“No.” Asteague/Che and Suma IV spoke at the same time.

“The brain-hands-creature doesn’t travel alone,” said Retrograde Sinopessen, bringing up another series of holographic images and flat-plate projections. “These things are with it at every one of the eighteen sites we’ve seen the brain.”

“Humans?” asked Orphu. The data was confusing.

“Not quite,” said Mahnmut. He described the scales, fangs, overly long arms, and webbed feet of the forms in the images.

“And according to the datametrics, there are hundreds of those things,” said Orphu of Io.

“Thousands,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “We’ve looked at images taken simultaneously at sites thousands of kilometers apart and counted at least thirty-two hundred of the amphibian-looking forms.”

“Caliban,” said Mahnmut.

“What?” Asteague/Che’s softly inflected voice sounded puzzled.

“On Mars, Prime Integrator,” said the little Europan. “The Little Green Men talked about Prospero and Caliban… from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The stone heads, you remember, were supposed to be images of Prospero. They warned us about Caliban. The thing looks and sounds like some versions of Caliban in the staging of that play over the centuries on Earth.”

None of the moravecs had anything to say about that.

“There are eleven new Brane Holes on Earth since we began measuring this spike of quantum activity two weeks ago,” Beh bin Adee said at last. “As far as we can tell, the brain-creature has generated—or at least is using—all of them for transport purposes. It and the scaled, amphibious-looking things you call Caliban. And there is a pattern to where they appear.”

More holographic images misted into solidity above the chart table and Mahnmut described them on tightbeam, but Orphu had already absorbed the accompanying data.

“All battlegrounds or sites of ancient historical human massacres or atrocities,” said Orphu.

“Precisely,” said General Beh bin Adee. “You notice that the city of Paris was the first Brane quantum opening. We know that more than twenty-five hundred years ago, during the EU Empire’s Black Hole Exchange with the Global Islamic Surinate, more than fourteen million people died in and around Paris.”

“And the other Brane Hole sites here fit that category,” said Mahnmut. “Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Waterloo, HoTepsa, Stalingrad, Cape Town, Montreal, Gettysburg, Khanstaq, Okinawa, the Somme, New Wellington—all bloodied historical sites from millennia ago.”

“Do we have some sort of Calabi-Yau traveling intermemBrane tourist Brain here?” asked Orphu.

“Or something worse,” said Cho Li. “The neutrino and tachyon beams rising from the spots this… thing… visits carry some sort of complex coded information. The beams are interdimensional, not directional in our universe. We just can’t tap into the beams to decode the messages or content.”

“I think the brain is a ghoul,” said Orphu of Io.

“Ghoul?” asked Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

Orphu explained the term. “I think it’s sucking up some sort of dark energy from those places,” said the big Ionian.

“That hardly seems likely,” chirped Retrograde Sinopessen. “I know of no recordable… energy… left behind by the mere event of violent action. That is metaphysics… nonsense… not science.”

Orphu shrugged four of his multiple articulated arms.

“Do you think the large brain creature might be something the post-humans or old-styles designed and biofactured during the dementia years after rubicon?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “And the Caliban-creature and headless robotic killer things as well? All artifacts from wildcat RNA engineers? Like some of the anachronistic plant and animal life reintroduced to the planet?”

“Not the big thing,” said the tall Ganymedan, Suma IV. “We would have seen it before this. The brain creature with the hands came through Brane Holes from another universe just a few days ago. We don’t know where the Caliban things came from, or the humpbacked creatures that are decimating the old-style humans. They might well be artifacts of genetic manipulation. We have to remember that the post-humans designed themselves right out of the human gene pool more than fifteen hundred standard years ago.”

“And I’ve seen the holos of dinosaurs and Terror Birds and saber-toothed cats roaming this Earth,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo.

“The humpbacked metallic things have killed up to ten percent of the old-style population?” asked Mahnmut, who was a stickler for the proper use of that word “decimate.”

“They have,” said General Beh bin Adee. “Probably more. And just since we’ve been in transit from Mars.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Orphu of Io. “Although if no one has an immediate answer, I have a suggestion.”

“Go ahead,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“I think you should defrost the thousand rockvec soldiers we have in cold storage, fire up the dropship and the dozen atmospheric hornets you have onboard, load them to the gunwales with troopers, and get into the fight.”

“Get into the fight?” repeated the navigator Callistan, Cho Li.

“Start by nuking that brain creature into radioactive pus,” said Orphu. “Then get moravec boots on the ground and defend the humans. Kill those Calibans and the headless-humped things that are killing humans everywhere. Get into the fight.”

“What an extraordinary suggestion,” said Cho Li in a shocked voice.

“We hardly have enough information to decide on a course of action at this point,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “For all we know, the brain creature—as we so respectfully call it—may be the only peaceful, sentient organism on Earth. Perhaps it’s some sort of interdimensional archaeologist or anthropologist or historian.”

“Or ghoul,” said Mahnmut.

“Our mission was to carry out surveillance,” said Suma IV in tones that were meant to be final. “Not start a war.”

“We can do both things for the price of one,” said Orphu. “We have the firepower aboard the Queen Mab to make a difference in whatever is going on down there. And although you haven’t officially told Mahnmut or me, we know there must be a host of more modern stealthed moravec warships following the Mab. This could be a wonderful opportunity to hit that thing—all those things—and coldcock them before they even know they’re in a fight.”

“What an extraordinary suggestion,” repeated Cho Li. “Absolutely extraordinary.”

“Right now,” said Asteague/Che in that odd James Mason voice that Mahnmut remembered from flatfilms, “our goal is not to start a war, but to deliver Odysseus to the Phobos-sized asteroid city in the polar ring as per the request of the Voice.”

“And before that,” said Suma IV, “we have to decide whether to go ahead with the dropship mission under cover of the aerobraking maneuver, or to wait until after rendezvous with the Voice’s orbital city and delivery of our human passenger.”

“I have a question,” said Mahnmut.

“Yes?” Prime Integrator Asteague/Che was also a Europan, thus almost the same size as the diminutive Mahnmut. The two stared visor-plate to visor-plate while the administrator waited.

“Does our human passenger want to be delivered to the Voice?” asked Mahnmut.

There was a silence broken only by the hum of ventilators, comm reports to and from those ‘vecs monitoring instruments, and the occasional bang of attitude thrusters from the hull.

“Good heavens,” said Cho Li. “How could we have overlooked asking him?”

“We were busy,” said General Beh bin Adee.

“I’ll ask him,” said Suma IV. “Although it will be embarrassing at this point if Odysseus says no.”

“We have his garments all prepared,” said the skittering Retrograde Sinopessen.

“Garments?” rumbled Orphu of Io. “Is our son of Laertes a Mormon?”

No one responded. All moravecs had some interest in human history and society—it had been programmed into their evolving DNA and circuits to keep such an interest—but very few were as immersed in human thinking as the huge Ionian. Nor had the others evolved such an odd sense of humor.