Suma IV was an excellent pilot. Mahnmut had to admire the way the Ganymedan guided the dropship down through the upper atmosphere, using thrusters so briefly that the ship seemed to be flying itself, and he had to smile when he remembered his own disastrous plunge with Orphu through Mars’ atmosphere. Of course, his ship had been charred and broken then, but he could still give credit to a real pilot when he flew with one.

The data and radar profile are impressive, tightbeamed Orphu of Io from the hold. What’s the visual look like?

Blue and white, sent Mahnmut. All blue and white. More beautiful even than the photographs. The entire Earth is ocean below us.

All of it? said Orphu and Mahnmut thought it was one of the few times he’d heard his friend sound surprised.

All of it. A water world—blue ocean, a million ripples of reflected sunlight, white clouds—cirrus, high ripples, a mass of stratocumulus coming over the horizon above us… . no, wait. It’s a hurricane, a thousand kilometers across, at least. I can see the eye. White, spinning, powerful, amazing.

Our track is nominal, sent Orphu. Coming right up from Antarctica crossing the South Atlantic toward the northeast.

The Mab’s out of atmosphere and on the other side of the Earth now, sent Mahnmut. The communication sats we seeded are working fine. Mab’s velocity is down to fifteen kilometers per second and falling. She’s climbing back to the polar ring coordinates and decelerating on ion drive. Trajectory is good. She’s headed for the rendezvous point the Voice gave us. No one’s fired on her yet.

Even better, sent Orphu, no one’s fired on us yet, either.

Suma IV allowed atmospheric drag to slow them to less than the speed of sound just as they crossed the bulge of Africa. Their flight plan had called for them to fly over the dried Mediterranean Sea, shooting video and recording data about the odd constructs there, but instruments now told them that there was some sort of energy-damping field extending in a dome up to forty thousand meters above that dried sea. The dropship might fly into that and cease flying altogether. In fact, according to Suma IV, if they flew into that, all the moravecs on board might cease functioning. The Ganymedan banked the dropship east across the Sahara Desert, flying in a wide curve around to the south and east of the waterless Mediterranean.

The feed continued to flow in from the Queen Mab, carried around the blocking mass of the planet by a score of snowflake-size repeater satellites.

The large spacecraft had reached the coordinates beamed to it by the Voice—a small volume of empty space just outside the edge of the orbital ring some two thousand kilometers from the asteroid-city from which the Voice had broadcast its—her—messages. Obviously the Voice did not want a spaceship that was propelled by atomic bombs to come within shockwave proximity of her—its—orbital home.

Besides realtime data the dropship was uplinking, it was getting twenty broadband tightbeams of information flowing in: feeds from the Queen Mab’s many cameras and external sensors, comm bands from the Mab’s bridge, ground data from the various satellites they’d seeded, and multiple feeds from Odysseus. The moravecs had not only rigged the human’s clothing with nanocameras and molecular transmitters, they’d mildly sedated Odysseus during his last sleep period and had started to paint cell-sized imagers on the skin of his forehead and hands, but had discovered to their shock that Odysseus already had nanocameras in the skin there. His ear canals also had been modified—long before he came aboard the Queen Mab they realized, with nanocyte receivers. The moravecs modified all these so they would send every sight and sound back to the ship’s recorders. Other sensors had been installed around his body so that even if Odysseus were to die during the coming rendezvous, data about his surroundings would continue flowing back to the moravecs.

At that moment, Odysseus was standing on the bridge with Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, Retrograde Sinopessen, navigator Cho Li, General Beh bin Adee, and the other command moravecs there.

Suddenly Orphu and Mahnmut perked up as the Queen Mab relayed real-time radio data from the ship’s comm.

“Incoming maser message,” said Cho Li.

“SEND ODYSSEUS ACROSS ALONE,” came the sultry female voice from the asteroid-city. “USE A SHUTTLE WHICH IS NOT ARMED. IF I DETECT WEAPONS ABOARD HIS SHIP OR IF ANYONE ORGANIC OR ROBOTIC ACCOMPANIES ODYSSEUS, I WILL DESTROY YOUR SPACECRAFT.”

“The plot thickens,” said Orphu of Io on the common dropship band.

The moravecs in the dropship watched with only a second’s delay as Retrograde Sinopessen escorted Odysseus down to the number eight launch bay. Since all of the hornets were armed, only one of the three Phobos construction shuttles still aboard the Queen Mab would satisfy the Voice’s requirements.

The construction shuttle was tiny—a remote-handling ovoid with barely room inside to squeeze in one adult human being and no life support beyond air and temperature—and as Retrograde Sinopessen helped the Achaean fighter squirm into the cable and circuit-board cluttered space, the moravec said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Odysseus stared at the spidery moravec from Amalthea for a long moment. Finally he said in Greek, “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees: all times have I enjoyed greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me and alone; on shore, and when through the scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vexed the dim sea; I am become a name…. Much have I seen and known; cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, and myself not least, but honored them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, far on the ringing plains of windy Troy…. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me little remains: but every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself… close the goddamned door, spider-thing.”

“But that’s …” began Orphu of Io.

“He’s been in the Mab’s library …” began Mahnmut.

“Hush!” commanded Suma IV.

They watched as the shuttle was sealed. Retrograde Sinopessen stayed in the shuttle bay, clinging to a strut so as not to be swept out in space as the bay dumped all its atmosphere, and then the ovoid shuttle moved out into space on silent peroxide thrusters. The egg-shaped thing tumbled, stabilized, aimed its nose at the orbital asteroid-city—only a glowing spark among thousands of other p-ring sparks at this dis-tance—and thrusted away toward the Voice.

“We’re coming up on Jerusalem,” said Suma IV on the intercom.

Mahnmut returned his attention to the dropship’s various video monitors and sensors.

Tell me what you see, old friend, tightbeamed Orphu.

All right… we’re still more than twenty kilometers high. On the unmagnified view, I see the dry Mediterranean Sea about sixty or eighty kilometers to the west, it’s a patchwork of red rock, dark soil, and what looks to be green fields. Then along the coast there’s the huge crater that used to be the Gaza Strip—a sort of impact crater, half-moon-shaped inlet to the dry sea—and then the land rises into mountains and Jerusalem is there, in the heights, on a hill of its own.

What does it look like?

Let me zoom a bit… yes. Suma IV’s doing an overlay with historical satellite photos, and it’s obvious that the suburbs and newer parts of the city are gone… but the Old City, the walled city, is still there. I can see the Damascus Gate… the Western Wall… Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock… and there’s a new structure there, one not in the old satellite photos. Something tall and made out of multifaceted glass and polished stone. The blue beam is coming up from it.