The tall onyx rockvec clicked to its full height. “Yes, Commander.”
“Send a squad into the city—that city, Ilium—and set up a full-strength forcefield to protect it,” ordered Orphu. “Set up another to protect the Achaean encampment you see along the coast.”
“Full-strength field, sir?” asked the centurion leader. Mahnmut knew that it would probably take the spacecraft’s entire fusion reactor’s output to power such a field.
“Full-strength,” said Orphu. “Able to repel lance, laser, maser, ballistic, cruise, nuclear, thermonuclear, neutron, plasma, antimatter, and arrow attack. These are our allies, Centurion Leader.”
“Yes, sir.” The onyx figure turned and tightbeamed. A dozen more troopers descended the ramp carrying massive projectors. The dark troopers jogged double-time in both directions from the ridge until only Centurion Leader Ahoo remained there next to Mahnmut and Orphu. The landed hornet fliers buzzed into the air and circled, weapons still swiveling.
Perimus walked closer. The crest on the man’s polished but battered helmet barely came up to Centurion Leader Ahoo’s chiseled chest. Perimus lifted his fist and rapped on the rockvec’s duraplast breastplate with his knuckles. “Interesting armor,” said the Trojan. He turned back to Mahnmut. “Little attendant, we’re going to go join Hector in the fight. Do you want to join us?” He pointed to the huge circle bitten out of the sky and ground to the south. More Trojan and Achaean units were marching—not running, but marching in orderly fashion, chariots and shields gleaming, banners flying—through the quantum portal, their speartips catching Earth’s sunlight on this side of the slice, Martian light on the other.
“Yes,” said Mahnmut, “I want to join you.” To Orphu he tightbeamed, You going to be okay here, Old Timer?
I have Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo to protect me, sent the Ionian.
Mahnmut marched next to Perimus down the slope—the thickets there trampled almost flat now by nine years of the ebb and flow of battle—leading the small contingent of Trojans to join Hector. At the bottom of the hill, they paused as an odd figure staggered toward them—a naked, beardless man with mussed hair and slightly wild eyes. He was walking gingerly, picking his way over the stones on bloody feet, and wore only a medallion.
“Hockenberry?” said Mahnmut in English. He doubted his own visual-recognition circuits.
“Present and accounted for,” grinned the scholic. “Howdy, Mahnmut.” In Greek, he said, “Good afternoon, Perimus, son of Megas. I’m Hockenberry, son of Duane, friend of Hector and Achilles. We met this morning, remember?”
Mahnmut had never seen a live human being naked before this minute, and he hoped it would be a long, long time until he saw a second one. “What happened to you? To your clothes?” he asked.
“It’s a long story,” said Hockenberry, “but I bet I could condense it and finish it before we march through that hole in the sky over there.” To Perimus, he said, “Son of Megas, is there any chance I could get some clothes from your group?”
Perimus obviously recognized Hockenberry now and remembered how both Achilles and Hector had deferred to him earlier at their interrupted captains’ conference on Thicket Ridge. He turned and snarled at his men, “Clothes for this lord! The best cape, the newest sandals, the best armor, the most polished greaves, and the cleanest underwear!”
Autonous stepped forward. “We don’t have any extra clothes or armor or sandals, noble Perimus.”
“Strip and give him your own immediately!” bellowed the Trojan commander. “But kill the lice first. That’s an order.”
62
Ardis
The sky continued to fall all that late afternoon into evening.
Ada had rushed out onto Ardis Hall’s long lawn to watch the bloody streaks slash the sky—sonic booms crashing and re-crashing across the wooded hills and river valley—and just stood there as the guests and disciples screamed and overturned tables and ran down the road toward the distant fax pavilion in their panicked eagerness to escape.
Odysseus joined her and they stood there on the grass, a two-person island of immobility in a sea of chaos.
“What is it?” whispered Ada. “What’s happening?” There were never fewer than a dozen fiery streaks in the sky, and sometimes the evening sky was all but occluded by the meteors.
“I’m not sure,” said the barbarian.
“Does it have something to do with Savi, Harman, and Daeman?”
The bearded man in the tunic looked at her. “Perhaps.”
Most of the burning trails scorched the sky and disappeared, but now one—brighter than the others and audible, screeching like a thousand fingernails dragged across glass—burned its way to the eastern horizon and struck, throwing up a billowing cloud of flame. A minute later a terrible sound rolled over them—so much louder and deeper than the fingernail scraping of the meteor’s passage that the rumble made Ada’s back teeth ache—and then a violent wind came up, knocking leaves off the ancient elm and tumbling most of the tents that had been set up in the meadow just beyond the driveway turnaround.
Ada gripped Odysseus’s powerful forearm and clung to it until her fingernails drew blood without her noticing or Odysseus saying anything.
“Do you want to go inside?” he said at last.
“No.”
They watched the aerial display for another hour. Most of the guests had fled, running down the road when they could find no available droshky or carriole or voynix to pull them, but about seventy disciples had stayed, standing with Ada and Odysseus on the sloping yard. Several more objects struck the earth, the last one more violent than the first. All of the windows on Ardis Hall’s north side shattered, shards raining down in the evening light.
“I’m so glad that Hannah is safe in the firmary right now,” said Ada.
Odysseus looked at her and said nothing.
It was the man named Petyr who came out of the manor at sunset to tell them that the servitors were down.
“What do you mean, ‘down’?” demanded Ada.
“Down,” repeated Petyr. “On the ground. Not working. Broken.”
“Nonsense,” said Ada. “Servitors don’t break.” Even with the meteor shower brighter now with the sun setting, she turned her back on the view and led Odysseus and Petyr back into Ardis Hall, stepping carefully across the broken glass and shattered plaster.
Two servitors were on the floor of the kitchen, one more in the upstairs bedroom. Their communicators were silent, their manipulators limp, the little white-gloved hands dangling. None responded to proddings, commands, or kicks. The three humans went out back and found two more servitors where they had fallen on the yard.
“Have you ever seen a servitor fail?” asked Odysseus.
“Never,” said Ada.
More disciples gathered. “Is this the end of the world?” asked the young woman named Peaen. It wasn’t clear who she was addressing.
Finally Odysseus spoke over the sky roar. “It depends on what’s falling.” He pointed his powerful, stubby finger at the e- and p-rings just visible behind the meteor storm pyrotechnics. “If it’s just some of the big accelerators and quantum devices up there, we should survive this. If it’s one of the four major asteroids where the posts used to live . . . well, it could be the end of the world . . . at least as we know it.”
“What’s an asteroid?” asked Petyr, ever the curious disciple.
Odysseus shook his head, waving the question away.
“When will we know?” asked Ada.
The older bearded man sighed. “A few hours. Almost certainly by tomorrow evening.”