“Yes, yes,” said Daeman, snapping his fingers in an attempt to remember. “His name is . . .”

“Odysseus,” said the man in the chair. He stood and took a step toward the startled Daeman. “Odysseus, son of Laertes.”

17

Mars

“She’s stabilizing,” said Mahnmut over the hardline to Orphu. “Roll rate down to about one revolution every six seconds. Pitch and yaw are approaching zero.”

“I’m going to try to flatten out the roll,” said Orphu. “Tell me when you have the polar cap in the reticule.”

“Okay, no—it’s drifting. Damn. What a mess.” Mahnmut was trying to line up the slash on the video feed with the white blur of the Martian polar cap through a blizzard of tumbling debris and still-glowing plasma.

“Yes,” said Orphu from the hold, “I am a mess.”

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

“I know. But I’m still a mess. I’d give half my Proust library if I had just one of my six eyes back.”

“We’ll get you hooked up to some visual feed,” said Mahnmut. “Hell. We’re tumbling again.”

“Let it tumble until right before we enter the atmosphere,” said Orphu. “Save our thruster fuel and energy. And—no—we’re not going to get this vision thing fixed. I did a damage check after you plugged me in here, and it’s not just the eyes and cameras that are missing. I was looking toward the bow when the ship was slagged, and the flash burned out every channel down to the organic level. My internal optic nerves are ash.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mahnmut. He felt sick and it wasn’t just from the tumbling. After a minute, he said, “We’re running fairly low on everything consumable here—water, air, reaction-pack fuel. Are you sure you want to stay inside this debris field?”

“It’s our best chance,” said Orphu. “On radar, we’re just another chunk of the destroyed spaceship.”

“Radar?” said Mahnmut. “Did you see what attacked us? A goddamned chariot. You think a chariot has radar?”

Orphu rumbled a laugh. “Do you think a chariot can launch an energy lance like the one that vaporized a third of the ship, including Koros and Ri Po? And yes, Mahnmut, I saw the chariot—it was the last thing I’ll ever see. But I don’t believe for a second that it was actually a chariot with an oversized human male and female riding in open vacuum. Uh-uh. Too cute . . . too cute by half.”

Mahnmut had nothing to say to that. He wished Orphu had damped all the roll—the sub was also pitching and yawing again—but everything else in the debris field was tumbling, so it made sense that they should be too.

“Want to talk about Shakespeare’s sonnets?” asked Orphu of Io.

“Are you shitting me?” The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.

“Yes,” said Orphu. “I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Mahnmut. “The debris is beginning to glow. So are we. Picking up ionization.” He was pleased that his voice stayed calm. Ahead of them, larger bits of the destroyed spacecraft were glowing a dull red. The bow of The Dark Lady was also beginning to glow. The Dark Lady ’s external sensors started reporting hull temperature rising. They were entering Mars’s atmosphere.

“Time to straighten us out,” said Orphu, getting the relayed data down in the submersible’s hull, doing what he could with the partial Koros III control download as he fired the sub’s strap-on thrusters and realigned her gyros. “Roll gone?”

“Not quite.”

“We can’t wait. I’m going to turn this pile of scrap iron around before we burn up.”

“This ‘pile of scrap iron’ is called The Dark Lady and she may save our lives,” Mahnmut said coldly.

“Right, right,” said Orphu. “Tell me when the hash mark on the aft video monitor is centered on the limb of Mars above the pole. I’ll begin flattening the tumble then. God, what I’d give for one of my eyes back. Sorry, last time I’ll say that.”

Mahnmut watched the monitor. Because of the widening debris cloud, the only reliable fixes he’d been able to make for Orphu over the past thirty minutes or so came from Mars itself. Even the two little moons were invisible. Now the thrusters thumped hollowly and the damaged sub pivoted slowly, the bow camera losing its view of Mars and showing glowing plasma, white-hot melted metal, and a million shining shards that had once been their spacecraft and traveling companions.

The orange-red-brown-green bulk of Mars filled the aft camera and the hash mark Orphu had directed Mahnmut to draw in the monitor drifted up, up, crossing the cloud-dappled coastline, showing blue sea, then white . . .

“Polar cap,” reported Mahnmut. “There’s the upper limb.”

“Okay,” said Orphu. All the thrusters hammered. “See the pole now on the aft camera?”

“No.”

“Any recognizable stars?”

“No. Just more hull ionization.”

“Close enough for government work,” said the Ionian. “I’m going to use the ring of thrusters on the stern as braking rockets now.”

“Koros III was going to use the big reaction pack on the bow to slow us for re-entry, then jettison it before we hit the atmosphere,” said Mahnmut. The stern glow was a deeper red now.

“I’m keeping those heavier thrusters on while we enter the atmosphere,” said Orphu.

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

“Isn’t it possible that if we keep those thrusters attached, they’ll explode when they heat up during reentry?”

“It’s possible,” grunted the Ionian.

“We’re pretty battered,” said Mahnmut. “Any chance we’ll break up as stuff burns away from the hull?”

“Sure, there’s a chance,” said Orphu. He fired the heavy-ion thrusters.

Mahnmut was pressed into his acceleration couch for thirty seconds and then released as the noise and vibration ceased. He heard the heavy thump as the attitude-control ring was ejected into space.

A fireball flicked past the bow camera, although the bow camera was now showing the view behind them as they entered the atmosphere stern first. “We’re definitely hitting atmosphere,” said Mahnmut, noticing that his voice wasn’t quite as calm as before. He’d never been in a real planetary atmosphere before and the idea of all those close-packed molecules added queasiness on top of his nausea. “The jettisoned thruster-pack just turned white-hot and burst into flame. I can see the stern beginning to glow. So is the main reaction pack on the bow, but not as badly. Most of the heat and shock wave seems to be around our stern. Wow—we’re falling behind some of the debris field, but it’s all burning up ahead of us. It’s like we’re in the middle of a huge meteor storm.”

“Good,” said Orphu. “Hang on.”

What had been the moravec spacecraft hit the thickened Martian atmosphere very much as Mahnmut had described to Orphu—as a meteor storm with the larger fragments massing several metric tons and stretching tens of meters across. A hundred fireballs arced through the pale-blue Martian sky and a rattle of deep sonic booms shattered the silence of the northern hemisphere. The fireballs crossed the northern polar cap like a flight of fiery birds and continued south across the Tethys Sea, leaving long plasma vapor trails as they passed. It looked eerily as if the fragments were flying rather than falling.

For hundreds of millions of years, Mars had boasted a negligible atmosphere, of some 8 millibars, mostly carbon dioxide, as opposed to Earth’s thick 1,014 millibars of pressure at sea level. In less than a century, through a process that none of the moravecs understood, the world had been terraformed to a very breathable 840 millibars.

The fireballs streaked across the northern kilometer in rough formation, leaving sonic-boom footprints in their wake. Some of the smaller pieces—large enough to survive the fiery atmospheric entry but small enough to be deflected by the thick air—began splashing down some eight hundred kilometers south of the pole. If one were looking from space, it would appear that some deity was firing a string of oversized machine-gun bullets—tracer rounds—into Mars’ northern ocean.