“Well, you don’t have to shout as well,” Orphu said drily. “The k-link works just fine. What’s happening now?”
“Well . . . not much,” said Mahnmut. “The captains are all shaking hands up and down the ridge. Bells and gongs are ringing out from the walled city. The armies are milling around—regular foot soldiers from each side crossing the no-man’s-land to clap each other on the shoulder and exchange names or whatever—and everyone looks like they’re ready to fight, but . . .”
“But there’s no one to fight,” said Orphu.
“Right.”
“Maybe the gods won’t come down to fight,” said the Ionian.
“I doubt that,” said Mahnmut.
“Or maybe the Device will blow Olympos into a billion pieces,” said Orphu.
Mahnmut was silent at the thought of this. He had seen the gods and goddesses up there, sentient beings by the thousands, and he had no wish to be a mass murderer.
“How long until your jury-rigged timer activates the Device?” asked Orphu, although he must have known himself.
Mahnmut checked his internal chronometer. “Fifty-four minutes,” he said.
Overhead, dark clouds suddenly boiled and roiled. It appeared that the gods were coming down after all.
When Mahnmut had dived into the Caldera Lake atop Olympus Mons, he had little hope of escape. He needed a minute or so to prep the Device for triggering—for detonation?—and he thought some depth and pressure might give him that time.
It did. Mahnmut dove to 800 meters, feeling the familiar and pleasant sensation of pressure pushing on every square millimeter of his frame, and found a ledge on the west side of the steep caldera wall where he could rest, secure the Device, and ready it. The gods did not pursue him into the water. Whether they didn’t like to swim or foolishly thought that their lasering and microwaving of the surface would drive him up, Mahnmut didn’t know or care.
He’d been negligent in not configuring a remote triggering mechanism before he and Orphu began their short-lived balloon trip, so he did so now, 800 meters down in the dark lake, his chestlamps illuminating the ovoid macromolecular Device. Removing the access cover of its transalloy shell, Mahnmut cannibalized bits of himself—one of his four power cells to provide the necessary 32-volt trigger signal, one of his three redundant tightbeam/radio receivers arc-welded to the trigger plate by his wrist laser, and a timer made from his external chronometer. Finally, he’d attached a crude motion-contact sensor rigged from one of his own transponders, so the Device would auto-trigger at this depth if anyone other than he touched it.
If these ersatz gods come down for me now, I’ll trigger the thing manually, he’d thought as he sat on the ledge 800 meters below the lake surface. But he didn’t want to destroy himself—if destruction was, indeed, the Device’s purpose—and he didn’t want to hide underwater all day. But the Hockenberry human had promised to QT back for him, so he’d wait. He wanted to see Orphu again. Besides, their mission—the late Koros III’s and Ri Po’s mission, actually—was to deliver the Device to Olympus Mons and transmit its arrival via the communicator. Both these objectives had been met. In a sense, Mahnmut and the Ionian had completed their mission.
Then why am I hiding 800 meters under the surface in this impossible Caldera Lake? He thought of the water boiling above him as the gods poured their anger and heat-rays into the lake and had to chuckle in his moravec way—this water should be boiling away anyway, since the top of Olympos Mons should be in near-vacuum.
Then the time had come for the human named Hockenberry to return to rescue him, and, amazingly, he did.
“Describe Earth,” said Orphu on Thicket Ridge. Mahnmut had slid down from the shell and was leading his friend by the rope leader he’d looped around the levitation harness. “And are you sure we’re on Earth?” Orphu added.
“Pretty sure,” said Mahnmut. “The gravity is right, the air is right, the sun looks the right size, and the plant life matches the images in the databanks. Oh, so do the human beings—although all these men and women seem to have memberships in the solar system’s best health and exercise club.”
“That good-looking, huh?” said Orphu.
“As humans go, I think so,” said Mahnmut. “But since these are the first Homo sapiens I’ve met in person, who knows? Only Hockenberry of all the men I’ve met here looks as ordinary as the men and women in the photos and vids and holos you and I have in our data banks.”
“What do you think . . .” began Orphu.
Sshhh, said Mahnmut on the tightbeam. He’d pulled the k-link so he didn’t have to ride on Orphu’s shell any more. The clouds continued to swirl above the battlefield. Achilles is addressing the troops—both Trojans and Achaean.
Can you understand him?
Of course I can. The files downloaded just fine, although some of the colloquialisms and cuss words I have to guess from context.
Can the other humans hear him without a public address system?
The man’s got lungs of iron, said Mahnmut. Metaphorically speaking. His voice must be carrying all the way to the sea in one direction and all the way to the walls of Troy in the other.
What’s he saying? asked Orphu.
I defy you, gods . . . blah, blah, blah . . . and now cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war . . . blah, blah, blah . . . recited Mahnmut.
Wait, said Orphu. Did he really use that Shakespeare quote?
No, said Mahnmut. I’m loosely translating.
Whew, said the Ionian on the tightbeam. I thought we had an amazing bit of plagiarism there. How long until activation of the Device?
Forty-one minutes, said Mahnmut. Is there something wrong with your . . . He stopped.
What? said Orphu.
In the middle of Achilles’ defiant cri de coeur against the gods, the King of the Gods appeared. Achilles stopped speaking. Two hundred thousand male faces and one robot face turned skyward on the plains of Ilium.
Zeus descended from the roiling black clouds in his golden chariot, pulled by four beautiful holographic horses.
The Achaean master-archer, Teucer, standing close to Achilles and Odysseus, took aim and launched an arrow skyward, but the chariot was too high and—Mahnmut was sure—surrounded by a powerful forcefield. The arrow arced and fell short, dropping into the thickets of brambles along the base of the ridge where the generals stood.
“YOU DARE TO DEFY ME?” boomed Zeus’s voice across the length and breadth of the fields and shore and city where the armies were gathered. “BEHOLD THE CONSEQUENCE OF YOUR HUBRIS!”
The chariot swung higher and then accelerated toward the south, as if Zeus were leaving the field in the direction of Mount Ida just visible on the southern horizon. Perhaps only Mahnmut, with his telescopic vision, saw the small silver spheroid Zeus dropped from the chariot when it was about fifteen kilometers south of them.
“Down!” roared Mahnmut on full amplification, shouting the word in Greek. “For your lives, get down now!! Don’t look to the south!!”
Few obeyed his command.
Mahnmut grabbed Orphu’s halter and ran for the slight shelter of a large boulder on the ridgetop thirty meters away.
The flash, when it came, blinded thousands. Mahnmut’s polarizing filters automatically went from Value 6 to Value 300. He didn’t pause in his wild running, tugging Orphu along behind him like a giant toy.