Daeman tucked the pipe under his arms, crouched low, remembered Caliban’s long-armed squat, imitated it, and shoved off with all the remaining energy in his legs and arms. He floated upward, but slowly, far too slowly. He felt like he was barely moving by the time he got to the first extruded terrace some seventy or eighty feet up, and realized how weak he was as he used the terrace railing to push himself upward again, watching the shadows as he rose.
There were too many shadows. Caliban could leap at him from any of those darkened terraces, but there was nothing Daeman could do about it—he had to stay close to the wall and the terraces to keep pushing off, always moving, floating upward—quickly at first, then with dying speed until he chose the next terrace—feeling like a frog jumping from one stone and metal lily pad to the next.
Suddenly Daeman laughed out loud. His thermskin, beneath the dirt and mud and blood and grime, was green. He did look like some awkward, scrawny frog, squatting to push himself off vertically at every tenth railing of every tenth terrace. His laugh echoed hollowly through his commpads over his ears and shocked him back into silence except for his tortured breathing and grunts.
With a stab of fear, Daeman paused and did a somersault even as he floated higher. Have I passed the level where the sonie’s parked outside? The distance to the floor below seemed impossible—a thousand feet of empty air, at least—and the sonie was only . . . How many stories up? His heart pounding with panic, Daeman tried to remember the holo image in Prospero’s control room cell. Five hundred feet or so up? Seven hundred?
Sick with terror at having lost his way, Daeman floated out further from the wall and checked the panels of glass. Most glowed that sickly, ever-weakening orange. Some were clear this far up, silver with earthlight. None showed the white mark of the semipermeable membranes at the first airlock and Prospero’s door. Did I see such a window mark on the holo, or just assume there’d be one visible from the inside?
Floating almost to a halt now at the apogee of his last leap, Daeman wrenched his osmosis mask loose. He was going to vomit.
You don’t have time for that, idiot. He tried to breathe in the air up here, but it was too thin, too cold, too rank. Only semiconscious, Daeman pulled the mask back down. Why didn’t I bring the flashlight? I thought Harman might need it to tend to Hannah or to shoot at Caliban, but now I can’t make out the fucking windows.
Daeman forced himself to slow his breathing and to calm down. Before the gravity began pulling him down again toward that dark floor hundreds of feet below, he kicked and paddled his way farther out from the wall, rolling over onto his back like a swimmer looking up at the stars.
There. Another fifty feet up, on this wall. The white square on an opaque window panel.
Daeman did a pirouette, clasped the pipe between his chin and chest, and used both arms and his gloved hands in a powerful breaststroke. If he couldn’t get to that closest terrace now, he’d lose two hundred or more feet of altitude, and he didn’t think he had the strength to fight his way back up again.
He reached the terrace, grabbed the pipe with his left hand, and kicked his way vertical, timing it so perfectly that he slowed to a stop just as he reached the white-marked panel. Panting, his vision dimmed with sweat, Daeman extended his right arm—his hand and forearm passed through the membrane as if it were slightly sticky gauze.
“Thank you, God,” gasped Daeman.
Caliban hit him then, leaping out of the shadowed recesses under the next terrace up, long arms and longer legs wide and grasping, teeth glinting in earthlight.
“No,” grunted Daeman just as the monster struck, wrapping arms and legs and long fingers around the man, teeth snapping for Daeman’s jugular. The human managed to get his right forearm up to protect his throat—Caliban’s teeth ripping through flesh and meeting on bone—while the two forms, entangled and thrashing, blood fountaining in low-g around them, fell together through the thin air down to the next terrace, crashing into glass and plastic and wood and frozen post-human flesh as they tumbled into darkness there.
59
The Plains of Ilium
Mahnmut may have been the first to notice what was happening in the sky, sea, and earth around Ilium, but that was because he was expecting it. He hadn’t known what he was expecting . . . but certainly not what he saw now.
What do you see? asked Orphu on the tightbeam.
Ah . . . gasped Mahnmut.
A rotating sphere some hundreds of meters across had appeared in the sky several thousand feet above Ilium. Then a second one rotated into view just above the battlefield, centered between the city and Thicket Ridge. Mahnmut turned quickly and saw a third sphere pop into existence above the Achaean encampments, then a fourth one suddenly appearing several miles out to sea immediately in front of the scores of fleeing Achaean ships. A fifth one appeared to the north of the city; a sixth one to the south.
What do you see? demanded Orphu.
Uh . . . said Mahnmut.
All of the spheres showed flashing colors but were suddenly filled with stabbing fractal designs; then all resolved themselves into multiple images of Olympus Mons, seen from different distances, viewed from different angles, and framed by different perspectives; now all showed the Martian volcano and the blue Martian sky. One of the spheres settled into the plains of Ilium ahead so that the Martian ground in the hundred-meter-wide circle extended smoothly from the Trojan soil. The huge sphere to the west flattened to a circle in the sky and then sank until the Martian ocean was level with the Mediterranean Sea. Water surged back and forth between the two worlds. The Achaean ships tried to drop their sails, men quit rowing, but the high-beaked ships could not stop in time and sailed through the circle of boiling turbulence into the Martian northern ocean, with white-sloped Olympus Mons looming in the background. No matter which direction Mahnmut looked, he could see the Martian volcano, even through the spheres now resolving themselves into circular portals high in the sky over Ilium.
What’s going on? shouted Orphu over the tightbeam.
Ah . . . said Mahnmut again.
Scores of black flying objects hurtled through the circular portals in the sky, out of the circle slicing into the sea behind Mahnmut, even through the ground-level portal—more arch now than circle, since its base was under Trojan soil—opening less than a hundred meters in front of Achilles and Hector and his men. The flying objects threw themselves through the sky like giant hornets and Mahnmut noticed that they were black, barbed, sharp-planed, not much larger than Orphu, and powered by visible pulse-engines in their bellies, sides, and sterns. The machines had bulbous, black-glassed cockpits and were festooned with whip comm antennae and what looked to be weapons—missiles, guns, bombs, ray projectors. If these were new-generation chariots from the gods, they’d gone high-tech industrial in a hurry.
Mahnmut! bellowed Orphu.
Sorry, said the little moravec. Almost stuttering, he hurried to describe the chaos in the skies, seas, and fields around them. He had trouble catching up to real time.
What are Achilles and Hector and all the other Greeks and Trojans doing? asked Orphu. Running?
Some are, said Mahnmut. But most of the Achaeans around me and the Trojans near your ridge are running into the closest circle-portal.
Running into it? repeated Orphu of Io. Mahnmut had never heard his big friend sound flabbergasted before.
Yeah. Achilles and Hector started it—they shouted, bellowed something, held their spears and shields high, and just . . . well . . . rushed into it. I guess they see Olympus Mons and know what it is and just . . . attacked.