Ilium

14 Low Mars Orbit

Mahnmut reset his systems and did a quick damage assessment. Nothing disabling to either his organic or cybernetic components. The explosion had caused rapid depressurization of three forward ballast tanks, but twelve remained intact. He checked internal clocks; he had been unconscious for less than thirty seconds before reset and he was still connected virtually to his submersible across the usual bandwidths. The Dark Lady was reporting wild tumbling, some minor hull breach, monitoring-system overloads, hull temperatures above boiling, and a score of other complaints, but there was nothing that demanded Mahnmut’s immediate attention. He rebooted video connections, but all he could see was the red-hot glowing interior of the spacecraft’s hold, the open bay doors, and—through those doors—tumbling starfields.

Orphu?

There was no response on the common band or on any of the tightbeam or maser channels. Not even static.

The airlock was still open. Mahnmut grabbed a personal reaction pack and coils of unbreakable microfilament rope and pulled himself out the airlock doors, fighting the vector forces of the tumbling by grabbing handholds he knew from decades of deep-sea work. On his own hull, he checked that the sub’s payload-bay doors were fully opened, estimated how much room he would need, and then grabbed some of Koros’s carefully folded machines at random and jetted them out of his sub, out of the disintegrating spacecraft, tumbling away through the blobs of molten ship metal and glowing plasma. Mahnmut didn’t know if he was jettisoning the weapons of mass destruction that Koros had been planning to bring to the surface—on my ship! thought Mahnmut with the same outrage he’d felt earlier—or if he was jettisoning gear that he would need for survival if he ever reached Mars. At that moment, he didn’t care. He needed the space.

Tying the rope off to brackets on The Dark Lady’ s hull, Mahnmut jetted out into space, taking care not to collide with the shattered ship-bay doors.

Once outside and a safe hundred meters from the tumbling ship, he rotated to get his first view of the damage.

It was worse than he’d thought. As Orphu had described, the entire bow of the spacecraft was gone—the control room and everything ten meters aft of where the control room had been. Sheared off as if it had never existed. Only a glowing and dissipating cloud of plasma around the bow showed where Koros III and Ri Po had been.

The rest of the ship’s fuselage had cracked and fragmented. Mahnmut could only guess the catastrophic results if the fusion engines, hydrogen tanks, Matloff/Fennelly scoop, and other propulsion devices had not been jettisoned long before this attack. The secondary explosions would certainly have vaporized Orphu and him.

Orphu? Mahnmut was using radio now as well as tightbeam, but the reflector antennae had been slagged off the hull for the maser relay. There was no response.

Trying to avoid the flying shrapnel, blobs of glowing metal, and the worst of the expanding plasma cloud while keeping slack in the line so that the tumbling wouldn’t fling him around the dying ship, Mahnmut used the reaction thrusters to come up and over the hull of the ship. The tumbling was so fierce now—stars, Mars, stars, Mars—that Mahnmut had to shut down his eyes and use the pack’s radar feed to find his way around the hull.

Orphu was still in his cradle. For a second, Mahnmut was joyous—the radar signature showed his friend intact and in place—but then he activated his eyes and saw the carnage.

The blast that had sheared off the bow had also scorched and fractured the upper hull of the ship all the way back to Orphu’s position and—as the Ionian had reported—had cracked and blackened his heavy carapace for a third of his length. Orphu’s forward manipulators were gone. His forward comm antennae were missing. His eyes were gone. Cracks ran the last three meters of Orphu’s upper shell.

“Orphu!” called Mahnmut on direct tightbeam.

Nothing.

Using every meg of his computational abilities, Mahnmut gauged the vectors involved and jetted over to the upper hull, all ten jets firing in microbursts to adjust his dangerous trajectory, until he was within a meter of the hull. He pulled the k-tool from the pack’s belt and fired a piton into the hull, then looped his line around it, making sure to keep it from getting tangled. He would have to pull free in a minute.

Pulling the line tight, swinging like a pendulum arm, Mahnmut arced aft to Orphu’s cradle—although scorched crater seemed a better description of the indentation in the hull now.

Hanging on to Orphu’s carapace, his short legs swinging wildly above him, Mahnmut slapped a hardline stick-on against his friend’s body just aft of where his eyes had been. “Orphu?”

“Mahnmut?” Orphu’s voice was cracked but strong. Mostly, it was surprised. “Where are you? How are you reaching me? All my comm is down.”

Mahnmut felt the kind of joy that only a few of Shakespeare’s characters ever achieved. “I’m in contact with you. Hardline. I’m going to get you out of here.”

“That’s idiotic!” boomed the Ionian’s voice. “I’m useless. I don’t . . .”

“Shut up,” explained Mahnmut. “I have a line. I need to tie you on. Where . . .”

“There’s a tie-on bracket about two meters aft of my sensor bundle,” said Orphu.

“No, there isn’t.” Mahnmut hated the idea of firing a piton into Orphu’s body, but he would if he had to.

“Well . . .” began Orphu and stopped for a terrible few seconds of silence as the extent of his own injuries obviously sank in. “Aft then. Farthest from the blast. Just above the thruster cluster.”

Mahnmut didn’t tell his friend that the external thrusters were also gone. He kicked back, found the tie-on, and tied the microfilament line with an unbreakable knot. If there was one thing that moravec Mahnmut had in common with the human sailors who had preceded him on Earth’s seas for millennia, it was knowing how to tie a good knot.

“Hang on,” said Mahnmut over the hardline. “I’m going to pull you out. Don’t worry if we lose contact. There are a lot of vector forces right now.”

“This is insane!” cried Orphu his voice still scratchy on the hardline. “There’s no room in The Dark Lady and I can’t do you any good if you get me there. I don’t have anything left to hang on with.”

“Quiet,” said Mahnmut, his voice calm. He added, “My friend.”

Mahnmut triggered all the reaction-pack jets, tugging loose the piton line as he did so.

The jets got Orphu up and out of his hull cradle. The tumbling of the ship did the rest, swinging both moravecs a hundred meters out and away from the ship.

Delta-v computations clouding his vision field, Mars and stars still exchanging places every two seconds, Mahnmut let the line go taut and then he fired the thrusters—using up energy at a fearsome rate—matching tumble velocities and reeling himself up the long line to The Dark Lady.

Orphu’s mass was considerable, its pull made the worse by the tumbling, but the line was unbreakable and so was Mahnmut’s will at the moment. He ratcheted them closer to the open bay of the waiting submersible.

The spacecraft began breaking up from the stresses, pieces of the stern snapping off and flying past Mahnmut where he clung to Orphu’s carapace, two tons of metal missing the smaller moravec’s head by less than five meters. Mahnmut pulled them in.

It was no use. The ship was coming apart around The Dark Lady, explosions further rending the hull as trace reaction gases and internal pressurized chambers gave way. Mahnmut would never get to the sub before it was torn apart.

“All right,” muttered Mahnmut. “The mountain has to come to Mohammed.”

“What?” cried Orphu, sounding alarmed for the first time.

Mahnmut had forgotten the hardline was still operative. “Nothing. Hang on.”

“How can I hang on, my friend? My manipulators and hands are all gone. You hang on to me .”

“Right,” said Mahnmut and fired every thruster he had, using up the pack’s energy supplies so quickly that he had to go to emergency reserve.

It worked. The Dark Lady emerged from the dark ship’s bay only seconds before the belly of the spacecraft began to come apart.

Mahnmut thrusted further away, seeing blobs of molten metal splatter on Orphu’s poor battered carapace. “I’m sorry,” whispered Mahnmut as he used the last of his fuel to tug the tumbling submersible farther from the dying spaceship.

“Sorry for what?” asked Orphu.

“Never mind,” panted Mahnmut. “Tell you later.”

He tugged, shoved, thrust, and generally moravec-hauled the huge Ionian into the almost-empty payload bay. It was better in the darkness of the bay—the wildly spinning stars/planet/stars/planet no longer gave Mahnmut vertigo. He crammed his friend into the main payload niche and activated the adjustable clamps.

Orphu was secure now. It was probable that all three of them—The Dark Lady and the two moravecs—were doomed, but at least they’d end their existence together. Mahnmut attached the sub’s comm leads to the hardline port.

“You’re safe for now,” gasped Mahnmut, feeling the organic parts of his body nearing overload. “I’m going to cut my hardline comm now.”

“What . . .” began Orphu but Mahnmut had cut the portable line and pulled himself hand over hand to the payload bay airlock. It still cycled.

With the last of his strength, he pulled himself up the vacuum-filled internal corridor to the enviro-niche, dogged the hatch, but did not pressurize the chamber, connecting to life-support lead instead. O2 flowed. Comm hissed static. The ship’s systems reported ongoing but survivable damage.

“Still there?” said Mahnmut.

“Where are you?”

“In my control room.”

“What’s the status, Mahnmut?”

“The ship’s essentially spun itself to bits. The sub’s more or less intact, including the stealth wrapping and the thrusters fore and aft, but I don’t have any idea how to control them.”

“Control them?” Then it obviously dawned on Orphu. “You’re still going to try to enter Mars’ atmosphere?”

“What choice do we have?”

There was a full second or two of silence while Orphu thought about that. Finally, he said, “I agree. Do you think you can fly this thing into the atmosphere?”

“No chance in hell,” said Mahnmut, sounding almost cheerful. “I’m going to download what control software Koros put in and let you fly us in.”

There came that rumbling-sneezing noise over the hardline, although Mahnmut found it very hard to believe that his friend was laughing at this particular moment. “You have to be joking. I’m blind—not just eyes and cameras missing, but my whole optical network burned out. I’m a mess. Essentially, I’m a bit of a brain in a broken basket. Tell me you’re joking.”

Mahnmut downloaded the programming the sub’s banks had on the external add-on thrusters, parachutes—the whole cryptic smash. He activated all the sub’s hull cameras but had to look away. The tumbling was as terrible and vertigo-producing as before. Mars filled the view now—polar cap, blue sea, polar cap, blue sea, bit of black space, polar cap—and watching it made Mahnmut sick. “There,” he said as the download ended. “I’ll be your eyes. I’ll give you whatever navigational data the sub can crib from the reaction software. You get us stabilized and fly us in.”

This time there was no mistaking the rumbling laughter. “Sure, why not,” said Orphu. “Hell, the fall alone will kill us.”

The rings of thrusters on The Dark Lady began to fire on Orphu’s command.