A second after the first impact, the entire, mile-long asteroid shuddered, sending concentric waves of dust and gas into space after the city debris. Then the asteroid broke apart.
“Hurry!” said Harman.
Daeman didn’t know what he was doing. He’d dived the ship toward Earth at full velocity, staying just ahead of the flames and debris and waves of frozen gases, but now various red and yellow and green alarms were showing all over the virtual control board. Worse than that, there was sound outside the sonie at long last—a suspicious hiss and crackle growing in seconds to a terrifying roar. Worst of all, an orange glow around the edges of the sonie was quickly turning into a sphere of flame and blue electrical plasma.
“What’s the matter?” shouted Hannah. “Where are we?”
Daeman ignored her. He didn’t know what to do with the throttle and attitude control. The roar rose in volume and the sheath of flames thickened around them.
“Are we damaged?” shouted Harman.
Daeman shook his head. He didn’t think so. He thought perhaps it had something to do with coming back into the Earth’s atmosphere at such speed. Once, at a friend’s house in Paris Crater, when Daeman was six or seven, despite his mother’s admonitions not to do so, he’d slid down a long banister, popped off onto the floor at high speed, and then slid on his bare hands and knees along his mother’s friend’s thick carpet. It had burned him badly and he’d never done that again. This friction felt something like that to Daeman.
He decided not to tell Harman and Hannah his theory. It sounded a little silly, even to himself.
“Do something!” shouted Harman over the roar and crackle all around them. Both men’s hair and beards were standing on end in the center of all this electrical madness. Hannah—bald, even her eyebrows gone—stared around her as if she’d wakened to madness.
Before the noise drowned out everything else, Daeman shouted at the virtual controls, “Autopilot!”
“Engage autopilot?” The sonie’s neutral voice was almost inaudible under the entry roar. Daeman could feel the heat through the forcefield and knew that couldn’t be good.
“Engage autopilot!” shouted Daeman at the top of his lungs.
The forcefield fell in on the three humans, squeezing them tightly to their couches as the sonie flipped upside down and the stern engines fired so fiercely that Daeman thought his teeth were going to rattle out of his head. His arm hurt terribly under the deceleration pressure.
“Re-enter on pre-programmed flight path?” the sonie asked calmly, speaking like the idiot savant it was.
“Yeah,” shouted Daeman. His neck was aching from the terrible pressure and he was sure that his spine was going to snap.
“Is that an affirmative?” asked the sonie.
“Affirmative!” screamed Daeman.
More thrusters fired, the sonie seemed to bounce like a thrown rock skipping off a pond’s surface, was wrapped twice more in reentry fire, and then somehow straightened itself out.
Daeman raised his head.
They were flying—flying so high that the edge of the Earth was still curved ahead of them, so high that the mountains far beneath them were visibly mountains only by the white snow texture against the brown and green earth colors—but flying. There was air out there.
Daeman cheered, reached over and hugged Hannah in her blue thermskin suit, then cheered again, raising his fist toward the sky in triumph.
He froze with his fist and eyes raised. “Oh, shit,” he said.
“What?” said Harman, still naked except for the osmosis mask now dangling around his neck. Then the older man looked up, following Daeman’s gaze. “Oh, shit,” he said.
The first of a thousand fireballs—debris from the city or the linear accelerator or the broken asteroid—roared by them less than a mile away, trailing a vertical wake of flame and plasma ten miles behind it, almost flipping the sonie over with the violence of its passage. More meteors roared down at them from the burning sky above.
61
The Plains of Ilium
Mahnmut arrived on the Thicket Ridge just as nine tall black figures stepped out of the spacecraft that had landed amidst the hornet fliers, all nine striding down the ramp into the swirling dust storm created by their landing. The figures were humanoid by way of insectoid, each about two meters tall, each covered with shiny, chitinous duraplast armor and a helmet that reflected the world around them like polished onyx. The individuals’ arms and hands reminded Mahnmut of images he’d seen of a dung beetle’s appendages—painfully curved, hooked, barbed, and blackly thorned. Each carried a complex, multibarreled weapon of some sort that looked to weigh at least fifteen kilograms. The figure in the lead paused in the swirling dust and pointed directly at Mahnmut.
“You there, little moravec, is this Mars?” The amplified voice spoke in inter-moon Basic English and arrived via both sound and tightbeam.
“No,” said Mahnmut.
“It’s not? It’s supposed to be Mars.”
“It’s not,” said Mahnmut, sending all this to Orphu. “It’s Earth. I think.”
The tall soldierly form shook its helmeted head as if this was an unacceptable answer. “What kind of moravec are you? Callistan?”
Mahnmut drew himself up to his full bipedal height. “I’m Mahnmut from Europa, formerly of the exploration submersible The Dark Lady. This is Orphu of Io.”
“Isn’t that a hard-vac moravec?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to his eyes, sensors, manipulators and legs? Who cracked his shell like that?”
“Orphu is a war veteran,” said Mahnmut.
“We’re supposed to report to a Ganymedan named Koros III,” said the armored form. “Take us to him.”
“He was destroyed,” said Mahnmut. “In the line of duty.”
The tall black figure hesitated. It looked at the other eight onyx warriors and Mahnmut had the idea they were conferring via tightbeam. The first soldier turned back. “Take us to the Callistan Ri Po then,” he ordered.
“Also destroyed,” said Mahnmut. “And before we go any further, who are you?”
They’re rockvecs, sent Orphu on his private tightbeam channel. “Aren’t you rockvecs?” the Ionian asked on the common tightbeam wavelength. It had been so long since Orphu had communicated with anyone except Mahnmut that the smaller moravec was shocked to hear his voice on the common band.
“We prefer to be called Belt moravecs,” said the leader, turning to address Orphu’s shell. “We should medevac you to a combat repair center, Old Timer.” He gestured to some of the other combat moravecs and they began moving toward the Ionian.
“Stop,” commanded Orphu, and his voice held enough authority to freeze the tall forms in their booted tracks. “I’ll decide when to leave the field. And don’t call me Old Timer, or I’ll have your gears for garters. Koros III was in charge of this mission. He’s dead. Ri Po was second in command. He’s dead. That leaves Mahnmut of Europa and me, Orphu of Io, in command. What’s your rank, rockvec?”
“Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, sir.”
Mep Ahoo? thought Mahnmut.
“I’m a commander,” snapped Orphu. “Is the chain of command clear here, trooper?”
“Yes, sir,” said the rockvec.
“Brief us on why you’re here and why you think this is Mars,” said Orphu in the same tone of absolute command. Mahnmut thought his friend’s voice on tightbeam was dipping into the subsonic the bass was cranked so deep. “Immediately, Centurion Leader Ahoo.”