But The Dark Lady, sent Mahnmut, thinking of his submersible. He’d not even run the last checks on the sub’s many systems.
They’re stowing her in the hold right now, sent Orphu from the Mab. I can feel the bumps. You can do your checklist when we’re in flight. Don’t dally down there, old friend. The tightbeam went from crackle to hiss as Orphu signed off.
Only one row back from the thin front line here, Hockenberry saw that the Amazons’ horses were huge… as big as Percherons or those Budweiser horses. There were thirteen of them and Virgil, bless his heart, had been right—the Amazon women’s armor left each of their left breasts bare. The effect was… distracting.
Achilles took three steps in front of the other men. He was so close to the blonde Amazon’s horse that he could have stroked its nose. He didn’t.
“What do you want, woman?” he asked. For such a huge, heavily muscled man, Achilles’ voice was very soft.
“I am Penthesilea, daughter of the war god Ares and the Amazon queen Otrere,” said the beautiful woman from high on her armored horse. “And I want you dead, Achilles, son of Peleus.”
Achilles threw back his head and laughed. It was an easy, relaxed laugh, and all the more chilling to Hockenberry because of that. “Tell me woman,” Achilles said softly, “how do you find the courage to challenge us, the most powerful heroes of this age, fighters who have laid siege to Olympos itself? Most of us are sprung from the blood of the Son of Kronos himself, Lord Zeus. Would you really do battle with us, woman?”
“The others can go if they want to live,” called down Penthesilea, her voice as calm as Achilles’ but louder. “I have no fight with Ajax, son of Telamon, or with the son of Tydeus or the son of Deucalion or the son of Laertes or the others gathered here. Only with you, son of Peleus.”
The men listed—Big Ajax, Diomedes, Idomeneus, and Odysseus—looked startled for a second, glanced at Achilles, and then laughed in unison. The other Achaeans joined in the laughter. Fifty or sixty more Argive fighters were coming up from the rear, the rockvec Mep Ahoo in their ranks.
Hockenberry didn’t notice as Mahnmut’s black-visored head swiveled smoothly around, and Hockenberry had no idea that Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo was tightbeaming the smaller moravec about the imminent collapse of the Brane Hole.
“You have offended the gods by your feeble attack on their home,” cried Penthesilea, her voice rising until it could be heard by the men a hundred yards away. “You have wronged the peaceful Trojans by your failed attack on their home. But today you die, womankiller Achilles. Prepare to do battle.”
“Oh, my,” said Mahnmut in English.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Hockenberry.
The thirteen women screamed in their Amazon language, kicked their warhorses’ sides, the giant mounts leaped forward, and the air was suddenly filled with spears, arrows, and the clatter of bronze points slamming into armor and onto hastily raised shields.
20
Along the coast of the northern Martian sea, called the Northern Ocean or the Tethys Sea by the inhabitants of Olympos, the Little Green Men—also known as zeks—have erected more than eleven thousand great stone heads. Each of the heads is twenty meters tall. They are identical—each showing an old man’s face with a fierce beak of a nose, thin lips, high brow, frowning eyebrows, bald crown, firm chin, and a fringe of long hair streaming back over his ears. The stone for the heads comes from giant quarries gouged into the cliffs of the geologic tumble known as Noctis Labyrinthus on the westernmost end of the four-thousand-two-hundred-kilometer-long inland sea filling the rift known as Valles Marineris. From the quarries at Noctis Labyrinthus, the little green men have loaded each uncarved block of stone onto broad-beamed barges and floated them the length of Valles Marineris. Once out into the Tethys, zek-crewed feluccas with lanteen sails have guided the barges into position along the coast, where hundreds of thronging LGM unload each stone and carve the head in place as it lies on the sand. When the carving is finished except for the hair on the back of the head, the mob of zeks roll each head to a stone basepad prepared for it, sometimes having to lift the head up cliffs or transport it across bogs and marshes, and then they pull it upright using a combination of pulleys, tackle, and shifting sand. Finally they set a stone stem from the neck into the base stone niche and rock the huge head into place. Then a dozen LGM finish the carving of the wavy hair while the majority of the little beings move on to work on the next head.
The identical faces all look out to sea.
The first head was erected almost an Earth-measured century and a half ago, at the base of Olympus Mons near where the surf of the Tethys Sea rolls in, and since then the little green men have placed another head every kilometer of the way, traveling east, around the great mushroom-shaped peninsula called Tempe Terra, then curving back south and into the estuary of Kasei Valles, then southeast along the marshes of Lunae Planum, then to both sides of the huge estuary and sea-within-a-sea of Chryse Planitia, then on both cliff-faced shores of the broad estuary of Valles Marineris, and finally—in just the last eight months—northeast along the steep cliffs of Arabia Terra toward the northernmost archipelagoes of Deuteronilus and Protonilus Mensae.
But this day all work on the heads has ceased and more than a hundred feluccas have carried the LGM—meter-tall green photosynthesizing hominids with transparent flesh, no mouth or ears and coal-black eyes—to a point on the broad beaches of Tempe Terra some two hundred kilometers across the curve of water from Olympus Mons. From here the island volcano of Alba Patera can be seen far out in the sea to the west and the incredible massif of Olympus Mons rises up over the shoulder of the world far to the southwest.
The stone heads line a cliff face here some several hundred meters back from the water, but the beach is broad and flat and it is here that all seven thousand three hundred and three zeks have gathered, creating a solid mass of green along the beach except for an empty semicircle of sand some fifty-one meters across. For several Martian hours, the little green men stand silent and motionless, their black coal-button eyes trained on the empty sand. Feluccas and barges bob slightly to the very low Tethys surf. The only sound is wind blowing in from the west, occasionally lifting sand and pelting it against transparent green skin or whistling very slightly among the low gorse plants beyond the beach and below the cliffs.
Suddenly the air smells of ozone—although the zeks have no noses to pick up this scent—and repeated thunderclaps explode close above the beach. Although the LGM have no ears, they feel these explosions of sound through their incredibly sensitive skin.
Two meters above the beach, there suddenly appears a three-dimensional red rhomboid about fifteen meters wide. This rhomboid widens but then grows pinched at the waist, until it resembles two red candy kisses. At the points of these kisses, a tiny sphere emerges and then grows into a three-dimensional green oval, which appears to have swallowed the original red rhomboid. The oval and rhomboid begin to spin in opposite directions until sand is thrown a hundred meters into the air.
The LGM stand in the growing storm and stare impassively.
The three-dimensional oval and rhomboid spin themselves into a sphere, completing the original shape’s flop-transition mirror rephrasing. A circle ten meters across appears in midair and seems to sink into the sand until a Brane Hole cuts a slice out of space and time. Because this Brane Hole is newborn, its protective world-sheet is still visible, petals and layers of eleven-dimensional energy protecting the sand, the air, Mars, and the universe from this deliberate degeneration of space-time fabric.