84

Their estimated twelve hours of continuous work took a little more than eighteen hours. The forty-eight tumbled missiles and missile tubes were more trouble to sort out, separate, and cut up than either Orphu or Mahnmut could have guessed. Some of the metal warhead casings had cracked completely away, leaving only the plastoid-alloy MRV cradles and the containment fields themselves, each glowing blue from its own Cerenkov radiation.

The sight would have been interesting if anyone other than the silent moravecs on the Queen Mab had been watching: the submersible The Dark Lady crouching over the hull of the sunken death sub, its belly searchlights illuminating mostly a world filled with silt, fanning anemones, torn cables, twisted wiring, and lethal, greengrown missiles and warheads. Brighter than the dappled daylight coming in through the Breach wall, brighter than the super-halogen bright searchlights aimed on the work area, brighter than the sun itself were the fires of the 10,000-degree-Fahrenheit cutting torches that both the blind Orphu and the silt-blinded Mahnmut were wielding as delicately as scalpels.

Girders, winches, pulleys, and chains were all in place and now in heavy use as the two moravecs and The Dark Lady herself supervised the winching-up of each MRVed warhead as it was cut away from the missile itself. The cargo hold of Mahnmut’s Europan submersible was never really empty; it was honeycombed with a programmable flowfoam that formed itself into fluted cathedral buttressings of internal bracing against terrible pressures when the hold was “empty” of cargo, but that could and did flow tight around any cargo—including Orphu of Io when he rode in the corner of the cargo bay. Now the flowfoam was adapting itself to cushion and support each ungainly lump of warhead as Mahnmut and Orphu ratcheted and cursed it into place.

At one point a little beyond halfway through the exhausting work, Mahmut pretended to pat the containment-field-glowing warhead itself as the flowfoam closed around it, as he said—

“What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”

“Your old friend Will?” asked Orphu as both moravecs dropped back into the confusion of agitated silt below to begin cutting away the next warhead.

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “Sonnet Fifty-three.”

About two hours later, just after they had secured another blue-glowing warhead in the now-crowded hold—they were spacing the black holes as far apart as they could—Orphu said, “This answer to our problem is costing you your ship. I’m sorry, Mahnmut.”

The Europan nodded, trusting his huge friend’s deep radar to pick up the motion. As soon as Orphu had suggested this approach, Mahnmut had realized that it meant losing his beloved Dark Lady forever—there was no way they could take the chance of removing the warheads from the Lady’s flowfoam cushioned hull and putting them into a different cargo bay. The very best case scenario now was that the moravecs would have another spacecraft up there in low earth orbit that could boost The Dark Lady and her planet-lethal cargo out and away from Earth, into deep space, as gently but quickly as possible.

“I feel that I just got her back,” said Mahnmut, hearing the pathetic tone in his own radio voice.

“They’ll build you another someday,” said Orphu.

“It wouldn’t be the same,” said Mahnmut. He had spent more than a century and a half in this little sub.

“No,” agreed Orphu. “Nothing will ever be the same after all this.”

At the end of the eighteen hours, after the last Cerenkov-glowing cluster of nascent black holes was loaded away, flowfoamed into place, and The Dark Lady’s cargo bay doors were shut, both moravecs were in a state of near total physical and nervous exhaustion as they hovered together above the wreck of the boomer.

“Is there anything we need to investigate or bring back from The Sword of Allah?” asked Orphu.

“Not at this time,” sent Prime Integrator Asteague/Che from the Queen Mab. The ship had been conspicuously quiet during the last eighteen hours.

“I never want to see the goddamned thing again,” said Mahnmut, too exhausted to care that he was speaking on the common channel. “It’s an obscenity.”

“Amen,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from the dropship circling above.

“Is there anything you guys want to tell us about what’s been going on up there with Odysseus and his girlfriend over the last eighteen hours or so?” asked Orphu.

“Not at this time,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che again. “Bring the warheads up. Be careful.”

“Amen,” said Mep Ahoo again, and there seemed to be no irony in the soldier ‘vec’s voice.

Suma IV was a damned good pilot, one had to grant him that—and Orphu and Mahnmut did. Suma IV actually hovered the dropship so that The Dark Lady remained fully submerged as the aircraft-spaceship’s much larger bay doors closed under it. Then Suma IV slowly drained out the seawater, but only as the dropship’s own flowfoam took the water’s place, encysting the submersible and its blue-glowing cargo in another layer of wrapping.

Orphu of Io had already used dropcables to scramble and scrabble to the roof of the dropship before The Dark Lady was ingested, but Mahnmut left his enviro-crèche only at the last moment, allowing the Lady to steady and monitor herself during the delicate lifting and placement. Mahnmut felt that he should have some last words as he stepped off his ship forever more, but other than a tightbeamed and unacknowledged Goodbye, Lady, to the submersible’s AI, he said nothing.

The dropship lifted out of the water, ocean streaming from its cargo venting tubes, and Mahnmut used the last of his strength—mechanical and organic—to haul himself up to the top of the dropship and then down through the smaller of two access hatches into the troop-carrier hold.

In any other circumstances, the confusion in the troop-carrier section would have been comic, but not that many things seemed humorous to Mahnmut at that moment. By retracting all of his manipulators and antennae, Orphu had just been able to squeeze through the larger of the two dropship hatches, but now the Ionian’s bulk filled most of the space where the twenty rockvec soldiers had been perched on their web seating. The soldiers now spilled over into the narrow access corridor going forward to the cockpit itself, black-barbed rockvecs and their weapons sprawled everywhere, and Mahnmut had to crawl over their chitinous forms to join Mep Ahoo and Suma IV in the cramped cockpit.

Suma IV was flying the hovering dropship manually, using the omnicontroller constantly to balance the ship and its shifting contents, playing the thruster tabs the way human pianists must have once played their instrument of choice.

“No more tie-down straps,” Suma IV said to Mahnmut without turning his head. “We used the last to harness your big friend into the troop-carrier space. Extend that last jumpseat and magtite yourself to the hull, please, Mahnmut.”

Mahnmut did as he was told. He realized that he was too tired to stand again—Earth’s gravity was terrible after all—and felt like weeping from the release of chemicals after the last eighteen hours of total effort and tension.

“Hang on,” said Suma IV.

The dropship engines roared and they rose slowly, vertically, meter by meter, no shocks, no surprises, until Mahnmut saw out the main cockpit window that they had reached an altitude of around two kilometers, and then they began to pitch forward slightly—the engines moving from the vertical to forward thrust. He could never have imagined that a machine could be handled so delicately.

Still, there were bumps and at each bump Mahnmut found himself holding his breath, feeling his organic heart pound as he waited for the black holes in the belly of the hold of the dropship to go critical. It would only take one and all the others would collapse into themselves a millionth of a second later.