Menelaus nodded. He knew that he should ask questions about how his brother hoped to mend the peace with the gods again, as well as overthrow the invincible Achilles, but he ached to discuss a more pressing topic.

“I saw Helen,” he said, hearing his own voice stumble at his wife’s name. “I was within seconds of killing her.”

Agamemnon wiped grease from his mouth and beard, drank from a silver cup, and raised one eyebrow to show that he was listening.

Menelaus described his firm resolve and opportunity to get to Helen—and how both were ruined by Oenone’s sudden appearance and her dying accusations against Philoctetes. “We were lucky to get out of the city alive,” he said again.

Agamemnon squinted toward the distant walls. Somewhere a moravec siren wailed and missiles hurtled skyward toward some unseen Olympian target. The forcefield over the main Achaean camp hummed into a deeper tone of readiness.

“You should kill her today,” said Menelaus’ older and wiser brother. “Now. This morning.”

“This morning?” Menelaus licked his lips. Despite the pig grease, they were dry.

“This morning,” repeated the once and future commander in chief of all the Greek armies assembled to sack Troy. “Within a day or so, the opening rift between our men and those dog-spittle Trojans will be so great that the cowards will be closing and bolting their fucking Scaean Gate again.”

Menelaus looked toward the city. Its walls were rose-colored in the light of the rising winter sun. He was very confused. “They won’t allow me in by myself …” he began.

“Go in disguise,” interrupted Agamemnon. The royal king drank again and belched. “Think as Odysseus would think… as some crafty weasel would think.”

Menelaus, as proud a man as his brother or any other Achaean hero in his own way, wasn’t sure he appreciated that comparison. “How can I disguise myself?”

Agamemnon gestured toward his own royal tent, its scarlet silk billowing again nearby. “I have the lion skin and old bore-tusk wraparound helmet that Diomedes wore when he and Odysseus attempted to steal the Palladian from Troy last year,” he said. “With that strange helmet hiding your red hair and the tusks hiding your beard—not to mention the lion skin concealing your glorious Achaean armor—the sleepy guards at the gate will think you another barbarian ally of theirs and let you pass without challenge. But go quickly—before the guard changes and before the gates are locked to us for the duration of Ilium’s doomed existence.”

Menelaus had to think about this for only a few seconds. Then he rose, clasped his brother firmly on the shoulder, and went into the tent to gather his disguise and to arm himself with more killing blades.

The moon Phobos looked like a huge, grooved, dusty olive with bright lights encircling the concave end. Mahnmut told Hockenberry that the hollowed tip was a giant crater called Stickney and that the lights were the moravec base.

The ride up had not been without some adrenaline flow for Hockenberry. He’d seen enough of the moravec hornets at short range to notice that none of them seemed to have windows or ports, so he assumed the ride would be a blind one, except perhaps for some TV monitors. He’d underestimated asteroid-belt moravec technology—for all the hornets were from the rockvecs according to Mahnmut. Hockenberry had also assumed there would be acceleration couches or Twentieth Century space-shuttle-style chairs with huge straps and buckles.

There were no chairs. No visible means of support. Invisible force-fields enfolded Hockenberry and the small moravec as they seemed to sit on thin air. Holograms—or some sort of three-dimensional projections so real that there was no sense of projection—surrounded them on three sides and beneath them. Not only were they sitting on invisible chairs, the invisible chairs and their bodies were suspended over a two mile drop as the hornet flashed through the Hole and climbed for altitude to the south of Olympus Mons.

Hockenberry screamed.

“Does the display bother you?” asked Mahnmut.

Hockenberry screamed again.

The moravec quickly touched holographic controls that appeared as if by magic. The drop below them shrank until it appeared to be set into the metal floor of the hull like a mere giant-screen TV. All around them, the panorama continued to unfold as the forcefield-shrouded summit of Olympus Mons flashed past—lasers or some sort of energy lances flickering at them and splashing against the hornet’s own energy field—and then the blue Martian sky shifted to thin pink, then to black, and the hornet was above the atmosphere, pitching over—although the great limb of Mars seemed to rotate until it filled the virtual windows.

“Better,” gasped Hockenberry, flailing for something to hang on to. The forcefield chair didn’t fight him, but it didn’t release him either. “Jesus Christ,” he gasped as the ship did a one-hundred-eighty degree roll and fired its engines. Phobos tumbled into view, almost on top of them.

There was no sound. Not a whisper.

“I’m sorry,” said Mahnmut. “I should have warned you. This is Phobos filling the aft windowscreen right now. It’s the smaller of Mars’ two moons, just about eight miles in diameter… although you can see it’s not a sphere by any means.”

“It looks like a potato that some cat’s been clawing,” managed Hockenberry. The moon was approaching very fast. “Or a giant olive.”

“Olive, yes,” said Mahnmut. “That’s because of the crater at this end. It’s named Stickney—after Asaph Hall’s wife, Angeline Stickney Hall.”

“Who was… Asaph… Hall?” managed Hockenberry. “Some astronaut… or… cosmonaut… or… who?” He’d found something to hang on to. Mahnmut. The little moravec didn’t seem to mind his metal-plastic shoulders being clutched. The aft view-holo flared with flame as some silent thrusters or engines fired. Hockenberry was just barely succeeding in keeping his teeth from chattering.

“Asaph Hall was an astronomer with the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.,” said Mahnmut in his usual soft, conversational tones. The hornet was pitching over again. And spinning. Phobos and the Stickney Crater hole were filling first one holographic window and then another.

Hockenberry was pretty sure that the thing was crashing and that he would be dead in less than a minute. He tried to remember a prayer from his childhood—damn all those years as an intellectual agnostic!—but all he could bring back was the singsong “Now I lay me down to sleep…”

It seemed appropriate. Hockenberry went with it.

“I believe that Hall discovered both moons of Mars in 1877,” Mahnmut was saying. “There is no record—none of which I am aware—of whether Mrs. Hall appreciated a huge crater being named after her. Of course, it was her maiden name.”

Hockenberry suddenly realized why they were out of control and going to crash and die. No one was flying the goddamned ship. It was just the two of them in the hornet, and the only control—real or virtual—that Mahnmut had touched had been the one to adjust the holographic views. He considered mentioning this oversight to the little organic-robot, but since the Stickney Crater was filling all the forward windows now and approaching at a speed they had no chance of decreasing before impact, Hockenberry kept his mouth shut.

“It’s a strange little moon,” said Mahnmut. “A captured asteroid, really—as is Deimos, of course. They’re quite different from each other. Phobos here orbits only three thousand seven hundred miles above the Martian surface—almost skimming the atmosphere, as it were—and is destined to crash into Mars in approximately eighty-three million years if no one does anything about it.”

“Speaking of crashing …” began Hockenberry.

At that moment the hornet slowed to a hover, dropped into the floodlit crater, and touched down near a complex network of domes, girders, cranes, glowing yellow bubbles, blue domes, green spires, moving vehicles, and hundreds of busy moravecs bustling around in vacuum. The landing, when it came, was so gentle that Hockenberry only just felt it through the metal floor and forcefield chair.