But the rest of that thought was lost as he realized that she was not dry against his tentative probes, but soft and opening and even moist, as if she had lain there waiting for him all these years.

Ada had been ready for him—wet with excitement, her lips as warm as her warm sex, her arms insistent around him, her fingers arched on his bare back as he moved gently into her and with her. They had kissed until the kissing alone would have made Harman—he of the Four Twenties and nineteen years that very week, the oldest of the old that Ada knew or had ever known—almost swoon with a teenaged boy’s lust and excitement.

They’d moved as the cubbie rocked to the wild gusts of wind—gently at first, forever it seemed, and then with increasing passion and less restraint as Ada urged him to lose restraint, as Ada opened to him and urged him deeper, kissing him and holding him within the powerful circle of her arms and squeezing legs and raking fingernails.

And when he’d come, Harman had throbbed in her for what seemed like long moments. And Ada had responded with a series of internal throbs that felt like tremors rising from some infinitely deep epicenter until he felt as if it was her small hand clenching the core of him tighter, releasing, then clenching again, rather than her entire body.

Harman throbbed inside the woman who looked like Savi and couldn’t be. He did not linger but pulled out immediately, his heart pounding with guilt and something like horror even as he was filled with his love for Ada and his memories of Ada.

He rolled aside and lay panting and miserable next to the woman’s body on the metallic-silken cushions. The warm air stirred around them, trying to lull him to sleep. Harman felt at that moment that he could sleep—could sleep for a millennium and a half just as this stranger had—sleep through all the danger to his world and to his friends and to his single, perfect, betrayed beloved.

Some small movement brought him up out of the fringes of his dozing.

He opened his eyes and his heart almost stopped as he realized that the woman’s eyes were open. She had turned her head and was staring at him with a cool intelligence—an almost impossible level of awareness after being asleep so long.

“Who are you?” asked the young woman in dead Savi’s voice.

In the end, it wasn’t just Orphu’s eloquence but a myriad of factors that decided the moravecs to launch the atmospheric dropship carrying The Dark Lady.

The moravec meeting on the bridge happened much sooner than the two hours Asteague/Che had suggested. Events were occurring too quickly. Twenty minutes after their conference outside on the hull of the Queen Mab, Mahnmut and Orphu were back on the ship’s bridge conferring verbally in full Earth-standard sea-level atmosphere and gravity with the Callistan Cho Li, Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, General Beh bin Adee and his lieutenant Mep Ahoo, the ominous Suma IV, an agitated Retrograde Sinopessen, and half a dozen other moravec integrators and military rockvecs.

“This is the transmission we received eight minutes ago,” said the navigator Cho Li. Almost everyone had heard it, but he played it back via tightbeam anyway.

The maser broadcast coordinates were the same as the previous transmission—from the Phobos-sized asteroid in Earth’s polar ring—but there was no female human voice this time, only a string of rendezvous coordinates and delta-v rates.

“The lady wants us to bring Odysseus straight to her house,” said Orphu, “and not fool around swinging around the other side of the Earth on the way.”

“Can we do that?” asked Mahnmut. “Brake straight to her high polar orbit, I mean?”

“We can if we use the fission bombs again for a high-g deceleration the next nine hours,” said Asteague/Che. “But we don’t want to do that for a variety of reasons.”

“Excuse me,” said Mahnmut. “I’m just a submersible driver, no navigator or engineer, but I don’t see how we’re going to drop our speed anyway given the weak deceleration we’re getting from the ion-drive engines. Did we have something special in store for the last bit of braking?”

“Aerobraking,” said the many-limbed bulky little Callistan, Cho Li.

Mahnmut laughed at the image of the Queen Mab—all three hundred nine meters of bulky, girdered, crane-festooned, nonaerodynmic bulk of her—aerobraking through the Earth’s atmosphere and then realized that Cho Li hadn’t been joking.

“You can aerobrake this thing?” he said at last.

Retrograde Sinopessen skittered forward on his spidery silver legs. “Of course. We had always planned to aerobrake. The sixty-meter-wide pusher plate with its ablative coating retracts and morphs slightly to serve very nicely as a heat shield. The plasma field around us during the maneuver should not be prohibitive—we can even maser comm through it if we so choose. Our original plans were for a mild aerobraking maneuver at an altitude of one hundred and forty-five kilometers above Earth sea level with several passes to regulate our orbit—the difficult part will be passing through the busy artificial p—and e-rings, since they have nothing comparable to the debris-cleared F-ring Cassini Gap around Saturn—but those computations were easy enough. We just have to dodge like a sumbitch. Now, since we seem to have been ordered to make a command appearance at the lady’s asteroid-city on the p-ring, we plan to dip to thirty-seven kilometers and burn off velocity much more quickly, establishing the proper elliptical orbit for rendezvous on the first attempt.”

Orphu whistled.

Mahnmut tried to visualize it. “We’ll be dropping to within a hundred-some thousand feet of the surface? We’ll be able to see individual faces on the humans below.”

“Not quite,” said Asteague/Che. “But it will be more dramatic than we had planned. We’ll definitely leave a streak in their sky. But the old-style humans down there are probably too distracted right now to notice a streak in their sky.”

“What do you mean?” asked Orphu of Io.

Asteague/Che transmitted the most recent series of photographs. Mahnmut described the elements that Orphu could not get through the accompanying datametrics.

More images of slaughter. Human communities destroyed, human bodies left out for carrion crows. Infrared imagery showed hot buildings and cold corpses and the motion of equally cold humped and headless creatures who were doing the killing. Fires burned where homes and modest cities had been on the night side of the planet. All over the planet, the old-style humans seemed to be under attack by the gray-metallic headless creatures which the moravec experts could not identify. And on four continents, the blue-ice structures were multiplying and growing and now images appeared of a single, huge creature looking like a human brain with eyes, only the brain the size of a warehouse, then video—vertical images looking almost straight down on the thing scuttling on what looked like gigantic hands with more stalklike arms protruding like ganglia. Obscene proboscises extruded from feeding orifices and seemed to be drinking or feeding from the earth itself.

“I see the data,” said Orphu, “but I’m having trouble visualizing the creature. It can’t possibly be that ugly.”

“We’re looking at it,” said General Beh bin Adee, “and we’re having trouble believing what we’re seeing. And it is that ugly.”

“Is there any theory,” asked Mahnmut, “about what that thing is or where it’s from?”

“It’s associated with the blue-ice sites, originally seen at the former city of Paris and the largest blue-ice complex,” said Cho Li. “But that’s not what you mean. We simply don’t know its origins.”

“Have moravecs ever seen an image of anything like that in all our centuries of observing the Earth through telescopes from Jupiter space or Saturn space?” asked Orphu.