Odysseus drew his short sword halfway from its scabbard on his belt.

“No,” cried Ada, pushing Odysseus’ hand and sword down. “No, it’s Harman! It’s Daeman!” She ran toward them through the high grass.

Harman started to pitch forward as she approached and Odysseus sprinted the last twenty paces, catching Harman’s burden as the man fell forward. Daeman also went to his knees.

“It’s Hannah,” said Odysseus, laying the semiconscious young woman in the grass and setting his fingers on her neck to find her pulse.

“Hannah?” repeated Ada. This woman had no hair or eyelashes, but the eyes under flickering eyelids were Hannah’s.

“Hi, Ada,” said the girl on the ground.

Ada went to one knee and crouched next to the fallen Harman, helping him roll over onto his back. He tried to smile up at her. Her lover’s face was bruised and cut under the whiskers, his cheeks and forehead all but covered with caked blood. His eyes were sunken, skin an unhealthy white, and his cheekbones too sharp above his beard. Harman shivered with fever and his eyes burned at her. His teeth chattered when he spoke. “I’m all right, Ada. God, I’m glad to see you.”

Daeman was in worse shape. Ada couldn’t believe that these two battered, bloodied, emaciated men were the same two who had set forth so casually a month earlier. She put one arm under Daeman’s arm to keep him from pitching facefirst into the ground. He swayed on his knees.

“Where’s Savi?” asked Odysseus.

Harman shook his head sadly. He seemed too tired to speak again.

“Caliban,” said Daeman. His voice sounded twenty years older to Ada’s ear.

The worst of the meteor storm had abated, the audible impacts and more fiery falls having moved off to the east. A few dozen minor streaks crossed the zenith west to east almost gently, looking more like August’s annual Perseid showers than the violence of earlier in the evening.

“Let’s get them back to the house,” said Odysseus. He stood, lifted Hannah easily in both arms, and gave his right shoulder to Daeman to lean on as he rose. Ada helped Harman to his knees and then to his feet, putting his right arm over her shoulder and holding much of his weight as they all headed down the darkened meadow toward the lights of Ardis Hall where Odysseus’ disciples and Ada’s friends had lighted candles.

“That arm looks bad,” Odysseus said to Daeman as the four of them and the unconscious girl descended. “I’ll cut the thermskin off and take a look at it when we get in the light.”

Ada used her free hand to reach and gently touch Daeman’s bloodied arm, and the gaunt man moaned and almost swooned. Only Odysseus’ strong shoulder and Ada’s right hand slid quickly to the small of his back kept Daeman upright. The young man’s eyelids fluttered for a few seconds, but then he focused, smiled at her, and kept walking.

“These are serious injuries,” said Ada, feeling close to tears for the second time that evening. “You should both be faxed to the firmary.”

She didn’t understand at all when both men started laughing, hesitantly and painfully at first, more coughing than laughing for a moment, but then the barking changing to pure laughter, increasing in volume and sincerity until the two battered, bearded men sounded almost irritatingly drunk in the throes of their own private amusement.

63

Olympos

Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano on Mars, rises more than seventeen miles above the surrounding plains and above the new ocean at its base. The volcano, at its base, spreads more than 400 miles in diameter. With its green summit peaking above 87,000 feet, Olympus Mons is almost three times the height of Mount Everest on Earth. The sides of the mountain, white from snow and ice in the daytime, are glowing almost blood red this evening from the glare of the setting Martian sun.

The ragged cliffs here at the northeast base of Olympus Mons sweep up vertically for 17,000 feet. On this particular Martian evening, the long shadow of the volcano stretches east almost to the line of the three Tharsis volcanoes on the hazy horizon.

The high-speed crystal elevator that used to snake its way up this side of Olympos has been sliced in two not far above the cliffs, and sliced as cleanly as if cut by a guillotine. A powerful seven-layer forcefield generated by Zeus himself—the aegis—shields the entire Olympus Mons massif from attack and shimmers now in the red light of evening.

Just beyond the cliffs, near where the base of Olympos comes close to the northern ocean terraformed here just a century and a half earlier, a thousand or more gods have come down to gather for war. A hundred golden chariots, each powered by invisible forces but visibly pulled by powerful steeds, fly air cover thousands of feet above the masses of gods and golden armor assembled on the high plains and shingled beaches below.

Zeus and Hera are at the forefront of this immortal army, each figure twenty feet tall, husband and wife both resplendent in armor and shields and weapons hammered into shape by Hephaestus and other craft-skilled gods; even Hera’s and Zeus’s high helmets are forged of pure gold, laced with microcircuits, and reinforced by advanced alloys. Athena and Apollo are temporarily missing from the forefront of this divine phalanx, but the other gods and goddesses are here—

Aphrodite is here, still beautiful in her war gear. Her war helmet is studded with precious stones; her tiny bow is made to shoot crystal arrows with hollow tips filled with poison gas.

Ares is here, grinning beneath the brow of his red-crested war helmet, happy in anticipation of the unprecedented bloodletting soon to come. He carries Apollo’s silver bow and a quiver full of heat-seeking arrows. Any target he shoots at, he will kill or destroy.

Poseidon is here—the Earth-Shaker, huge and darkly powerful, dressed in war gear for the first time in millennia. Ten men, even including Achilles, could not lift the massive axe Poseidon carries in his left hand.

Hades is here—darker in countenance, mood, and armor than even Poseidon, his red eyes gleaming from the depths of his battle helmet’s deep sockets. Persephone stands by her lord, armored in lapis lazuli, a barbed titanium trident held firm in her long, pale fingers.

Hermes is here—thin and deadly, wrapped in his red-insect’s armor, poised to quantum teleport into battle, kill, and leap away before mortal eye can record his arrival, much less the carnage he will leave behind.

Thetis is here, her divine eyes red from weeping, but dutifully clad in full-scaled war gear, ready to kill her son, Achilles, if and when Zeus wills it so.

Triton is here—bold in layers of green-black armor; this is the forgotten Satyros of the old worlds—terror of the conch-horn and rapist of girls and boys, the god who took pleasure in discarding children’s bodies in the depths after he’d had his pleasure with them.

Artemis is here—gold-armored goddess of the hunt, her war-bow in her hand, ready and eager to spill gallons of human blood as the first step toward avenging the injury to her beloved brother, Apollo.

Hephaestus is here—armored in flames and ready to bring the torch to the mortal enemy.

All the gods except healing Apollo and healing Athena are here—row upon row of giant armored silent figures drawn up beneath the shadows of the cliffs. Above them, more gods and goddesses circle in their flying chariots. Above everything, the shimmering aegis—both offensive and defensive weapon—shimmers and builds its energies.

In the no-man’s-land beyond the gods, just beyond where the aegis shimmer slices into soil and stone and continues downward, curving in a sphere deep toward the center of Mars, the bodies of the two cerberids lie. Two-headed dog-things more than twenty feet long with teeth of chrome steel and gas chromatograph mass spectrometers in their snouts, the cerberids sprawl dead where Achilles and Hector each killed one upon the heroes’ arrival at Olympos only hours earlier.