the rampart toward us, I gasp, “The sirens. Where did the moravecs put the air raid sirens?”
“Sirens?” says Helen. She looks alarmed now, as if my madness must be dealt with quickly.
“The air raid sirens. The ones that used to wail months ago when the gods attacked the city by air. Where did the moravecs—the machine-toy people—put the equipment for the air raid sirens?”