“Yeah,” shouted Daeman. His neck was aching from the terrible pressure and he was sure that his spine was going to snap.

“Is that an affirmative?” asked the sonie.

“Affirmative!” screamed Daeman.

More thrusters fired, the sonie seemed to bounce like a thrown rock skipping off a pond’s surface, was wrapped twice more in reentry fire, and then somehow straightened itself out.

Daeman raised his head.

They were flying—flying so high that the edge of the Earth was still curved ahead of them, so high that the mountains far beneath them were visibly mountains only by the white snow texture against the brown and green earth colors—but flying. There was air out there.

Daeman cheered, reached over and hugged Hannah in her blue thermskin suit, then cheered again, raising his fist toward the sky in triumph.

He froze with his fist and eyes raised. “Oh, shit,” he said.

“What?” said Harman, still naked except for the osmosis mask now dangling around his neck. Then the older man looked up, following Daeman’s gaze. “Oh, shit,” he said.

The first of a thousand fireballs—debris from the city or the linear accelerator or the broken asteroid—roared by them less than a mile away, trailing a vertical wake of flame and plasma ten miles behind it, almost flipping the sonie over with the violence of its passage. More meteors roared down at them from the burning sky above.

61

The Plains of Ilium

Mahnmut arrived on the Thicket Ridge just as nine tall black figures stepped out of the spacecraft that had landed amidst the hornet fliers, all nine striding down the ramp into the swirling dust storm created by their landing. The figures were humanoid by way of insectoid, each about two meters tall, each covered with shiny, chitinous duraplast armor and a helmet that reflected the world around them like polished onyx. The individuals’ arms and hands reminded Mahnmut of images he’d seen of a dung beetle’s appendages—painfully curved, hooked, barbed, and blackly thorned. Each carried a complex, multibarreled weapon of some sort that looked to weigh at least fifteen kilograms. The figure in the lead paused in the swirling dust and pointed directly at Mahnmut.

“You there, little moravec, is this Mars?” The amplified voice spoke in inter-moon Basic English and arrived via both sound and tightbeam.

“No,” said Mahnmut.

“It’s not? It’s supposed to be Mars.”

“It’s not,” said Mahnmut, sending all this to Orphu. “It’s Earth. I think.”

The tall soldierly form shook its helmeted head as if this was an unacceptable answer. “What kind of moravec are you? Callistan?”

Mahnmut drew himself up to his full bipedal height. “I’m Mahnmut from Europa, formerly of the exploration submersible The Dark Lady. This is Orphu of Io.”

“Isn’t that a hard-vac moravec?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to his eyes, sensors, manipulators and legs? Who cracked his shell like that?”

“Orphu is a war veteran,” said Mahnmut.

“We’re supposed to report to a Ganymedan named Koros III,” said the armored form. “Take us to him.”

“He was destroyed,” said Mahnmut. “In the line of duty.”

The tall black figure hesitated. It looked at the other eight onyx warriors and Mahnmut had the idea they were conferring via tightbeam. The first soldier turned back. “Take us to the Callistan Ri Po then,” he ordered.

“Also destroyed,” said Mahnmut. “And before we go any further, who are you?”

They’re rockvecs, sent Orphu on his private tightbeam channel. “Aren’t you rockvecs?” the Ionian asked on the common tightbeam wavelength. It had been so long since Orphu had communicated with anyone except Mahnmut that the smaller moravec was shocked to hear his voice on the common band.

“We prefer to be called Belt moravecs,” said the leader, turning to address Orphu’s shell. “We should medevac you to a combat repair center, Old Timer.” He gestured to some of the other combat moravecs and they began moving toward the Ionian.

“Stop,” commanded Orphu, and his voice held enough authority to freeze the tall forms in their booted tracks. “I’ll decide when to leave the field. And don’t call me Old Timer, or I’ll have your gears for garters. Koros III was in charge of this mission. He’s dead. Ri Po was second in command. He’s dead. That leaves Mahnmut of Europa and me, Orphu of Io, in command. What’s your rank, rockvec?”

“Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, sir.”

Mep Ahoo? thought Mahnmut.

“I’m a commander,” snapped Orphu. “Is the chain of command clear here, trooper?”

“Yes, sir,” said the rockvec.

“Brief us on why you’re here and why you think this is Mars,” said Orphu in the same tone of absolute command. Mahnmut thought his friend’s voice on tightbeam was dipping into the subsonic the bass was cranked so deep. “Immediately, Centurion Leader Ahoo.”

The rockvec did as he was told, explaining as quickly as he could while more hornet fliers buzzed overhead and hundreds of Trojan warriors came out of the city and slowly advanced up the ridge toward the landing party, shields raised, spears poised. At the same moment, hundreds more Achaeans and Trojans were flowing through the circular portal a few hundred meters to the south, all of them running toward the icy slopes of Olympos visible through the slice taken out of the sky and ground.

Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo was succinct. He confirmed Orphu’s earlier statement to Mahnmut—from their discussion when they’d been passing over the Asteroid Belt on their way to Mars—that sixty e-years ago the Ganymedan Koros III had been sent to the Belt by the Pwyll-based moravec Asteague/Che and the Five Moons Consortium. But Koros’s mission had been as a diplomat, not as a spy. Spending more than five years in the Belt, hopping from rock to rock and losing most of his Jovian-moravec support team in the process, Koros had negotiated with the belligerent rockvec clan leaders, sharing the Jovian-space moravec scientists’ concerns about the rapid terraforming of Mars and the early signs of quantum tunneling activity just detected there. The rockvecs wanted to know who was doing this dangerous QT tunneling—post-humans from Earth? Koros III and the Belt moravecs agreed on the acronym UME’s—Unknown Martian Entities.

The rockvecs were already concerned, although more about the visible—and impossible—rapid terraforming of Mars than about the quantum activity, which their technology could not easily detect. Confrontational and bold by nature, the Belt moravecs had already dispatched six expeditionary fleets of spacecraft on the relatively short hop to Mars. None of their ships had returned or survived translation to Mars orbit. Something on the Red Planet, or on what had been the Red Planet until recently—the rockvecs had no idea what—was destroying their fleets before arrival.

Through diplomacy, guile, courage, and some single combat, Koros III had earned the rockvec clan leaders’ trust. The Ganeymedan explained the Five Moons Consortium’s plan—first, the rockvecs would design and biofacture dedicated warrior-vecs over the next fifty years or so, using their already tough rockvec DNA as a breeding base. The rockvecs would also be responsible for designing and constructing advanced space and atmospheric fighting vehicles. Meanwhile, the more advanced Five Moons moravec scientists and engineers would divert cutting-edge technology from their interstellar program to the building of a quantum-tunneler and wormhole stabilizer of their own. Second, when the time was right and the quantum activity on Mars reached alarming levels, Koros himself would lead a small contingent of moravecs from Jupiter space, its goal to arrive undetected on the Red Planet. Third, once on Mars, Koros III would place the quantum-tunneler at the vertex of the current QT activity, stabilizing not only those quantum tunnels already in use by the UME’s, but opening new tunnels to the Asteroid Belt, where other Five Moons’-designed tunneling devices would be waiting for his maser signal before activating.