The slice in the sphere slid closed. There were six cracked-leather contour seats in the center of the sphere, and he and Harman threw themselves into side seats as Savi ran her hand over a flat metal wedge protruding above the front seat. A softly glowing projection control panel—much more complicated than the one on the sonie—pulsed into life around her. She touched a virtual red dial, ran a bright yellow circle along a green slide, and slipped her hand into a form-fitting controller.
“What if it doesn’t start?” asked Harman, whom Daeman now nominated for master of the poorly timed rhetorical question. A score of voynix pulled themselves up and over the high black mesh wheels and jumped like giant grasshoppers onto the top of the glass sphere. Daeman flinched and ducked low.
“If it doesn’t start, we die,” said Savi. She twitched the virtual controller to the right.
There was no engine roar or gyro hum, just a soft buzz so low as to be almost subsonic. But searchlights stabbed out in front of the crawler and a dozen other virtual displays flicked into life.
The half-dozen voynix atop the passenger sphere had been pounding and clawing on the glass, but suddenly they slid away and fell to the ground twenty feet below. They weren’t injured or damaged—each voynix leapt to its feet and jumped for the sphere again—but each then fell away again, unable to gain purchase on the surface they’d been clinging to only a few seconds earlier.
“It’s a micron-thick forcefield,” muttered Savi, her attention on the glowing designs and icons appearing all over the virtual panel. “Frictionless. It was designed to keep snow or rain from accumulating on the canopy, but it appears to shed voynix as well.”
Daeman turned to watch a score of voynix scrambling up the huge wheels, battering at the metal mesh, pulling at the struts and braces. “We should go,” he said.
“Yes.” Savi pushed the virtual controller forward and the crawler crashed through the ancient church wall, fell a dozen feet before the wildly articulated wheels found purchase on the wall and ground, and then accelerated forward. The lane was slightly narrower than the crawler, but this didn’t slow the machine a bit. Walls several thousand years old collapsed on either side until the crawler lurched out onto David Street and Savi turned it left, toward the west, away from the blue beam still stabbing skyward behind them.
Countless voynix scrabbled in pursuit while dozens more threw themselves in front of the speeding crawler and leapt for the passenger sphere. Still accelerating, the crawler ran over those in the street that failed to dodge and left the rest of the pack behind. Half a dozen persistent voynix still clung to the struts and were hacking away at the metal, clawing at the spinning wheels.
“Can they do damage?” asked Harman.
“I don’t know,” said Savi. “We’re approaching the Sho’or Yafa—the Jaffa Gate. Let’s see if we can get rid of them.”
She swerved the still-accelerating crawler into walls on the left and then on the right side of David Street, finally smashing through an arch lower than the crawler. Vibration and falling masonry shook the clinging voynix off, but Daeman turned to see most of them rising out of the rubble and joining the pack giving chase. Then the crawler was through the gate, out of the old city, and picking up speed down the graveled hill where they’d left the sonie, but the only sign of their flying machine was a heap of rocks thirty feet high surrounded by forty or fifty more voynix. Immediately the creatures left the mound and rushed to cut off the crawler. Savi ran over some, dodged others, and found an ancient highway running west from the city.
“Tough machine,” said Harman.
“They built tough machines toward the end of the Lost Age,” said Savi. “With nano-maintenance, it should last damned near forever.” She’d pulled her thermskin night-vision lenses from her pack and was driving with the crawler’s headlights off now. Daeman found the effect of hurtling along in the dark unsettling as he heard the big wheels crunching over rusted artifacts on the road—probably ancient abandoned vehicles. Then he realized that they were hurtling over a bridge and then rumbling through a cut between hills. He couldn’t see the pursuing voynix now in the dark—only the receding blue blade of light leaping straight up from the dark hill of Jerusalem—but he knew the voynix were still back there, still coming on.
Savi told them that it was about thirty miles to the coastline of the former Mediterranean Sea. They made the distance in less than ten minutes.
“Look at this,” said Savi, slowing the crawler. She removed her night-vision glasses and flicked on the headlights, fog lights, and searchlights.
A mass of five or six hundred voynix had made a wedge near where the land suddenly tilted down into the dry Mediterranean Basin.
“Do we turn?” asked Harman.
Savi shook her head and accelerated the crawler forward. Later, Daeman thought that the sound of the machine hitting so many voynix at such high speed had been somewhat like a hailstorm he had heard on a metal roof in Ulanbat many years ago. But this was very large hail.
The crawler reached the former shoreline, Savi cried “Hang on,” and the machine was airborne for ten seconds as it jumped the drop between shore and former sea. Then the six huge wheels hit the ground, the struts absorbed most of the shock and stabilized them, and they drove straight ahead down into the Basin, headlights and searchlights still stabbing white cones out of the darkness.
Daeman looked back and saw the surviving voynix, silhouetted by the distant blue beam, lining the shoreline behind them. “They won’t follow?” he asked.
“Into the Basin?” said Savi. “Never.” She slowed the crawler to a more reasonable speed, but before she slipped on her glasses and shut off the lights, Daeman saw that they were following a smooth red-clay road through verdant fields of crops. There were black metal crosses rising above the level of the wheat and corn and sunflowers and flax out there in the dark, and, impaled on each cross, was what looked to be a pale, writhing, naked human body.
34
The Coast of Ilium, Indiana
Achilles raged, roared, and tore at the tent wall where the goddess Athena had disappeared, dragging the body of Patroclus. Then the man-killer went mad.
His guards rushed in. Still naked, Achilles lifted the first man and threw him at the head of the second guard. The third guard heard a roar and found himself also flying through the air, tearing through the canvas wall of the tent. The fourth threw down his spear and ran to wake the Myrmidons to let them know that their lord and captain had been possessed by a demon spirit.
Achilles gathered up his breechcloth, his tunic, his breastplate, his shield, his polished bronze greaves, his sandals, and his spear, wrapped them in a sheet, and, taking up his sword, cut his way through three canvas walls of tent. Outside, he shoved over the large tripod left burning in the center of his camp and ran past the darkened tents—toward the dark sea and away from all the encampments of men, toward his mother, the goddess Thetis.
The waves crashed in to shore, only the whites of each curl visible in the darkness here away from the fires. Achilles paced back and forth on the wet sand. He was still naked, his armor and his weapons scattered on the beach. While he paced, he pulled at his long hair and moaned aloud, occasionally crying out his mother’s name in anguish.
And Thetis, daughter of the sea god Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea, answered Achilles’ call, appearing from the salt-green depths, rising up from the rolling surf like a mist, but then solidifying into the tall form of the noble goddess. Achilles ran to her like an injured child and fell to one knee in the wet sand. Thetis cradled his head against her wet breast while he sobbed.
“My child—why the weeping? What sorrow has hurt your heart?”