The shock wave hit seconds after the flash, rolling up from the south in a wall of dust and sending visible stress waves rippling through the atmosphere itself. The wind speed went from five kilometers per hour out of the west to a hundred klicks per hour from the south in less than a second. Hundreds of tents were ripped from their moorings and flown into the sky. Horses whinnied and fled their masters. The whitecaps blew out away from the land.
The roar and shock wave knocked everyone standing—everyone except Hector and Achilles—to the ground. The noise and shattering overpressure were overwhelming, vibrating human bones and moravec solid-state innards, as well as setting Mahnmut’s organic parts quivering. It was as if the Earth itself was roaring and howling in anger. Hundreds of Achaean and Trojan soldiers two kilometers or so to the south of the ridge burst into flame and were thrown high into the air, their ashes falling on thousands of cowering, fleeing men running north.
A section of the south wall of Ilium crumbled and fell, carrying scores of men and women with it. Several of the wooden towers in the city burst into flame, and one tall tower—the one from which Hockenberry had watched Hector saying good-bye to his wife and son just days ago—fell into the streets with a crash.
Achilles and Hector had their hands to their faces, shielding their eyes from the terrible flash that threw their shadows a hundred meters behind them on Thicket Ridge. Behind them, great boulders that had stood firm high on the Amazon Myrine’s mounded tomb vibrated, slipped, and fell, crushing running Achaeans and Trojans alike. Hector’s polished helmet stayed on his head, but his proud crest of red horsehairs were torn off in the high winds that followed the initial shock wave.
Has something happened? tightbeamed Orphu.
Yes, whispered Mahnmut.
I can feel some sort of vibration and pressure right through my shell, said Orphu.
Yes, whispered Mahnmut. The only reason the Ionian hadn’t tumbled away on the winds and blast was that Mahnmut had lashed the rope around the largest rock he could find on the lee side of their sheltering boulder.
What . . . began Orphu.
Just a minute, whispered Mahnmut.
The mushroom cloud was rising through ten thousand meters now, smoke and tons of radioactive debris lifting toward the stratosphere. The ground vibrated so fiercely to aftershocks that even Achilles and Hector had to drop to one knee rather than be thrown down like the tens of thousands of their men.
This atomic mushroom cloud resolved itself into a face.
“YOU WANT WAR, O MORTALS?” bellowed the bearded face of Zeus in the rising, roiling, slowly unfurling cloud. “THE IMMORTAL GODS WILL SHOW YOU WAR.”
51
The Equatorial Ring
Prospero sat there in a long, royal-blue robe covered with brightly colored embroidery showing galaxies, suns, comets, and planets. He held a carved staff in one age-motttled right hand and there was a foot-thick book under the palm of his left hand. The carved chair with the broad armrests was not quite a throne, but close enough to impart a sense of magisterial authority reinforced by the magus’s cool stare. The man was mostly bald, but a mane of vestigial white hair poured back over his ears and fell in curls to the blue of his robe. The once-grand head was now perched on an old man’s withered neck, but the face was iron-firm with character, showing coolly indifferent if not actively cruel little eyes, a bold beak of a nose, a forceful declaration of a chin not yet lost in jowls or wattles, and a sorcerer’s thin lips turned up in ancient habits of irony. He was, of course, a hologram.
Daeman had watched Harman burst through the semipermeable membrane and fall to the floor under the unexpected gravity, just as Daeman had done. Then, seeing Daeman sitting in a comfortable chair with his osmosis mask off, Harman had peeled his own mask off, breathed in the fresh air deeply, and then staggered to the other empty chair.
“It’s only one-third Earth gravity,” said Prospero, “but it must seem like Jupiter after a month in near zero-g.”
Neither Harman nor Daeman replied.
The room was circular, about fifteen meters across, and essentially a glassed-in dome from the floor up. Daeman hadn’t seen it while they were approaching the crystal city on the chairs because they’d come in at the asteroid’s south pole and this was the north pole, but he imagined it must look like a long, slender metal stalk with this glowing mushroom at its end. The only light in the room came from the soft glow of a circular virtual control console in the center of the space, behind Prospero, and the earthlight and moonlight and starlight flooding in above and around them. It was bright enough that Daeman could see the careful workings on the magus’s embroidered robe and the hand-oiled carvings on his staff.
“You’re Prospero,” said Harman, his chest rising and falling quickly under the blue thermskin. The fresh air in the room had been a shock to Daeman as well. It was like breathing a rich, thick wine.
Prospero nodded.
“But you’re not real,” continued Harman. The man looked solid. The robe fell in beautiful but dynamic folds and wrinkles in the one-third gravity.
Prospero shrugged. “This is true. I’m nothing more than a recorded echo of a shadow of a shade. But I can see you, hear you, talk with you, and sympathize with your travails. It’s more than some real beings are capable of doing.”
Daeman looked over his shoulder. He was holding the black gun loosely in his lap.
“Will Caliban come here?”
“No,” said Prospero. “My former servant fears me. Fears this speaking memory of me. If the blue-eyed hag who bore him was here on this isle, that damned quantum-witch Sycorax, she’d be on you here in a minute, but Caliban fears me.”
“Prospero,” said Daeman, “we need to get off this rock. Back to Earth. Alive. Can you help us?”
The old man leaned his staff against his chair and held up both mottled hands. “Perhaps.”
“Just perhaps?” said Daeman.
Prospero nodded. “As an echo of a recorded shadow, I can do nothing. But I can give you information. You can act if you will, and if you have the will. Few of your kind do anymore.”
“How do we get out of here?” asked Harman.
Prospero passed his hand over the book and a hologram rose above the center of the circular console behind him. It was the asteroid and the crystal city as seen from some miles out in space, the gold-glassed towers turning slowly beneath the vantage point as the asteroid turned on its axis. Daeman glanced at the bold blue and white of the Earth coming into view outside the windows and realized that the image was synchronized—it was a real-time view from somewhere out there.
“There!” cried Harman, pointing. He tried to jump out of his chair, but the gravity made him stagger and grab the armrest for support. “There,” he said again.
Daeman saw it. On an outside slab of terrace five or six hundred feet up that first tall tower where they’d entered, its metal shell glowing now in Earthlight—a sonie. “We searched the city,” said Daeman. “We never thought that there might be a vehicle parked outside the city.”
“It looks like the sonie we took to Jerusalem,” said Harman, leaning forward the better to see the holographic display.
“It is the same sonie,” said Prospero. He moved his palm again and the image disappeared.
“No,” said Daeman. “Savi told us that sonies couldn’t fly to the orbital rings.”
“She didn’t know they could,” said the old magus. “Ariel freed it from the voynixes’ stones and programmed it to come up here.”
“Ariel?” Daeman stupidly repeated. He was so, so hungry, and so very tired. He sorted through his memory. “Ariel? The avatar of the biosphere below?”