“You don’t seem to offer us any chance,” said Tom, the quiet medic.

“I am not,” said Noman, his voice rising now. “It is not for me to offer you a chance, although my trip may accidentally afford you one if I am successful. But the odds of my success are low—I won’t lie to you. You deserve the truth. But if something important does not change, sonie or no sonie, the odds of your success—of your survival—are zero.”

Daeman, who had sworn he would stay quiet during the discussion, heard himself shouting. “Can we go to the rings, Noman? The sonie would take us there—six at a time. It brought me home from Prospero’s Isle on the e-ring. Would we be safe in the orbital rings?”

All faces turned toward him. Not a single gaze moved to where the shimmering Moira stood not six feet to his right.

“No,” said Noman. “You would not be safe in the rings.”

The dark-haired woman named Edide stood suddenly. She seemed to be sobbing and laughing at the same time. “You’re not giving us a fucking chance!”

For the first time—maddeningly, infuriatingly—Odysseus/Noman smiled, his teeth white against his mostly gray beard. “It’s not for me to give you a chance,” he said harshly. “The Fates will either choose to do that or decline to do that. It is up to you today to give me a chance… or not.”

Ada stepped forward. “Let’s vote. I think that no one should abstain in this vote, since everything may depend on it. Those in favor of allowing Odysseus… I’m sorry, I mean Noman… to borrow our sonie, please hold up your right hand. Those opposed, keep your hands down.”

The city and battlefield of Troy—ancient Ilium—wasn’t much to look at from five thousand meters up.

“That’s it?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from the troop carrier deck. “That’s where we were with the Greeks and Trojans fighting? That shrubby hill and bit of land?”

“Six thousand years ago,” said Mahnmut from his control room of The Dark Lady in the dropship’s cargo bay.

“And in another universe,” said Orphu from his corner of The Dark Lady’s own cargo bay.

“It doesn’t look like much,” said Suma IV from the controls of the dropship. “Can we move on?”

“One more circle, please,” said Mahnmut. “Can we go lower? Fly over the plain between the ridge and the sea? Or the beach?”

“No,” said Suma IV. “Use your optics to magnify. I don’t choose to run that close to the interdiction field dome over the dried-up Mediterranean Sea or get that low.”

“I was thinking of getting a little closer to allow Orphu’s radar and thermal imaging to get better signals,” said Mahnmut.

“I’m fine,” rumbled the intercom voice from the hold.

The dropship orbited again at five thousand meters, the westernmost part of its circle above the ruins on the hilltop and still more than a kilometer from where the Mediterranean Basin began. Mahnmut zoomed his image from the primary camera feed, shut off other inputs, and looked down with a strange sense of sadness.

The rubble of the ruins of the ancient stones where Ilium had once stood lay on a ridge running westward toward the curve of Aegean shore—it was never really a bay, just a bend where ancient ships had tied up to stakes and stone anchors. And where Agamemnon and all the Greek heroes had beached their hundreds of black ships.

To the west then, the Aegean and Mediterranean had stretched forever—the wine-dark sea—but now, through the slight shimmer of the post-human-created interdiction field that would cut all the dropship’s power in a millisecond if they flew into it, there stretched away only more dirt, more rock, distant green fields—the dry Mediterranean Basin. Also easily visible to the west were ancient islands that once rose from the sea—islands that Achilles had conquered before assaulting Troy: Imbros, Lemnos, and Tenedos, visible now only as steep, forest-covered hills with rocky bases meeting the sandy bottom of the Basin.

Between the now-dry Aegean and the ridge holding the ruins of Troy, Mahnmut could see a kilometer and a half or so of alluvial plain. It was a forest of scrub trees now, but the little moravec could easily see this plain as it was when he had been there with Odysseus, Achilles, Hector, and all the other warriors—about three curving miles of shallow sea fringed with marshes and sandy alluvial flats, the man-crowded beach, the sand dunes that had soaked up so much blood in the years of fighting there, the thousands of bright tents above the beach, then the wide plain between the beach and the city—wooded now, but stripped bare of all trees then after a decade of foraging for firewood for cooking fires and corpse fires.

To the north there was water still visible: the strait once called the Dardanelles, the Hellespont, dammed up by glowing forcefield hands of the same sort as between Gibraltar and Africa on the west end of the drained Mediterranean.

As if he were studying the same area with his radar and other instruments, Orphu said over their private circuit—“The post-humans must have built some huge drainage system underground or this entire area would be flooded now.”

“Yes,” sent Mahnmut, not really interested in the engineering or physics of the thing. He was thinking of Lord Byron and of Alexander the Great and of all the others who had made their pilgrimage to Ilium, Troy, this strangely sacred site.

No stone there is without a name. The words seemed just to appear in Mahnmut’s mind. Who had written that? Lucan? Perhaps. Probably.

On the hilltop now, only a few gray-white scars of disturbed rock showed, a tumble of stones, all without a name. Mahnmut realized that he was looking at the ruins of ruins—some of those scrapes and scars probably dated back to the Troy-fanatic and amateur archaeologist Schlie-mann’s careless digs and brutal excavations from when he first started digging in 1870—more than three thousand years ago on this true Earth.

It was noplace special now. The last name it had held on any human map was Hisarlik. Rocks, scrub trees, an alluvial plain, a high ridge looking north to the Dardanelles and west to the Aegean.

But in Mahnmut’s mind’s eye he could see precisely where the armies had clashed on the Plains of Scamander and the Plain of Simois. He could see where the walls and topless towers of Ilium had held their high place there, where the long ridge dropped down toward the sea. He could still make out a thicketed ridge in between the city and the sea—the Greeks had called it Thicket Ridge even then, but the priests and priestesses in the temples of Troy often referred to it as Mryine’s Mounded Tomb—and he remembered how he had watched Zeus’s face rise in the south as an atomic mushroom cloud not so many months ago.

Six thousand years ago.

As the dropship completed its last, high circling, Mahnmut could make out where the great Scaean Gate had held back the screaming Greeks—there had been no large wooden horse in the Iliad Mahnmut had seen firsthand, and the great, main lane inside past the marketplace and central fountains all leading to Priam’s palace, destroyed in the bombing more than ten months ago in Mahnmut’s time, and just northeast of the palace the great Temple to Athena. Where only rocks waited now and scrub trees grew, Mahnmut from Europa could see where the busy Dardanian Gate had been and the main watchtower and well just north of it where once Helen had…

“There’s nothing here,” said their pilot, Suma IV, over the intercom. “I’m leaving now.”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut.

“Yes,” rumbled Orphu over the same commline.

They flew north, retracting the slow-flight wings and breaking the sound barrier again. The echo of the sonic boom went unheard on both sides of the empty Dardanelles.

“Are you excited?” Mahnmut asked his friend over their private line. “We’ll be seeing Paris in a few minutes.”