But the skyhook was astronomical in scope, and made even a mountain range set on its end look puny. In this case, the mountain range Menelaus saw, white with glaciers, and now covered as if with a spilled pepperbox by subatmospheric meteorite impacts, was over seven hundred miles from northernmost to southernmost ridge. The skyhook was well over two hundred twenty thousand miles from base to geosynchronous balance point. The iron column had been a hair less wide in diameter than the hypocycloid tunnel of the depthtrain system: nine and a half feet. In contrast the skyhook was some two and a half miles in diameter and over fifty thousand feet high.

If someone had lit a yardstick on fire and, with the help of a large crossbow, flung it straight up the side of the Empire State Building and into the clouds beyond, some mote smaller than an ant, looking upward in awe, may have been impressed with the hugeness of the yardstick—until its little mind adjusted to the scale.

5. Pain

He felt the hands of Mickey and Soorm on him, helping him back to the throne, and he felt nine distinct types of pain: aches, agonies, scalds, bone fracture, laceration, throbs, gashes, pangs, and smarts.

Treacherous numbness pretending not to be pain, and lightheadedness brought on by blood loss, shock, cold, panic, blows to the face and head, lack of sleep, nanite interference with nerve flow, or brought on by improperly too-rapid petrifaction and thaw, that he did not consider to be “pain”—these were like wading pools left behind by the tide compared to pain’s true ocean. The things like where his nose hurt from being slammed into a coffin, or where his head ached from being pummeled by the musketstock of a dog; while he might have complained were he healthy that these were painful, compared to the overloaded torrent of pain signals jerking and throbbing and cutting like ice and flashing like angry lightning down his nerves, he would have laughed to call a mere broken nose or cut lip pain.

So it was that when Soorm gasped and Mickey flinched in surprise; and he fell awkwardly into the seat; and the sensation in his arm was only that of having red-hot wires yanked inexpertly up and down through the marrows of his bones; and his skull barked against the metal backrest—that was so slight that he merely smiled, wincing only slightly because he discovered his lip was cut.

“Godling, you are in trouble,” said Mickey in Virginian.

Menelaus, who was absorbed in recollecting the visual details of the scene overhead and outside, had only the smallest fragment of his many-layered mind to spare, and so he said, “I think we are in trouble. That mass of Von Neumann crystal was traveling beyond escape velocity, maybe beyond orbital velocity, and it may be the first of several such launches. I’ve toyed with the idea, of course, of using the train acceleration system to launch a vehicle into orbit, but the friction problem has always stopped me. In this case…”

Only then did he realize that Mickey, who had no goggles with an external view, could not possibly be talking about the launch he had just seen, or even known what was going on overhead and outside. The noise of micrometeorites landing with explosive force along the rocks and hills overhead could be heard, buried here under scores of feet of bedrock and layers of armor, as something fainter than the tap-tap of the drops of a summer shower on the roof. Mickey probably did not leap from that sense impression to conclude that Exarchel had just successfully pirated the technology of Pellucid and created a small-scale orbital version of itself using frighteningly advanced Xypotechnology.

He reached up and pulled the goggles off, absentmindedly proffering them toward Keirthlin, who was not looking at him. Her silvery eyes were on the gathered men facing him.

Their hair was smeared with blood and offal, sharpened bones piercing nose or earlobes, and dressed in white leather flayed from human victims. They were standing on the highest tier of the dais, and had both captured muskets and antique pikes and halberds pointed at him.

Of the twelve men, four were civilians: one wore the grape leaf design of a vintner, one was dressed in the spirals and formulae of a genetic alchemist, one wore a surcoat emblazoned with the snakes and birds of an apothecary, and one was in a black robe adorned with the cogwheels and smokestack of a factory hand. The rest wore the frozen and berserk expression of Demonstrators, the warrior-zealots of the Witches.

Behind them, carrying wands instead of muskets, were Fuamnach and Louhi, Twardowski of Wkra, and Drosselmeyer of Detroit. Drosselmeyer had in his hand a jeweled pistol of the Blue Men, and he had managed to ignite the gems of the barrel to a soft, sinister glow.

Mickey stood to the left of the throne, leaning on his charming wand and looking remarkably nonchalant for a man facing a firing squad. Soorm was on all fours next to the left arm of the throne, his tail lashing, eyes retracted, head lowered, teeth bared; but the expression on him looked like something between a grin and a sneer. Keirthlin the Gray in her black parka stood behind the throne, her hand on the tall backrest. Her fur hood was down, her goggles parked on her brow, and her blue hair hung like a banner down her back; but her strange silver eyes were calm as if she used a mental discipline to neutralize all fear.

“Yes, we are in trouble,” said Menelaus with a sigh.

“What do you mean, ‘we,’ White Man?” asked Mickey.

6. Burn

Menelaus closed his eyes again, because he was still trying to elicit one last bit of visual information from the photons that had struck his eyes. The image was clear enough in his imagination: the vast blue swath of immensity, longbow-curved, hanging in the heaven huge as the rings of Saturn as seen from its innermost moon, had been slightly brighter on the eastern limb than the western. It could not be sunlight. It was an energy discharge of thrusters or attitude-correction jets of some sort, imparting an impulse to the immense mass. It was a maneuvering burn.

The implication of that was clear. The Bell, or whatever intelligence was directing it, had noticed that the north and south magnetic poles of the planet were not where they should be and had seen the eruption of the thin sliver of core material shoot up past mantle and crust, atmosphere and stratosphere—and it was correcting its orbital elements to move the mouth of the skyhook toward the open and defenseless, roofless tomb.

“No, my friend,” said Menelaus to Mickey with a sigh. “I mean ‘we.’ Those of us in this chamber, on this continent, or on this planet. I mean the human race, and I don’t just mean unmodified elder men. I mean all the human races, living or ghost. Us. All of us.

“I thought the skyhook was something the Blue Men had created. Then I thought it was Melusine technology. Now, I do not know. Maybe Einstein was wrong. Maybe the Hyades got here faster than the laws of physics allow, or can accelerate mass without energy, or can derive more energy from a gram of mass than total conversion allows. Because that object, which is bigger than anything man-made has any right to be, is sure acting like a Hyades instrumentality.”

He opened his eyes.

There stood Illiance to one side of the line of armed men, in a coat of blank, pure, and gemless blue, and a look of unselfconscious pride almost like a glow.

To the other stood Fatin Simon Fay, pretty as a schoolgirl in her white cotton dress and peach sash, hair snared in a net that hung down her neck, and in her face was such darkness that Menelaus could not put a name to it. It was a passion beyond mere anger or shame or thirst for revenge.

“Why, Miss Fay,” he said in Virginian. “Pardon my manners for not getting up. What can I do for you?”