The other two floated closer. Savi shoved three gloved fingers into a ragged hole in the corpse’s leathery neck. The fingers disappeared to the knuckle. Disgusted, Daeman kick-floated backward, but not before noticing that the other corpses also had such ragged wounds on their necks, thighs, and rib cages.

“Scavengers?” said Harman.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Savi, floating from corpse to corpse, inspecting each wound. “Nor the effects of decomposition. I don’t think there was much in the way of viable bacteria here even before the air began leaking out and the cold set in. Maybe post-humans didn’t even have bacteria in their guts.”

“How could that be?” asked Daeman.

Savi just shook her head. She floated to two bodies tangled in chairs on the next platform. These corpses showed wider wounds in the belly. Rags of loose, torn clothing floated in the thin, cold air. “Something chewed a hole into their bellies,” whispered Savi.

“What?” Daeman heard how hollow his voice sounded on the thermskin comm.

“I think all these people—posts—died of wounds,” said Savi. “Something chewed their throats and bellies and hearts out.”

“What?” Daeman asked again.

Instead of answering, Savi removed the black gun from her pack and slapped it onto the stiktite patch on the thigh of her thermskin suit. She pointed down the open mall of the interior city to where it curved a half mile or so straight ahead. “Something’s moving there,” she said.

Without waiting to see if the two men would follow, Savi kicked off and floated in that direction.

41

Olympus Mons

After their capture, Mahnmut thought that his best shot would have been to trigger the Device—whatever it was—as soon as the blond god in the flying chariot had destroyed the balloon and begun hauling them back to Olympus Mons.

But he couldn’t get to the Device. Or to the transmitter. Or to Orphu. It took everything Mahnmut had just to hang on to the railing of the gondola as they flew at almost Mach 1 toward the Martian volcano. If the Device, transmitter, and Orphu of Io hadn’t been lashed down to the gondola platform with every meter of rope and wire Mahnmut had been able to scavenge, all three objects would have all dropped 12,000 meters and more to the high plateau between the northernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes—Ascraeus—and the Tethys Sea.

The god in the machine—still carrying these metric tons of dead weight and the added weight of the bunched cables in one hand—actually gained altitude as the chariot headed north, swung out to sea still gaining altitude, and came in toward Olympus Mons from the north. Even with his short legs dangling and his manipulators sunk deep into the gondola railing, Mahnmut had to admit it was one hell of a sight.

A near-solid mass of clouds covered most of the region between the Tharsis volcanoes and Olympus, with only the solid masses of the volcanoes rising from the cloud cover. The rising sun was small but very bright to the southeast, painting the ocean and the clouds a brilliant gold. The golden glare from the Tethys Sea was so bright that Mahnmut had to notch up his polarizing filters. Olympus itself, rising right at the edge of the Tethys ocean, was staggering in its immensity, an endless cone of icefields rising to an impossibly green summit with a series of blue lakes in its caldera.

The chariot dipped and Mahnmut could make out the 4,000-meter vertical cliffs at the very base of its northwestern quadrant, and although the cliffs were in shadow, he could also see tiny roads and structures in what looked to be a narrow strip of beach, although there were almost certainly two or three miles of coastline between the cliffs and the golden ocean. Farther north and farther out to sea, turned into an island by the terraforming, was the isle of Lycus Sulci, which resembled nothing so much as a lizard’s head raised toward Olympus Mons.

Mahnmut described all of this to Orphu, subvocalizing on the tightbeam channel. The Ionian’s only comment was, “Sounds pretty, but I wish we were taking this tour under our own steam.”

Mahnmut remembered that he wasn’t here for sightseeing when the godlike humanoid dipped the chariot toward the summit of the giant volcano. Three thousand meters above the upper snow slopes, they passed through a forcefield—Mahnmut’s sensors registered the ozone shock and voltage differentials—and then leveled out for final approach to the green and grassy summit.

“I’m sorry I didn’t see this guy in the chariot coming sooner and take some evasive action,” Mahnmut said to Orphu in the last seconds before he had to shut down comm for landing.

“It’s not your fault,” said Orphu. “These deus ex machinas have a way of sneaking up on us literary types.”

After landing, the god who’d captured them grabbed Mahnmut by the neck and carried him unceremoniously into the largest artificial space the little Moravec had ever seen. Other male gods went out to haul in Orphu, the Device, and the transmitter. Still more male gods came into the hall as Zeus listened to their chariot god describe their capture. Mahnmut was comfortable now thinking that these chariot people thought of themselves as gods, assuming now that their choice of Olympus Mons as a home was no coincidence. The holograms in niches of scores and scores more gods and goddesses reinforced his hypothesis. Then the über-god whom Mahnmut assumed to be Zeus began speaking and it was all Greek to the moravec. Mahnmut spoke a sentence or two in English. The gray-bearded gods and the younger ones frowned their incomprehension. Mahnmut cursed himself for never loading ancient or modern Greek into his language base. It hadn’t seemed all that important at the time he’d first set out in The Dark Lady to explore the subsea oceans of Europa.

Mahnmut switched to French. Then German. Then Russian. Then Japanese. He was working his way through his modest database of human languages, framing the same sentence—“I came in peace and did not mean to trespass”—when the Zeus figure held up one massive hand to silence him. The gods spoke amongst themselves and didn’t sound happy.

What’s going on? tightbeamed Orphu. The Ionian’s shell was five meters away, on the floor with the other two artifacts from the gondola. Their captors hadn’t seemed to consider the possibility that there was a sentient person in that cracked and battered form, and they treated Orphu as another captured thing. Mahnmut had anticipated this. It’s why he phrased his sentence “I came in peace . . .” rather than “we.” Whatever the gods decided to do to him, Mahnmut, there was an outside chance that they would leave Orphu alone, although how the poor Ionian might be able to escape without eyes, ears, legs, or manipulators wasn’t clear to Mahnmut.

The gods are talking, tightbeamed Mahnmut. I don’t understand them.

Repeat a few of the words they’re using.

Mahnmut did, sending them silently.

That’s a variant on classical Greek, said Orphu. It’s in my database. I can understand them.

Upload the database to me, sent Mahnmut.

On tightbeam? said Orphu. It would take an hour. Do you have an hour?

Mahnmut turned his head to watch the beautiful humanoid males barking syllables at each other. They seemed near a decision. No, he said.

Subvocalize what they say to me and I’ll translate, we’ll decide the proper answer, and I’ll send back the phonemes for your response, said the Ionian.

In real time?

Do we have a choice? said Orphu.

Their captor was speaking to the bearded figure on the gold throne. Mahnmut sent on what he heard, got the translation within a fraction of a second, consulted with Orphu, and memorized the syllables of their response in Greek. It hardly seemed efficient to the little moravec.