Savi and Harman released Daeman’s arms as they paused on a platform sixty feet above the city floor. He had time to notice the floating mummies all around, bits of their throats and bellies bitten away with the same bite radius as the humans inside the firmary, realized that he was about to vomit into his breathing mask, and then the two on either side of him found something solid to kick from and swam toward the darkness ahead.
Daeman tugged up his mask in desperation and vomited into near-vacuum and stinking, cold air. He felt his eardrums bursting and his eyes swelling, but he tugged the mask back in place—smelling his own vomit and fear—and kicked off after Savi and Harman. He didn’t want to run. He just wanted to curl up, float in a tight ball, and throw up again. But even Daeman realized that he didn’t have that choice. Flailing wildly, looking over his shoulder at the glow of the firmary, Daeman swam and ran and kicked for his life.
Caliban caught them in the darkest corner of the city, where the wild-kelp beds swayed to the coriolis of the slowly turning asteroid. All of the glass walls of the city here were clear, showing them the cloud-whitened earth floating by for several minutes and then several minutes of darkness broken only by the cold stars. It was in the darkness that Caliban came.
The three huddled together in the darkness there.
“Did you see him come out of the firmary?” gasped Savi.
“No.”
“I didn’t see anything after we ran,” gasped Harman.
“Was it a calibani?” gasped Daeman, realizing that he was weeping, not caring that he was. He asked the question with his last reservoir of hope.
“No,” said Savi over the comm, her tone dashing Daeman’s last hopes. “It was Caliban himself.”
“Those bodies . . .” began Harman. “Fifth Twenties?”
“It looked like younger ones, too,” whispered Savi. She had the black gun in her hand and was swiveling, peering into the darkness between the strands of swaying kelp.
“Maybe the thing used to harvest just the Fifth Twenties,” whispered Harman over the comm. “But it’s gotten bolder. Impatient. Hungrier.”
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” hissed Daeman. It was the oldest invocation known to humankind, even if they didn’t know what it meant. His teeth were chattering
“Still hungry?” asked Savi. Perhaps she was attempting to calm Daeman down with some dark approximation of humor. “I’m not,” she said.
“I am,” said Caliban over their radio frequencies. The monster floated out of the kelp, cast his net over the three of them, batted the gun out of Savi’s hand, and gathered them in like fish.
44
Olympus Mons
It felt strange to Mahnmut not to have Orphu in tightbeam range. He hoped his friend was safe.
The gods burst into the room a second after the human, who had never identified himself, quantum teleported out. Mahnmut didn’t believe in invisibility other than good stealth material, but he was obviously invisible to the tall gods and goddesses who crowded into the room and knelt around Hera. Mahnmut slipped out between the bronzed legs and white togas and began retracing his way through the labyrinth of corridors. He discovered that it was very hard to walk as a biped when one is invisible—he kept checking to see where his feet were and they were nowhere—so he dropped to all fours and padded silently along the halls.
Because Orphu had slowed down the gods escorting him to his cell, Mahnmut had seen where they’d stored the transmitter and Device. The room had been down a side corridor three right turns away from the corridor where he and Orphu had been incarcerated.
When Mahnmut reached the storage room, the hallway was empty—although gods passed through the adjoining hallways and intersections frequently—and Mahnmut activated his low-wattage wrist laser to cut through the door. Even while he was cutting he realized how odd this would look to any divinity turning into this hallway—no moravec in sight, but a twenty-centimeter red beam floating by itself, slowly burning a circle into the lock mechanism of the huge door.
The laser could never have cut through the entire door, but it cut a nice five-centimeter circle above the lock—Mahnmut’s hearing could detect the solid-state mechanism shifting up through subsonic frequencies—and the door swung inward. Mahnmut closed it behind him when he stepped in, hearing footsteps coming down his corridor only a few seconds later. They passed by. He tugged off the leather Hades Helmet cowl the better to see his hands and feet.
This was no empty holding cell. The room was at least two hundred meters long, half that high, and filled with bars of gold, heaps of coins, chests of precious stones, small mountains of polished bronze artifacts, marble statues of gods and men, great seashells spilling pearls onto the polished floor, dismantled gold chariots, glass columns filled with lapis lazuli, and a hundred other treasures, all gleaming from the reflected light from flames flickering in a score of gold fire tripods.
Mahnmut ignored the wealth and ran to the dull-metal squirt transmitter and slightly smaller Device. There was no way that Mahnmut could carry both things out of here—invisibility didn’t keep one inconspicuous when two metal devices could be seen floating down the hallway—and he knew that he only had seconds in which to act, so he dragged the Device out of the way, found the correct jackpatch on the communicator, and triggered it with a standard low-voltage command.
The transmitter’s primitive AI accepted the command and shed its nanocarbon skin to show complex devices folded in on themselves. Mahnmut backed away as the transmitter did a forward roll as gracefully as a human acrobat, extended tripod legs and Chevkovian felschenmass power booms, then unfurled a mesh dish eight meters wide. Mahnmut was glad he hadn’t tried this in a small room.
But he was still in a windowless room, perhaps under tons of marble and granite and Martian stone, quite possibly too thick for the transmission to pass through. At any rate, there was no starfield for the dish to use for navigation or orientation. As the dish searched and whirred, Mahnmut felt anxiety build—and not just because there were more shouts from the corridors. This should be the next place the gods would search—or QT to—after making sure that Hera was alive. If the transmitter couldn’t lock on here, Mahnmut’s and Orphu’s mission was probably over. It all depended on the sophistication of the squirt transmitter’s design.
The dish wobbled, whirred, adjusted itself a final time, and locked on something about twenty degrees from vertical. A virtual control panel appeared next to the physical jackports and green lights glowed.
Mahnmut jacked in and downloaded everything in his memory banks from the entire trip—every conversation with Orphu, every piece of dialogue with Koros III, Ri Po, or the gods, every visual he’d seen and recorded from the time they left Jupiter space. With the broadband on the transmitter jackport enabled, it took less than fifteen seconds to complete the download.
Mahnmut’s sensors picked up the Chevkovian antimatter energy field in the squirt transmitter building, and he wondered if the gods could sense it. One way or the other, he knew, they’d find him within minutes, if not sooner. And there was no way out of this room and the building while carrying the Device. He could trigger it now, or he could trigger it later. Either way, he’d be in the center of whatever happened.
But it wasn’t the Device he had to worry about now, Mahnmut reminded himself. It was this squirt transmitter.
The communicator blinked green across a myriad of indicators, suggesting to Mahnmut that the squirt power source was now at maximum charge, the data was encrypted, and the target—probably Jupiter space, possibly even Europa—was locked. Or so he hoped.