I struggle to my feet, hunched over, as the huge woman approaches with her eye full of business.

QT somewhere, idiot, I advise myself.

Where?

Anywhere but here!

Hypsipyle grabs me by my tunic front, tears the tunic, and aims a ham-fisted blow at my face. I raise my forearms to block the blow and the impact of her big-knuckled fist almost breaks the radius and ulna in both arms. I bounce off the wall and she grabs me by the shirt again and punches me in the belly.

Suddenly I’m on my knees again, retching, trying to clutch both belly and balls, no longer having enough wind in me even to manage a squeak.

Hypsipyle kicks me in the ribs, breaking at least one, and I roll to my side. I can hear the slap of the guards’ sandals as they rush up the main staircase.

Now I remember. The last time I saw Hypsipyle she was protecting Helen and I sucker-punched her to drag Helen away with me.

The slave-woman lifts me like a rag doll and slaps me—first forehand, then backhand, then forehand again. I feel teeth loosen and find myself feeling glad that I’m not wearing the reading glasses I used to have to wear.

Jesus Christ, Hockenberry, rages part of my mind. You just watched Achilles kill Zeus-Who-Drives-the-Storm-Clouds in single combat, and here you are getting the shit kicked out of you by one lousy Lesbian.

The guards burst into the room, spearpoints raised toward me. Hypsipyle turns toward them, still holding my bunched tunic in one of her huge hands, the tops of my feet scraping the floor, and holds me out, offering me to their spears.

I QT the two of us to the top of the great wall.

A blast of sunlight around us. Trojan warriors yards away exclaiming and leaping back. Hypsipyle is so astonished at this instantaneous change of place that she drops me.

I use the few seconds of her confusion I have left to kick her heavy legs out from under her. She scrambles to all fours, but—still on my back—I pull back my legs, coil them, and kick her clean off the open rampart into the city below.

That’ll teach you, you great muscled cow, teach you not to mess with Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D. in Classical Literature…

I get to my feet, dust myself off, and look down from the rampart. The great muscled cow has landed on the canvas roof of a marketplace stall backed to the wall, has torn through the canvas, landed again in a heap of what look to be potatoes, and is currently running toward the stairs near the Scaean Gate to scramble back up to where I wait.

Shit.

I run along the rampart toward where I now see Helen standing with the other members of the royal family on the broad reviewing area of the wall, near Athena’s Temple. Everyone’s attention is firmly fixed on the battle on the beach—my Achaeans’ doomed last stand, obviously in its last stages now—so no one interdicts me before I’m grabbing Helen by her beautiful white arm.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she says, marveling. “What is it? Why do you…”

“We’ve got to get everyone out of the city!” I gasp. “Now! Right now!”

Helen shakes her head. Guards have whirled and gone for their spears or swords, but Helen waves them away. “Hock-en-bear-eee… it is wonderful… we are winning… the Argives fall like wheat before our scythe… any minute now Noble Hector will…”

“We have to get everyone out of the buildings, off the wall, out of the city!” I shout.

It’s no good. The guards are all around us now, ready to protect Helen, King Priam, and the other royal family members here by killing me or dragging me off in an instant. I’ll never convince Helen or Priam to warn the city in time.

Panting, aware of Hypsipyle’s heavy running footsteps coming down the rampart toward us, I gasp, “The sirens. Where did the moravecs put the air raid sirens?”

“Sirens?” says Helen. She looks alarmed now, as if my madness must be dealt with quickly.

“The air raid sirens. The ones that used to wail months ago when the gods attacked the city by air. Where did the moravecs—the machine-toy people—put the equipment for the air raid sirens?”

“Oh, in the anteroom of the Temple of Apollo, but Hock-en-bear-eeee, why do you…”

Keeping my grip firm on her upper arm, I visualize the steps of Apollo’s Temple here in Ilium and QT us there an instant before the guards and one big, angry woman from Lesbos can grab me.

Helen gasps as we pop into solidity on the white steps, but I drag her up into the anteroom. There are no guards here. Everyone in the city seems to be on the walls or in a high place to watch the end of the war play out on the beach to the west.

The equipment is here, in the small acolytes’ changing room next to the main temple anteroom. The air raid siren warning had been automatic, triggered by the moravecs’ antiaircraft missile and radar sites—now gone—that had been stationed outside the city—but, just as I remembered, the moravec engineers had put a microphone with the other electronic gear here, just in case King Priam or Hector had wanted to address the entire Trojan population through the thirty huge air-raid-siren loudspeakers set around the walled city.

I study the equipment for just a few seconds—it had been made simple enough for a child to use so that the Trojans could manage it themselves, and child-simple technology is exactly the kind Dr. Thomas Hockenberry can manage.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee….”

I flip the switch that says PA SYSTEM ON, throw the toggle that reads LOUDSPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT, lift the archaic-looking microphone, and begin babbling, hearing my own words echoing back from a hundred buildings and the great walls themselves—

“ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ALL PEOPLE OF ILIUM… KING PRIAM IS ISSUING AN EARTHQUAKE WARNING… EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! LEAVE ALL BUILDINGS… NOW! GET OFF THE WALLS… NOW!! RUN FROM THE CITY INTO OPEN COUNTRY IF YOU CAN. IF YOU ARE IN A TOWER, EVACUATE IT… NOW!! AN EARTHQUAKE WILL HIT ILIUM AT ANY SECOND. AGAIN, KING PRIAM IS ISSUING AN EARTHQUAKE EVACUATION ORDER EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY … LEAVE ALL BUILDINGS AND SEEK OPEN SPACE NOW!!”

I echo on for another blaring minute, then switch off, grab the staring, open-mouthed Helen, and drag her out of the Temple of Apollo into the central marketplace.

People are milling and talking, staring at the various speaker locations from where my blaring announcement had come, but no one seems to be evacuating. A few people wander out of the large buildings that adjoin this central open plaza, but almost no one is running for the open Scaean Gate and the countryside as my announcement had commanded them to.

“Shit,” I say.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee, you are very worked up. Come to my chambers and we shall have some honeyed wine and…”

I tug her along behind me. Even if no one else is headed through the open gate and out away from the buildings, I sure as hell am. And I’m going to save Helen whether she wants me to or not.

I slide to a stop just before entering the narrowing avenue at the west end of the huge plaza. What am I doing? I don’t have to run like an idiot. I just have to visualize Thicket Ridge way out beyond the walls and QT us there…

“Oh, shit,” I say again.

Above us, horizontal, seemingly miles wide, descending rapidly, is the kind of Brane Hole I’d seen above Olympos earlier—a flat circle rimmed by flames. Through the Hole I can see dark sky and stars.

“Damn!” I decide at the last second not to quantum teleport—the chances of us getting caught in quantum space just as the Brane Hole hits us is too great.

I tug the staring, horrified Helen a dozen yards back toward the center of the huge plaza. With any luck we’ll be out of the range of the falling walls and buildings.

The hoop of fire falls around us past Ilium, falls past the surrounding hills, plains, marshes, and beaches for a circle of at least two miles, and the instant after it falls, we fall. There is a sensation of the entire city of ancient Troy being on an elevator suddenly cut free of its cables, and two seconds later all hell breaks loose.