“God damn it!” shouted Daeman. He’d listened to this meaningless drivel long enough. “I’m hungry! I want some food!”
“Wait,” said Harman. “I see something.” He pointed up and ahead of their direction of travel.
“It’s the firmary,” said Savi.
She was right. They’d swum-kicked another exhausting half mile through the underwater light of the dead asteroid city, ignoring the floating gray mummies of the dead post-humans they’d encountered, until they could clearly see the rectangle of clear plastic three hundred feet or so up one of the glowing walls. Inside, stretching for hundreds of yards, were row upon row of familiar healing tanks filled with naked old-style human beings, busy servitors—Daeman almost wept at the familiar sight—and other shapes moving to and fro in the bright hospital light within the room.
“Wait,” gasped Daeman. They’d been swimming and kicking through the thin, toxic air close to the ground, finding stanchions, terraces, dead trees, and other solid objects from which to kick off, but Daeman was exhausted. He’d never worked this hard.
Although visibly impatient to fly her way up to the glowing infirmary, Savi doubled back and floated near the panting Daeman. Harman looked up at the clear-walled room with something like hunger in his eyes.
Savi handed Daeman her bottle and he finished the last of the water without hesitation or asking permission. He was dehydrated and worn out.
“I promised Ada that I’d take her with us,” Harman said softly.
Both Daeman and the old Jew looked at him.
“I was sure we’d be in a spaceship,” said Harman with an embarrassed shrug. “I promised her I’d stop at Ardis Hall and pick her up.”
“She was angry at you anyway,” said Daeman between gasps for air. The osmosis mask never seemed to supply all the oxygen he needed.
“Yes,” said Harman.
Savi pushed aside a chewed gray corpse that floated out of the kelp, its frozen white eyes seeming to stare at them in reproach. “I doubt very much if Ada would be all that thankful to be here right now,”she said. She pointed up at the infirmary. “But you should be, Harman. This was your goal, wasn’t it? To get to the infirmary and negotiate a few more years?”
“Something like that,” said Harman.
She nodded toward the corpse. “It doesn’t look like it’s the posts you’ll be negotiating with.”
“Do you think the firmary is automated?” asked Harman. “That it’s just the servitors who’ve been keeping it running, faxing us up, repairing us for our allotted five Twenties, and then faxing us back to our dull little lives these past few centuries?”
“Why don’t we go up and find out?” said the old woman.
They got into the glowing, glass-sided rectangle through a white square of semipermeable wall just like the one at the airlock.
It was the firmary. It not only had light and air, it somehow had one-tenth Earth gravity. Daeman fell on his hands and knees coming through the wall, unable to adapt so quickly to the light but persistent tug of gravity. The sudden change, plus the welcome sight of the oh-so-familiar servitors, plus his terror in being back in the firmary so soon after the allosaurus episode, made his legs too weak for him to stand even in the swimming-pool g-field.
Savi and Harman walked from tank to tank. Savi had slipped her osmosis mask down and tested the air. “Thin, but there’s a terrible stench,” she said, her voice sounding strange and high-pitched. “They must need air for something here, but it’s too foul to breathe. Keep your masks on.”
Daeman needed no more prompting; he kept the mask in place.
The servitors ignored them, tending to various virtual control panels. Clear pipelines and tubes showed green and red fluid flowing to and from the tanks. Harman stared in each ten-foot-high holding tank. The human bodies in each were, for the most part, almost perfect, but unformed, the flesh too slick, the skulls and groin areas hairless, the eyes white. Only a few of the floating forms were nearly complete, and on these, eyes with color and torpid intelligence blinked out at them.
Daeman walked behind the other two, staying farther away from the tanks. He looked at these proto-humans, remembered his hazy images from his tank time only days earlier, and he shuddered again, backing away from the tanks until he bumped into a counter. A servitor floated around him, ignoring him.
“They’re evidently not programmed to deal with humans outside the tanks,” Savi said. “Although if you interfered with their work enough, they’d probably do something to get you out of the way.”
Suddenly a green light blinked on one of the vats holding a fully rebuilt body—a young woman, with blue eyes and red hair on her head and groin—and the fluid in the tank began bubbling wildly. A second later the body was gone. A few seconds after that, another body materialized in the tank—this one a pale man with staring dead eyes, and a wound on his forehead.
“They have a faxportal in each tank!” cried Daeman. Then he realized, of course they must. That’s how their bodies were brought up here each Twenty, or after each serious injury. Or death. “We could use these faxnodes,” he said.
“You might be able to,” said Savi, her face close to one of the tanks. “Or perhaps not. The fax is coded for the body in the tank. The faxing machinery might not recognize your codes and might just . . . flush you.”
Colored fluids flowed into the tank with the new corpse. Clusters of tiny blue worms appeared from an aperture, swam to the dead man, and burrowed into his battered skull and into his bloated, white flesh.
“Still want your extra tank time?” Savi asked Harman.
Harman only rubbed his chin and squinted down the multiple rows of glowing tanks. Suddenly he pointed. “Holy Christ,” he said.
The three approached slowly, half walking, half floating in the low but no longer negligible gravity. Daeman simply did not believe what he was seeing.
A third of the tanks at this end were filled with fluid but empty of human bodies. But there were bodies—parts of bodies—on every available surface here: the floor, the tables, the tops of servitor consoles, on top of disabled servitors themselves. At first glance, Daeman thought—hoped—that these were more mummified remains of the posts, as horrible as that was, but these were no mummies. Nor were they the remains of post-humans.
The firmary was something’s smorgasbord.
Lying on the long table ahead of them were human body parts—white, pink, red, moist, bloody, fresh. A dozen forms on that table, male and female, seemingly still wet from the tanks, lay eviscerated—organs scooped out, meat gnawed off bloody ribs. A human head lay under the table, blue eyes staring up in what might have been a second of shock as something or someone ate the body to which it had been attached. A small pile of hands lay in front of a tall-backed swivel chair turned away from the table.
Before any of them could speak to each other on the commline, the chair swiveled around. For a second, Daeman thought it was another human body propped up in the chair, but this one was greenish, intact, and breathing. Yellow eyes blinked. Impossibly long forearms and clawed fingers unfolded. A lizardy tongue flicked out over long teeth.
“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as theyself,” said what Daeman realized had to be the real Caliban. “Thou thoughtest wrong.”
Savi and Harman grabbed Daeman as they kick-flew their way up the length of the firmary, Daeman screaming into the comm the same way he’d screamed on the way up in the chair. They hit the white wall dead on, passed through it without pause—feeling the thermskins clutch them tighter as they hit the freezing near-vacuum outside the firmary—and then kicked strongly off the clear wall as they dove toward the ground three hundred feet below.
Savi and Harman released Daeman’s arms as they paused on a platform sixty feet above the city floor. He had time to notice the floating mummies all around, bits of their throats and bellies bitten away with the same bite radius as the humans inside the firmary, realized that he was about to vomit into hi
s breathing mask, and then the two on either side of him found something solid to kick from and swam toward the darkness ahead.
Daeman tugged up his mask in desperation and vomited into near-vacuum and stinking, cold air. He felt his eardrums bursting and his eyes swelling, but he tugged the mask back in place—smelling his own vomit and fear—and kicked off after Savi and Harman. He didn’t want to run. He just wanted to curl up, float in a tight ball, and throw up again. But even Daeman realized that he didn’t have that choice. Flailing wildly, looking over his shoulder at the glow of the firmary, Daeman swam and ran and kicked for his life.
Caliban caught them in the darkest corner of the city, where the wild-kelp beds swayed to the coriolis of the slowly turning asteroid. All of the glass walls of the city here were clear, showing them the cloud-whitened earth floating by for several minutes and then several minutes of darkness broken only by the cold stars. It was in the darkness that Caliban came.
The three huddled together in the darkness there.
“Did you see him come out of the firmary?” gasped Savi.
“No.”
“I didn’t see anything after we ran,” gasped Harman.
“Was it a calibani?” gasped Daeman, realizing that he was weeping, not caring that he was. He asked the question with his last reservoir of hope.
“No,” said Savi over the comm, her tone dashing Daeman’s last hopes. “It was Caliban himself.”
“Those bodies . . .” began Harman. “Fifth Twenties?”
“It looked like younger ones, too,” whispered Savi. She had the black gun in her hand and was swiveling, peering into the darkness between the strands of swaying kelp.
“Maybe the thing used to harvest just the Fifth Twenties,” whispered Harman over the comm. “But it’s gotten bolder. Impatient. Hungrier.”
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” hissed Daeman. It was the oldest invocation known to humankind, even if they didn’t know what it meant. His teeth were chattering
“Still hungry?” asked Savi. Perhaps she was attempting to calm Daeman down with some dark approximation of humor. “I’m not,” she said.
“I am,” said Caliban over their radio frequencies. The monster floated out of the kelp, cast his net over the three of them, batted the gun out of Savi’s hand, and gathered them in like fish.
44
Olympus Mons
It felt strange to Mahnmut not to have Orphu in tightbeam range. He hoped his friend was safe.
The gods burst into the room a second after the human, who had never identified himself, quantum teleported out. Mahnmut didn’t believe in invisibility other than good stealth material, but he was obviously invisible to the tall gods and goddesses who crowded into the room and knelt around Hera. Mahnmut slipped out between the bronzed legs and white togas and began retracing his way through the labyrinth of corridors. He discovered that it was very hard to walk as a biped when one is invisible—he kept checking to see where his feet were and they were nowhere—so he dropped to all fours and padded silently along the halls.
Because Orphu had slowed down the gods escorting him to his cell, Mahnmut had seen where they’d stored the transmitter and Device. The room had been down a side corridor three right turns away from the corridor where he and Orphu had been incarcerated.
When Mahnmut reached the storage room, the hallway was empty—although gods passed through the adjoining hallways and intersections frequently—and Mahnmut activated his low-wattage wrist laser to cut through the door. Even while he was cutting he realized how odd this would look to any divinity turning into this hallway—no moravec in sight, but a twenty-centimeter red beam floating by itself, slowly burning a circle into the lock mechanism of the huge door.
The laser could never have cut through the entire door, but it cut a nice five-centimeter circle above the lock—Mahnmut’s hearing could detect the solid-state mechanism shifting up through subsonic frequencies—and the door swung inward. Mahnmut closed it behind him when he stepped in, hearing footsteps coming down his corridor only a few seconds later. They passed by. He tugged off the leather Hades Helmet cowl the better to see his hands and feet.
This was no empty holding cell. The room was at least two hundred meters long, half that high, and filled with bars of gold, heaps of coins, chests of precious stones, small mountains of polished bronze artifacts, marble statues of gods and men, great seashells spilling pearls onto the polished floor, dismantled gold chariots, glass columns filled with lapis lazuli, and a hundred other treasures, all gleaming from the reflected light from flames flickering in a score of gold fire tripods.
Mahnmut ignored the wealth and ran to the dull-metal squirt transmitter and slightly smaller Device. There was no way that Mahnmut could carry both things out of here—invisibility didn’t keep one inconspicuous when two metal devices could be seen floating down the hallway—and he knew that he only had seconds in which to act, so he dragged the Device out of the way, found the correct jackpatch on the communicator, and triggered it with a standard low-voltage command.
The transmitter’s primitive AI accepted the command and shed its nanocarbon skin to show complex devices folded in on themselves. Mahnmut backed away as the transmitter did a forward roll as gracefully as a human acrobat, extended tripod legs and Chevkovian felschenmass power booms, then unfurled a mesh dish eight meters wide. Mahnmut was glad he hadn’t tried this in a small room.
But he was still in a windowless room, perhaps under tons of marble and granite and Martian stone, quite possibly too thick for the transmission to pass through. At any rate, there was no starfield for the dish to use for navigation or orientation. As the dish searched and whirred, Mahnmut felt anxiety build—and not just because there were more shouts from the corridors. This should be the next place the gods would search—or QT to—after making sure that Hera was alive. If the transmitter couldn’t lock on here, Mahnmut’s and Orphu’s mission was probably over. It all depended on the sophistication of the squirt transmitter’s design.
The dish wobbled, whirred, adjusted itself a final time, and locked on something about twenty degrees from vertical. A virtual control panel appeared next to the physical jackports and green lights glowed.
Mahnmut jacked in and downloaded everything in his memory banks from the entire trip—every conversation with Orphu, every piece of dialogue with Koros III, Ri Po, or the gods, every visual he’d seen and recorded from the time they left Jupiter space. With the broadband on the transmitter jackport enabled, it took less than fifteen seconds to complete the download.
Mahnmut’s sensors picked up the Chevkovian antimatter energy field in the squirt transmitter building, and he wondered if the gods could sense it. One way or the other, he knew, they’d find him within minutes, if not sooner. And there was no way out of this room and the building while carrying the Device. He could trigger it now, or he could trigger it later. Either way, he’d be in the center of whatever happened.
But it wasn’t the Device he had to worry about now, Mahnmut reminded himself. It was this squirt transmitter.
The communicator blinked green across a myriad of indicators, suggesting to Mahnmut that the squirt power source was now at maximum charge, the data was encrypted, and the target—probably Jupiter space, possibly even Europa—was locked. Or so he hoped.
Someone was banging against the doors.
Why don’t they just quantum teleport in? thought Mahnmut. He didn’t take time to figure that out. Swapping out his hands for metal leads, he found the final enable port and transmitted the actuate charge of thirty-two modulated volts.
The dish shot out a yellow beam eight meters wide. The column of pure Chevkovian energy blasted a hole in the ceiling and through three more floors before stabbing out to the stars. Then it switched off and the transmitter silently self-destructed into a molten blob.
Mahnmut’s emergency polarizing filters had come on in nanoseconds during the transmission, but he was still blinded for a few seconds. When he did loo
k up through the series of slanted, steaming holes above and saw the sky, he dared to have hope for the first time.
The gods blew the door inward and Mahnmut’s end of the treasure vault filled with smoke and vapor.
Mahnmut used the few seconds of cover the smoke provided to grab the Device—which would have massed only about ten kilograms on Earth’s gravity and weighed only about three here on Mars—and then he crouched, contracted the springs and actuators in his hind legs as tightly as he could, ignoring design tolerances, and then leaped up through the smoking holes, flying up and through fifteen meters of shattered marble and dripping granite.
The roof of this part of the Great Hall was flat and Mahnmut ran along it as fast as he could on two legs, exhilarated to be out in the open air, carrying the Device under his left arm.
The sky above the summit of Olympus Mons was blue, and filled with dozens of flying chariots being guided by gods and goddesses. One of the machines swooped down now and hurtled ten meters above the rooftop, evidently intent upon smashing Mahnmut under its wheels. Too late, Mahnmut realized that he’d forgotten to pull the Hades Helmet cowl over his head. He was visible to every one of the searching gods above.
Using every bit of stored energy in his system, leaving any worry about recharging for a later date, Mahnmut coiled and jumped again, passed right through the holographic horses, and kicked the surprised goddess right in the chest. She flew backward off the chariot, white arms pinwheeling, and landed hard on the roof of the Great Hall of the Gods.
Mahnmut spent three-tenths of a second studying the virtual display holographed above the front chariot rail, and then he slipped his manipulators into the matrix and banked the chariot hard right. Other chariots and shouting gods banked and dived and climbed to cut him off. There’d be no escape from Olympos airspace, but Mahnmut wasn’t planning to escape that way.
Five chariots were closing and the air was full of titanium arrows—arrows!—when Mahnmut crossed over the edge of the huge caldera lake. He grabbed the Device and jumped just as the first of Apollo’s arrows struck his chariot. The machine exploded just meters above him and Mahnmut fell toward the water amidst melting gold and flaming energy cubes. The air rained microcircuits in the seconds before Mahnmut hit the surface. His deep-ranging sonar told him that the caldera under the lake’s surface was more than 2,000 meters deep.