Odysseus stared for a long minute. Then he slid his sword back in its belt-sheath and said, “Tell me the message, son of Duane. Hurry.” The man glanced at the lowering sky and roaring Olympos. Suddenly a flight of twenty hornets and dropship transports flew out through the Hole, hauling the moravec techs to safety. A series of sonic booms pounded the Martian earth and made running men duck and raise their arms to cover their heads.
“Let’s go over by the moravec machine, son of Laertes. It is a message best delivered in private.”
They walked through the milling, shouting men to where the black hornet crouched on its insectoid landing gear.
“Now, speak, and hurry,” said Odysseus, grasping Hockenberry’s shoulder in his powerful hand.
Mahnmut tightbeamed Mep Ahoo. You have your taser?
Yes, sir.
Taser Odysseus unconscious and load him into the hornet. Take the controls. We’re going up to Phobos immediately.
The rockvec touched Odysseus on the neck, there was a spark, and the bearded man collapsed into the moravec soldier’s barbed arms. Mep Ahoo slid the unconscious Odysseus into the hornet and jumped in, firing up the repellors.
Mahnmut looked around—none of the Achaeans had seemed to notice the kidnapping of one of their captains—and then jumped in next to Odysseus. “Come on,” he said to Hockenberry. “The Hole’s going to collapse any second. Anyone on this side stays on Mars forever.” He glanced up at Olympos. “And forever may be measured in minutes if that volcano blows.”
“I’m not going with you,” said Hockenberry.
“Hockenberry, don’t be crazy!” shouted Mahnmut. “Look over there. All the Achaean top brass—Diomedes, Idomeneus, the Ajaxes, Teucer—they’re all running for the Hole.”
“Achilles isn’t,” said Hockenberry, leaning closer to be heard. Sparks were falling all around, rattling on the roof of the hornet like hot hail.
“Achilles has lost his mind,” shouted Mahnmut, thinking Shall I have Mep Ahoo taser Hockenberry?
As if reading his mind, Orphu came on the tightbeam. Mahnmut had forgotten that all this real-time video and sound was still being relayed up to Phobos and Queen Mab.
Don’t zap him, sent Mahnmut. We owe Hockenberry that. Let him make up his own mind.
By the time he does, he’ll be dead, sent Orphu of Io.
He was dead once, sent Mahnmut. Perhaps he wants to be again.
To Hockenberry, Mahnmut shouted, “Come on. Jump in! We need you aboard the Earth-ship, Thomas.”
Hockenberry blinked at the use of his first name. Then he shook his head.
“Don’t you want to see Earth again?” shouted the little moravec. The hornet was shaking on its gear as the ground vibrated with marsquake tremors. The clouds of sulfur and ash were swirling around the Brane Hole, which seemed to be growing smaller. Mahnmut realized that if he could keep Hockenberry talking another minute or two, the human would have no choice but to come with them.
Hockenberry took a step away from the hornet and gestured toward the last of the fleeing Achaeans, the dead Amazons, the dead horses, and the distant walls of Ilium and warring armies just visible through the now vibrating Brane Hole.
“I made this mess,” said Hockenberry. “Or at least I helped make it. I think I should stay and try to clean it up.”
Mahnmut pointed toward the war going on beyond the Brane Hole. “Ilium is going to fall, Hockenberry. The ‘vec forcefields and air defenses and anti-QT fields are gone.”
Hockenberry smiled even while shielding his face from the falling embers and ash. “Et quae vagos vincina prospiciens Scythas ripam catervis Ponticam viduis ferit excisa ferro est, Pergannum incubuit sibi,” he shouted.
I hate Latin, thought Mahnmut. And I think I hate classics scholars. Aloud, he said, “Virgil again?”
“Seneca,” shouted Hockenberry. “And she … he meant Penthesilea… the neighbor of the wandering Scythians, keeping watch, leads her destitute band toward the Pontic banks, having been cut down by iron, Pergamum … you know, Mahnmut, Ilium, Troy… itself stumbled.”
“Get your ass in the hornet, Hockenberry,” shouted Mahnmut.
“Good luck, Mahnmut,” said Hockenberry, stepping back. “Give my regards to Earth and Orphu. I’ll miss them both.”
He turned and slowly jogged past where Achilles was kneeling and weeping over Penthesilea’s body—the mankiller was alone now except for the dead, the other living humans having all fled—and then, as Mahnmut’s hornet lifted off and clawed toward space, Hockenberry ran as hard as he could toward the visibly shrinking Hole.
Part 2
22
After centuries of semitropical warmth, real winter had come to Ardis Hall. There was no snow, but the surrounding forests were free of all but the most stubbornly clinging leaves, frost marked the area of the great manor’s shadow for an hour after the tardy sunrise—each morning Ada watched the line of white-tinged grass on the sloping west lawn retreating slowly back up toward the house until it became only the thinnest moat of frost—and visitors reported that the two small rivers that crossed the road in the one-and-one-quarter miles between Ardis Hall and the faxnode pavilion both showed scrims of ice on their surface.
This evening—one of the shortest of the year—Ada went through the house lighting the kerosene lamps and many candles, moving gracefully despite the fact that she was in the fifth month of her pregnancy. The old manor house, built more than eighteen hundred years earlier, before the Final Fax, was comfortable enough; almost two dozen fireplaces—used mostly for decorative and entertainment purposes during the previous centuries—now warmed most of the rooms. In the other chambers in the sixty-eight-room mansion, Harman had sigled the plans for and then built what he called Franklin stoves, and this evening these radiated enough heat to make Ada sleepy as she moved from the lower hall to rooms and then to the staircase and upper halls and rooms, lighting the lamps.
She paused at the large arched window at the end of the hall on the third floor. For the first time in thousands of years, thought Ada, forests were falling to human beings wielding axes—and not just for the firewood. In the last of the wan winter twilight flowing through the gravity-warped panes, she could see the view-blocking but reassuring gray wall of the wooden palisade down the hill on the south lawn. The palisade stretched all around Ardis Hall, sometimes as close as thirty yards from the house, sometimes as far away as a hundred yards behind the house to the edge of the forest. More trees had been felled to build the watch towers rising at all the corners and angles of the palisade, and then even more to turn the scores of summer tents into homes and barracks for the more than four hundred people now living on the grounds of Ardis.
Where is Harman? Ada had been trying to block the urgency of that thought for hours—busying herself with a score of domestic tasks—but now she couldn’t ignore her concern. Her lover—“husband” was the archaic word that Harman liked to use—had left with Hannah, Petyr, and Odysseus—who insisted upon being called Noman these days—a little after dawn that morning, leading an oxen-pulled droshky, sweeping up through the forests and meadows ten miles and more from the river hunting for deer and searching for more of the lost cattle.
They should have been home by now. He promised me he’d be home long before dark.
Ada returned to the first floor and went into the kitchen. For centuries the preserve only of servitors and the occasional voynix bringing in meat from their slaughter grounds, the huge kitchen was now alive with human activity. It was Emme and Reman’s night to plan the meal—usually about fifty people ate in Ardis Hall itself—and there were almost a dozen men and women bustling around baking bread, preparing salads, roasting meat on the spit in the huge old fireplace, and generally producing a genial chaos that would soon resolve itself into a long table filled with food.