Ilium

33 Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Basin

Savi led Daeman and Harman off the roof, down the ladders and steps, and into one of the narrow alleys. The starlight and blue glow from the neutrino beam on the Temple Mount gave just enough illumination for them not to crash into walls or fall into wells as they ran, although shadows were a solid black in the doorways and empty windows. Daeman soon fell behind, gasping. He’d never run, even as a child. It was an absurd thing to do.

Closer now, less than a short block away in the maze of flat-topped buildings and labrynthine alleys, came the scrabbling of the hundreds of hurrying voynix.

Itbah al-Yahud! rasped the voice from those loudspeakers Savi had called muezzin.

Savi led them across a cobblestoned street, down another dark, narrow alley, across a small clearing strewn with glowing human bones, and into an interior courtyard that was even darker than the alley. The pad-thump and manipulator-scratch of voynix running at high speed along walls was closer now.

Itbah al-Yahud! The amplified cry seemed more urgent.

Only Savi here is a Jew, whatever that is, thought Daeman, his lungs burning, staggering to keep up. If Harman and I let her go on by herself, the voynix will leave us alone, probably even help us get home. There’s no reason we should share her fate.

Harman was running hard behind the old woman as she crossed the courtyard and ducked through a low arch into the ruins of an ancient building. Or I can take care of myself, thought Daeman. Harman can stay with her if he wants.

Daeman slid to a stop on the dusty cobblestones. Harman paused in the black rectangle of a doorway and waved him on. Daeman looked over his shoulder toward the sounds behind them—like claws or hollow bones rattling against stone—and, in the light of the blue beam, saw the first of a dozen voynix running in the street they had just crossed.

Daeman felt his heart lurch—he wasn’t used to the emotion of fear and found the thought of doing anything alone right now as the most terrifying option—and then he ran into the dark doorway behind Harman and the old woman.

Savi led the way down a series of increasingly narrow staircases, each flight of steps older and more worn than the one above. Four flights down, she tugged a flashlight from her backpack and flicked it on as the last of the reflected light disappeared from the dim blue glow above. The narrow beam illuminated a wall at the bottom of the narrowest flight of steps and Daeman’s heart lurched again. Then he saw what looked like a flap of dirty burlap hung over a hole he was sure was too small to allow him through.

“Hurry,” whispered Savi. She pulled the gunny sack material aside and slipped through the hole. Daeman heard echoes as if from a well. Harman quickly followed the old woman into the blackness.

Daeman heard scrabblings from the ruined house above, but no voynix footsteps sounded on the stairs. Not yet at least.

He leaned into the little hole, squeezed his narrow shoulders through, found that he was hanging over a bottomless black circle less than four feet across, and then his flailing hands found iron rungs in the wall opposite and he grunted as he pulled his torso and hips through the opening, scraping skin against ancient plaster until his legs were free and dangling. Then his feet found purchase on the rusty metal rungs and he began clambering down toward the muted sounds of Savi and Harman descending below him.

Cold air flowed up past his face. Daeman’s fingers and feet shifted uncertainly downward from cold rung to cold rung, he heard whispers below, and suddenly there were no rungs under his feet and he dropped four or five feet onto a brick floor.

Harman’s hands steadied him. He could see the circle of Savi’s flashlight illuminating a round tunnel made of ancient stones or bricks.

“This way,” she whispered and began running again, bent over to avoid the low ceiling. Harman and Daeman scrambled along behind, trying to avoid the irregular bricks in the curved floor by watching the circle of her flashlight rather than their own feet.

They came to a junction of tunnels. Savi checked her glowing palm function and they followed the left passage.

“I don’t hear the voynix behind us,” said Harman. He’d spoken softly, but his voice still echoed from the curved brick. The tallest of the three, Harman had to bend the most to walk.

“They’re above us,” said Savi. “Following us on the streets.”

“Are they using proxnet?” asked Daeman.

“Yes.” She paused at another junction, chose the center of three smaller passages. They all had to bend low here.

Harman looked at Daeman again, obviously curious about the proxnet comment, but not asking any questions now.

“They’re following you, you know,” said Savi, pausing to look first at Daeman and then at Harman. The harsh flashlight beam made her face look even older and more skull-like.

“Not you?” said Daeman, surprised.

She shook her head. “I don’t register on any nets. The voynix don’t even know I’m here. It’s you two who are showing up out of bounds on their farnet and proxnet scans. I think the nearest faxportal is Mantua. They know you didn’t walk this far.”

“Where are we going now?” whispered Harman. “The sonie?”

Savi shook her head again. Her gray hair was wet with sweat or condensation and plastered to her skull. “These tunnels don’t go beyond the old city. And the voynix have rendered the sonie inoperable by now. I’m headed for the crawler.”

“Crawler?” said Daeman, but rather than explain, Savi turned away and began leading them through the tunnels again.

A hundred paces further and the round brick tunnel became a narrow corridor, thirty paces beyond that and the corridor became stairs, and then a wall stopped them.

Daeman felt his heart trying to pound through his chest wall. “What do we do?” he said. “What do we do? What do we do?” He spun away from the light, listening hard in the darkness for voynix sounds.

“Climb.”

Daeman turned back to see Savi being lifted into another vertical well—this one narrower than the one they had descended—and then the light was gone as the flashlight bobbed above them.

Harman jumped up for the lowest rung, missed, cursed softly, jumped again, caught it, and pulled himself up. Daeman could barely see the outline of the older man’s arm as he reached down. “Come on, Daeman. Hurry. The voynix are probably already up there, waiting for us.”

“Then why are we climbing up there?”

“Come on.” Harman seized Daeman’s forearm in the darkness and pulled him up.

The voynix broke through the wall of the building just as the three humans were scrambling onto the crawler.

The huge machine took up much of the space in the central area of what Savi said had once been a large church. When they came up the stairs from the cellar, Savi’s flashlight flicking this way and that, Daeman had paused on the steps, not sure of what he was seeing. The crawler filled the space like some giant spider, its six wheels—each at least twelve feet tall—linked by hinged spidery struts, its passenger sphere glowing milkily in the center of the struts like a white egg at the center of a web.

The battering against the church doors and walls began even before Savi began climbing the thin, metallic access ladder hanging from the struts. “Hurry,” she said, no longer whispering.

Third in line—again—Daeman thought that the old woman was the master of the unnecessary imperative. A boarded window sixty feet up a wall exploded inward and five voynix scrabbled in, their bladed manipulators hacking into stone like ice hammers. The eyeless, rust-red domes above their carapaces turned ponderously downward and fixed on the crawler and the three people trying to get to its passenger sphere. Stones burst from the far wall and half a dozen other voynix came in on two legs.

Savi touched a faded red circle on the underside of the sphere, tapped digits into a small yellow energy diskey that appeared, and a section of the glass globe slid open with an audible rasp. She crawled up and in, Harman followed, and Daeman got his legs in just as the first of the voynix hurtled across the dusty stones toward him.

The slice in the sphere slid closed. There were six cracked-leather contour seats in the center of the sphere, and he and Harman threw themselves into side seats as Savi ran her hand over a flat metal wedge protruding above the front seat. A softly glowing projection control panel—much more complicated than the one on the sonie—pulsed into life around her. She touched a virtual red dial, ran a bright yellow circle along a green slide, and slipped her hand into a form-fitting controller.

“What if it doesn’t start?” asked Harman, whom Daeman now nominated for master of the poorly timed rhetorical question. A score of voynix pulled themselves up and over the high black mesh wheels and jumped like giant grasshoppers onto the top of the glass sphere. Daeman flinched and ducked low.

“If it doesn’t start, we die,” said Savi. She twitched the virtual controller to the right.

There was no engine roar or gyro hum, just a soft buzz so low as to be almost subsonic. But searchlights stabbed out in front of the crawler and a dozen other virtual displays flicked into life.

The half-dozen voynix atop the passenger sphere had been pounding and clawing on the glass, but suddenly they slid away and fell to the ground twenty feet below. They weren’t injured or damaged—each voynix leapt to its feet and jumped for the sphere again—but each then fell away again, unable to gain purchase on the surface they’d been clinging to only a few seconds earlier.

“It’s a micron-thick forcefield,” muttered Savi, her attention on the glowing designs and icons appearing all over the virtual panel. “Frictionless. It was designed to keep snow or rain from accumulating on the canopy, but it appears to shed voynix as well.”

Daeman turned to watch a score of voynix scrambling up the huge wheels, battering at the metal mesh, pulling at the struts and braces. “We should go,” he said.

“Yes.” Savi pushed the virtual controller forward and the crawler crashed through the ancient church wall, fell a dozen feet before the wildly articulated wheels found purchase on the wall and ground, and then accelerated forward. The lane was slightly narrower than the crawler, but this didn’t slow the machine a bit. Walls several thousand years old collapsed on either side until the crawler lurched out onto David Street and Savi turned it left, toward the west, away from the blue beam still stabbing skyward behind them.

Countless voynix scrabbled in pursuit while dozens more threw themselves in front of the speeding crawler and leapt for the passenger sphere. Still accelerating, the crawler ran over those in the street that failed to dodge and left the rest of the pack behind. Half a dozen persistent voynix still clung to the struts and were hacking away at the metal, clawing at the spinning wheels.

“Can they do damage?” asked Harman.

“I don’t know,” said Savi. “We’re approaching the Sho’or Yafa—the Jaffa Gate. Let’s see if we can get rid of them.”

She swerved the still-accelerating crawler into walls on the left and then on the right side of David Street, finally smashing through an arch lower than the crawler. Vibration and falling masonry shook the clinging voynix off, but Daeman turned to see most of them rising out of the rubble and joining the pack giving chase. Then the crawler was through the gate, out of the old city, and picking up speed down the graveled hill where they’d left the sonie, but the only sign of their flying machine was a heap of rocks thirty feet high surrounded by forty or fifty more voynix. Immediately the creatures left the mound and rushed to cut off the crawler. Savi ran over some, dodged others, and found an ancient highway running west from the city.

“Tough machine,” said Harman.

“They built tough machines toward the end of the Lost Age,” said Savi. “With nano-maintenance, it should last damned near forever.” She’d pulled her thermskin night-vision lenses from her pack and was driving with the crawler’s headlights off now. Daeman found the effect of hurtling along in the dark unsettling as he heard the big wheels crunching over rusted artifacts on the road—probably ancient abandoned vehicles. Then he realized that they were hurtling over a bridge and then rumbling through a cut between hills. He couldn’t see the pursuing voynix now in the dark—only the receding blue blade of light leaping straight up from the dark hill of Jerusalem—but he knew the voynix were still back there, still coming on.

Savi told them that it was about thirty miles to the coastline of the former Mediterranean Sea. They made the distance in less than ten minutes.

“Look at this,” said Savi, slowing the crawler. She removed her night-vision glasses and flicked on the headlights, fog lights, and searchlights.

A mass of five or six hundred voynix had made a wedge near where the land suddenly tilted down into the dry Mediterranean Basin.

“Do we turn?” asked Harman.

Savi shook her head and accelerated the crawler forward. Later, Daeman thought that the sound of the machine hitting so many voynix at such high speed had been somewhat like a hailstorm he had heard on a metal roof in Ulanbat many years ago. But this was very large hail.

The crawler reached the former shoreline, Savi cried “Hang on,” and the machine was airborne for ten seconds as it jumped the drop between shore and former sea. Then the six huge wheels hit the ground, the struts absorbed most of the shock and stabilized them, and they drove straight ahead down into the Basin, headlights and searchlights still stabbing white cones out of the darkness.

Daeman looked back and saw the surviving voynix, silhouetted by the distant blue beam, lining the shoreline behind them. “They won’t follow?” he asked.

“Into the Basin?” said Savi. “Never.” She slowed the crawler to a more reasonable speed, but before she slipped on her glasses and shut off the lights, Daeman saw that they were following a smooth red-clay road through verdant fields of crops. There were black metal crosses rising above the level of the wheat and corn and sunflowers and flax out there in the dark, and, impaled on each cross, was what looked to be a pale, writhing, naked human body.