On the Achaeans’ right flank, nearest the ocean, row upon row of armored men turn their crested helmets to look to their leader and the oldest Achaean captain present this day, wily Nestor, breaker of horses. Nestor has placed himself out ahead of all others there on the right flank, red-caped and visible in his four-horsed chariot, so he will be the first on this flank to fall or the first to fight his way through the battle line of the immortals. In nearby chariots, obviously eager to ride into combat with their father, are Nestor’s sons, Antilochus—Achilles’ good friend—and Antilochus’ taller and more handsome brother, Thrasymedes.
A hundred more captains are here this day, each carrying his proud name and his father’s proud name, together leading tens of thousands more men, each of those men holding noble names and complex histories, each man carrying their fathers’ proud names into battle to glory and life, or taking those names down with them to the House of Death this day.
To the right of the massed Achaeans, spread out along the shore in no particular order, standing silent and green, are several thousand zeks—Little Green Men who have poured out of their barges and feluccas and flimsy sailing ships from Ocean Tethys and the Valles Marineris Inland Sea and who stand witness here this day for reasons known only to themselves, and perhaps to their avatar Prospero or the unmet god called Setebos. They stand mute along the softly crashing line of surf, and neither the Greeks nor the Trojans nor the immortal gods have yet interfered with them.
A half mile or so out to sea behind the zeks, sails catching the rosy Martian sunset and oars reflecting the golden sea glow, range more than a hundred Achaean ships of the line. Now the sails are slackened, the oars are shipped, and shields and spears line the ships’ sides. Crests of yellow, red, purple, and blue and the gleaming tops of helmets are all that can be seen of the more than 3,000 Achaean fighters on those ships. In the space between the massed ships, barbed black fins are cutting through the sun-gilded seas. Hinted at now only by their periscopes and the tops of their black-metal sails, three Belt moravec ballistic missile submarines cruise through the Martian sea.
Spread thinly for two miles behind the Trojans and Achaeans on land are massed the Belt moravec infantry—27,000 black-armored, beetle-armed ground troopers carrying weapons both heavy and light. Energy and ballistic rockvec artillery batteries are arrayed as far back as fifteen kilometers behind the front lines, their projectors and tubes aimed at Olympos and the massed immortals. Above all the human and moravec lines circle and dart 116 hornet-fighter aircraft, some tuned to stealth, others still as boldly black as when first sighted earlier in the day. In orbit overhead, so the Belt moravecs have reported, are 65 combat spacecraft circling Mars in orbits ranging from just a hair above the Martian atmosphere to several million miles out beyond hurtling Phobos and Deimos. The Belt moravec military commander on the ground has reported to the Europan moravec Mahnmut, who has translated to Achilles and Hector, that all grades of bombs, missiles, forcefields, and energy weapons on all these ships are cocked and locked. The report means nothing to the heroes and they have disregarded it.
On the same flat area near Achilles, to the right of Odysseus and the Atrides but standing apart, are Mahnmut, Orphu, and Hockenberry. Mahnmut had taken one look at the gathering armies earlier in the afternoon and, with the Trojan commander Perimus’ help, immediately commandeered a chariot with which to fetch Orphu through the quantum tunnel slice, dragging the levitated Ionian behind the chariot—in Orphu’s own words—like a “dinged-up U-Haul trailer.” Mahnmut didn’t know what that was exactly—his Lost Age colloquial data banks were not as obsessively overflowing as Orphu’s—but he promised himself he’d look it up someday. If he survived.
Scholic Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., is dressed in a Trojan captain’s cape, armor, and clothes, and although he seems thrilled to be witnessing all this, he also appears to have some trouble standing still. While the thousands of warriors up to the level of noble Achilles wait almost motionless for the final stragglers in each army—human and immortal—to assemble, Hockenberry is shuffling from foot to foot.
“Something wrong?” whispers Mahnmut in English.
“I think something’s crawling in my shorts,” Hockenberry whispers back.
The armies are assembled. The silence is uncanny—there is no noise from either side except for the slow hiss of distant waves rolling in to the pebbled beach, the occasional whinny of a horse harnessed to a battle chariot, the soft sound of Martian breeze through the cliff rocks of Olympos, the air-hiss of flying chariots circling and the higher buzz of hornet fighters, the occasional inadvertent soft clank of bronze on bronze as some soldier shifts position, and the powerful, omnipresent negative sound of tens of thousands of anxious men trying to remember to breathe normally.
Zeus steps forward, passing through the aegis like a giant stepping through a rippling waterfall.
Achilles walks out into no-man’s-land to face the Father of the Gods.
“DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY BEFORE YOU AND YOUR SPECIES DIE?” says Zeus, his tone conversational but so amplified that it carries to the farthest reaches of the field, even to the men on the Greek ships at sea.
Achilles pauses, looks over his shoulder at the masses of men behind him, turns back, looks past Zeus toward Olympos and the masses of gods in front of him, and then crooks his neck to look up again at towering Zeus.
“Surrender now,” says Achilles, “and we’ll spare your goddesses’s lives so they can be our slaves and courtesans.”
64
Ardis Hall
Daeman slept for two days and two nights, waking fitfully only when Ada fed him broth or Odysseus bathed him. He woke again briefly the afternoon that Odysseus shaved him, drawing a straight razor through his lathered beard, but Daeman was too tired to speak or listen to language. Nor did the sleeping man pay any attention to the roars in the sky as the meteors returned the next night and then the next. He didn’t wake when a small bit of something traveling several thousand miles per hour plowed into the field behind the house, exactly where Odysseus had taught for weeks. The impact excavated a crater fifteen feet across and nine feet deep and broke every remaining window on Ardis Hall.
Daeman awoke mid-morning of the third day. Ada was sitting on the edge of his bed—her bed, it turned out—and Odysseus was leaning against the door frame, arms crossed.
“Welcome back, Daeman Uhr,” Ada said softly.
“Thank you, Ada Uhr,” said Daeman. His voice was hoarse and it seemed to him that he had to use an inordinate amount of energy just to croak a few words. “Harman? Hannah?”
“Both better,” said Ada. Daeman had never noticed how perfectly green the young woman’s eyes were. “Harman is out of bed and downstairs eating this morning, and Hannah is learning to walk again. Right now she’s on the front lawn, in the sun.”
Daeman nodded and closed his eyes. He had the overwhelming urge to keep them closed and to drift back into dreams and sleep. It hurt less there and right now his right arm ached and burned terribly. Suddenly he opened his eyes and pulled the covers off that arm, filled with a terrible certainty that they had amputated the limb while he slept and that all he was feeling was phantom pain from a phantom limb.
The arm was red, swollen, scarred, the wound from Caliban’s terrible bite stitched together with heavy thread, but the arm was there. Daeman tried to move it, to wiggle his fingers. The pain made him gasp, but the fingers had moved, the arm had lifted a bit. He dropped it back onto the sheet and gasped for a while.