Trembling, Harman sat back on the couch, adjusted the red cloth over his face, touched the embroidery to his forehead, and closed his eyes.

The Queen Mab decelerated toward Earth on a column of nuclear explosions, the ship kicking out a Coke-can-sized fission bomb every thirty seconds, the bomb exploding and driving the pusher plate back up to the stern of the thousand-foot-long ship, the huge pistons and cylinders in the clockwork engine room cycling back and forth, the next can-bomb being ejected…

Mahnmut was watching on the stern video channel. If anyone on Earth didn’t know we were coming, they must know now, he said to Orphu on their tightbeam channel. The two had been invited to the bridge for the first time on the voyage and they were in the largest lift now, rising toward the bow of the ship—which during deceleration, of course, was aiming back toward space rather than at the rapidly growing Earth.

I don’t think the idea is to be subtle, tightbeamed Orphu.

Obviously not. But this is about as subtle as a stomach pump, about as subtle as a pay toilet in the diarrhea ward, about as subtle as…

Do you have a point? rumbled Orphu.

It’s too unsubtle, said Mahnmut. Too obvious. Too visible. Too precious—I mean, mid-Twentieth Century spaceship designs, for God’s sake. Fission bombs. Ejection mechanisms from the Atlanta, Georgia, Coca-Cola bottling plant circa 1959…

So your point is? interrupted Orphu. In the old days, his eye-stalks and video cameras would have tracked toward Mahnmut—some of them, at least—but those had not been replaced since his optic nerves had been burned out.

I have to assume that less obvious moravec ships—modern ships, stealth-activated and stealth-propelled ships—are following us, sent Mahnmut.

That has been my assumption as well, said the big hard-vac moravec.

You never mentioned it.

Nor have you, until now, said Orphu.

Why didn’t Asteague/Che and the other Prime Integrators tell us? asked Mahnmut. If we’re being put out ahead of the real fleet as the obvious target, we have a right to know.

Orphu sent a subsonic rumble that Mahnmut had learned was the Ionian’s equivalent of a shrug. It wouldn’t make any difference, would it? said the big moravec. If the Earth defenses fire on us and breach our rather modest forcefield defenses, we’ll be dead before we have time to complain.

Speaking of Earth defenses, has the voice from the orbital city said anything else since the message two weeks ago? The maser broadcast had been succinct; the recorded female-human voice had simply said “Bring Odysseus to me” over and over for twenty-four hours and then had cut off as quickly as it had begun. The message had not been broadcast at random—it had been aimed precisely at the Queen Mab.

I’ve been monitoring the incoming channels, said Orphu, and I haven’t heard anything new.

The lift whirred and stopped. The broad cargo doors opened. Mahnmut stepped onto the bridge for the first time since before their launch from Phobos and Orphu repellored after him.

The bridge was circular with a diameter of thirty meters, the ceiling dome-shaped and ringed with thick windows and holographic screens serving as windows. From a spaceship-spaceship point of view, it was almost completely satisfying to Mahnmut. Although the unnamed spacecraft that had brought Orphu, the late Koros III and Ri Po, and him to Mars had been centuries more advanced—accelerated to one-fifth light speed by magnetic scissors accelerator wickets, carrying a boron light sail, fusion engines, and other modern moravec devices—this strangely retro atomic spaceship and spaceship grid looked… right. Instead of purely virtual controls and simple jack-in stations, more than a dozen tech moravecs sat in old-fashioned acceleration chairs at even more old-fashioned metal and glass monitoring stations. There were actual switches, real toggles, physical dials—dials!—and a hundred other eye—and vid-camera-pleasing details. The floor looked to be of textured steel, perhaps lifted straight out of the hull of some World War II–era seagoing battleship.

The usual suspects—Orphu’s irreverent term—stood awaiting them near the central navigation table: Asteague/Che their central Prime Integrator from Europa, General Beh bin Adee representing the Belt fighter-moravecs, Cho Li their Callistan navigator (looking and sounding far too much like the dead Ri Po for Mahnmut’s comfort), Suma IV the brawny, buckycarbon-sheathed fly-eyed Ganymedan, and the spidery Retrograde Sinopessen.

Mahnmut walked closer to the map table and stepped up onto the metal ledge that allowed smaller moravecs to look down upon the glowing table surface. Mahnmut floated over.

“We have a little less than fourteen hours until low-Earth orbital insertion,” said Asteague/Che without greetings or introductions. His voice—that James Mason voice to Mahnmut’s Lost Era history-vid-trained ears and audio receivers—was smooth but businesslike. “We have to decide what to do.”

The Prime Integrator was vocalizing rather than transmitting on the common band. The bridge was pressurized to Earth normal—an atmospheric content the Europan moravecs liked and the others could tolerate—and audible speech was more private than common band chatter and less conspiratorial than tightbeaming.

“Have there been any more broadcasts from that woman asking us to deliver Odysseus?” asked Orphu.

“No,” said Cho Li, the bulky Callistan navigator. Cho Li’s voice, as always, was very, very soft. “But the orbital construction that was the source of that broadcast is our destination.”

Cho Li ran a manipulator tentacle over the map table and a large hologram of Earth appeared. The equatorial and polar rings were very bright, countless specks of light moving west to east along the equator and north to south around the poles.

“This is a live video feed,” said the tiny little silver box amidst the skinny little silver legs that comprised the Amalthean Retrograde Sinopessen.

“I can read the data bars via the common channel,” said Orphu of Io. “And I can ‘see’ all of you on my radar return and infrared scans. But there may be subtle aspects of the holo projections that I miss—being blind and all.”

“I’ll give a description via tightbeam of everything I see,” said Mahnmut. He connected via tightbeam and set up a high-speed squirt feed to the Ionian, describing the holographic image of the blue and white Earth hanging in space above the chart table, the bright polar and equatorial rings crisscrossing above the oceans and clouds. The rings were close enough that countless discrete objects could be seen gleaming against the black of space.

“Magnification?” asked Orphu.

“Just ten,” said Sinopessen. “Small binoculars level. We’re approaching the orbit of Earth’s Moon—although right now Luna is on the backside of the planet from us. We’ll cease use of the fission bombs and switch to ion drive as we enter their cislunar space—no reason to antagonize anyone there. Our velocity is down to ten kilometers per second and dropping. You may have noticed our one-point-two-five Earth-g deceleration the last two days.”

“How has Odysseus been taking the added g-load?” asked Mahnmut. He’d not seen their only remaining human passenger over the past week. Mahnmut had hoped that Hockenberry would QT back to the Queen Mab, but so far he hadn’t.

“Fine,” rumbled Suma IV, the tall Ganymedan. “He tends to stay in his bunk and quarters more than usual, but he was doing that before we raised the deceleration g-load.”

“Has he said anything about the female voice on the maser—or the ‘Bring Odysseus to me’ message?” asked Orphu.