Mahnmut knew that he would have to communicate with the little green men again, but he hated the thought of reaching into one of the creatures’ chests, of killing it through communication. No, he wouldn’t do that until he had to.

He stood, returned to Orphu’s corpse, and began disconnecting the power cells.

“Hey,” said Orphu on the commband, “I’m still eating.”

Mahnmut was so startled he actually jumped backward in the sand. “Jesus, you’re alive.”

“As much as any of us moravecs are ‘alive.’ “

“God damn you,” said Mahnmut, feeling like laughing and crying, but mostly like hitting the big, battered horseshoe crab. “Why didn’t you answer me when I called? And called? And called?”

“What do you mean?” said Orphu. “I was in hibernation. Have been ever since the air and energy ran out on The Lady. You expect me to chat with you while I’m in hibernation?”

“What is this hibernation shit?” said Mahnmut, pacing around Orphu. “I never heard of moravecs going into hibernation.”

“You Europan vecs don’t have it?” asked Orphu.

“Obviously not.”

“Well, what can I say? Working alone in Io’s radiation torus, or anywhere in Jovian space, we hardvac moravecs sometimes run into situations where we just have to shut down everything for a while until someone can get to us to repair and recharge us. It happens. Not often, but it happens.”

“How long could you have stayed in this . . . hibernation?” asked Mahnmut, his anger shifting into something like giddiness.

“Not long,” said Orphu. “About five hundred hours.”

Mahnmut extended fingers through his manipulator pads, picked up a rock, and bounced it off Orphu’s shell.

“Did you hear something?” asked the Ionian.

Mahnmut sighed, sat in the sand near the end of Orphu that used to house his eyes, and began describing their current situation.

Orphu convinced Mahnmut that he’d have to communicate with the LGM through a translator again. The Ionian hated the idea of causing the death of one of the little green men as much as Mahnmut did—especially since the LGM had rescued him—but he argued that the mission depended on them communicating and communicating fast. Mahnmut had tried talking again, had tried sign language, had tried drawings in the sand—showing maps of the coast where they were and the volcano they had to get to—had even tried the idiot’s version of speaking a foreign language: shouting. The LGM all stared calmly but did not respond. Finally it was a little green man who took the initiative, stepping forward, seizing Mahnmut’s hand, and pulling it to his chest.

“Shall I?” Mahnmut asked Orphu over the commline.

“You have to.”

Mahnmut winced as his hand was pulled through the yielding flesh, as his fingers encircled and then gripped what could only be a beating green heart in the warm, syrupy fluid of the little man’s body.

HOW

CAN

WE

HELP

YOU?

Mahnmut had a hundred questions he wanted to ask, but Orphu helped him put first things first.

“The sub,” said Orphu. “We have to get it out of sight before a chariot flies over.”

Through a combination of language and images, Mahnmut conveyed the thought of moving the submersible a kilometer or so to the west, of pulling it into the ocean-cave in the cliff that jutted out to sea at the headland.

YES

Scores of the little green men began work even while Mahnmut stood there, his hand deep in the translator’s chest. They began sinking rods into the sand, running more cables to The Dark Lady, and rigging pulleys. The translator waited with Mahnmut’s hand around his heart.

“I want to ask him about the stone heads,” said Mahnmut over the commline. “Ask him who they are, why they’re doing this.”

“Not until we try to find a way to get to Olympus,” insisted Orphu.

Mahnmut sighed and communicated the request for help in getting to the large volcano. He transmitted images of Olympus Mons as he’d seen it from orbit and asked if there was anyway the LGM could help them travel either overland over the Tempe Terra highlands or east along the Tethys coast for more than four thousand kilometers, then south along the Alba Patera coast to Olympus Mons.

THAT

IS

NOT

POSSIBLE

“What does he mean?” asked Orphu when Mahnmut relayed the response. “Does he mean it’s not possible to help us, or to travel east that way?”

Mahnmut had felt something like relief when the LGM translator had all but pronounced their mission over, but now he forwarded Orphu’s request for clarification.

NOT

POSSIBLE

FOR

YOU

TO

TRAVEL

EAST

SECRETLY

BECAUSE

THE

DWELLERS

ON

OLYMPOS

WOULD

SEE

YOU

AND

KILL

YOU

“Ask him if there’s another way,” said Orphu. “Maybe we could go overland along the Kasei Valles.”

NO

YOU

WILL

GO

TO

THE

NOCTIS

LABYRINTH

BY

FELUCCA

“What’s a felucca?” asked Orphu when Mahnmut relayed the answer. “It sounds like an Italian dessert.”

“It’s a two-masted, lateen-rigged sailing ship,” said Mahnmut, whose training for the black underseas of Europa had included everything available in download about sailing the liquid seas of Earth. “Used to ply the Mediterranean millennia ago.”

“Ask them when we can leave,” sent Orphu.

“When can we leave?” asked Mahnmut, feeling the question as a vibration through his fingers and a tickling in his mind.

THE

STONE

BARGE

ARRIVES

IN

THE

MORNING.

THE

FELUCCA

WILL

BE

WITH

IT.

YOU

CAN

LEAVE

ON

IT.

“We’ll need some other things salvaged from our submersible,” said Mahnmut. He sent the images of the Device and the two other pieces of cargo in the hold, visualized it being brought ashore and transported to the sea cave. Then he sent the image of LGM rolling Orphu to the same cave.

As if in response, dozens of the little green men began to wade and paddle back out to the ship. Others walked closer to Orphu and began arranging the rollers into an Orphu-sized pallet.

“I don’t think I can hold this man’s heart any longer,” Mahnmut said to Orphu over the comm. “It’s like grabbing a live electric wire.”

“Let go then,” said the Ionian.

“But . . .”

“Let go.”

Mahnmut thanked the translator—thanked all of them—and released his grip. Just as with the first translator, this little green man fell to the sand, twitched, hissed, dried out, and died.

“Oh, God,” whispered Mahnmut. He leaned back against Orphu’s shell. The little green men were already lifting the Ionian’s bulk, sliding rollers under him.

“What are they doing?”

Mahnmut described the translator’s body and the work all around him—their preparation to transport Orphu and the Device and other objects already being hauled in from the ship, the cables being attached to the sub, the hundreds of LGM pulling at the cables from the shore, already dragging The Dark Lady west toward the ocean cave where it would be safe from airborne eyes.

“I’ll go with you to the cave,” Mahnmut said dully. The translator’s body was like a dry, shriveled brown husk on the red sand. All of the interior organs had dried up and the fluid had flowed out of it, making the mud under it run like red blood. The other little green men ignored the translator’s corpse and were already beginning to roll Orphu along the sand toward the west.