Ilium

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 look 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.

It might be good enough, thought the little moravec. Then he hit the water, activated his flippers, kept a tight hug on the Device with one arm, and dived deep.