For the longest moments, nothing does happen. Achilles expects shouts, cries, demands that Hephaestus prove that the images and voices had been real, Titans bellowing, the big Healer bugs scuttling around on rocks—but there is no movement, no sound from the hundreds of gigantic figures still gathered around. The air is so thick with smoke, the red-lava glare so filtered by the ash in the air, that Achilles silently thanks the gods—or someone—for the thermskin goggles he’s wearing that allow him to see what’s going on. He sneaks a glance at the Brane Hole that Hephaestus had said Nyx—Goddess Night herself—had opened for him. The Hole’s still there, about two hundred yards away, perhaps fifty feet high. If fighting starts, if the Demogorgon decides to eat both dwarf-god and Achaean hero as a snack, Achilles plans to make a run for that Brane Hole, even though he knows he’ll have to hack his way through giants and beasties every foot of the way. He’s prepared to do so.

The silence stretches. Dark winds howl over misshapen boulders and more misshapen sentient forms. The volcano burbles and belches but the Demogorgon does not make a noise.

Finally, it speaks—“ALL SPIRITS ARE ENSLAVED WHICH SERVE THINGS EVIL. NOW THOU KNOWEST WHETHER ZEUS BE SUCH OR NO.”

“Evil??” roars Kronos the Titan. “My son is mad! He is the usurper of all usurpers.”

Rhea, Zeus’s mother, has an even louder voice. “Zeus rides the wreckage of his own will. He is the scorn of the earth and the bane of Olympos. He needs to suffer the outcast of his own abandonment. He must wither in destined pain and be hanged from hell in his own adamantine chains.”

The Healer-monster speaks and Achilles is shocked to hear that its voice is very feminine. “Zeus reaches too far. He has first mimicked and now mocked the very Fates.”

One of the Immortal Hours booms down from its rocky precipice—“Downfall demands no direr name than this—Zeus Usurper.”

Achilles grabs the nearest shaking boulder, thinking that the volcano behind the Demogorgon is erupting, but it is only the muted rumble from the assembled Beings.

Kronos’ brother, the shaggy Titan Krios, speaks from where he stands amidst a lava flow. “This pretender must sink beneath the wide waves of his own ruin. I myself will ascend to Olympos where once we ruled and drag this empty thing down to hell, even as a vulture and a snake outspent drop, twisted in inexplicable fight.”

“Awful shape!” cries a many-armed Charioteer to the Demogorgon. “Speak!”

“MERCIFUL GOD REIGNS,” echoes the shapeless Demogorgon giant’s voice amid the Tartarus peaks and valleys. “ZEUS IS NOT ALMIGHTY GOD. ZEUS MUST NO LONGER REIGN ON OLYMPOS.”

Achilles had been sure that the veiled Demogorgon was limbless, but somehow the limbless giant raises a robed arm that was not visible a second earlier, extends something like terrible fingers.

The Brane Hole two hundred yards behind Hephaestus rises as if on command, hovers above them all, widens, and begins to drop.

“WORDS ARE QUICK AND WORDS ARE VAIN,” booms the Demogorgon as the burning red and still-widening circle of flame drops down around them all. “THE SINGLE SURE AND FINAL ANSWER MUST BE PAIN.”

Hephaestus grabs Achilles’ arm. The dwarf-god is grinning wildly, insanely, through his beard. “Hang on, kid,” he says.

It was a desperate, almost insane, turn of events, but Mahnmut couldn’t have been happier.

The dropship had hovered very low and dropped Mahnmut’s The Dark Lady submersible into the ocean about fifteen kilometers north of the troublesome critical-singularity coordinates. Suma IV explained that he didn’t want the splash setting off the seven hundred sixty-eight detected black holes—presumably on warheads in the the ancient, sunken sub also detected—and no one gave him an argument.

If Mahnmut had owned a human mouth, he would have been grinning like an idiot. The Dark Lady was designed and built for beneath-the-ice, black-as-inside-God’s-belly, horrific-pressure exploration and salvage work on Jupiter’s moon Europa, but it worked just fine in Earth’s Atlantic Ocean.

Better than fine.

“I wish you could see this,” Mahnmut said over their private comm. He and Orphu of Io were on their own again. None of the other moravecs had shown any great interest in approaching the seven hundred sixty-eight nascent but close-to-critical black holes and the drop-ship had already flown away on Suma IV’s continued reconnaissance—of the eastern seaboard of North America this time.

“I can ‘see’ the radar, sonar, thermal, and other data,” said Orphu.

“Yes, but it’s not the same. There’s so much light here in Earth’s ocean. Even here below twenty meters depth. Even full Jupiter-glow never illuminated my oceans—if there was a lead, a bare patch, above—deeper than a few meters.”

“I’m sure it’s beautiful,” said Orphu.

“It really is,” burbled Mahnmut, not noticing or caring if his big friend had been speaking ironically. “The sunlight shafts down, illuminating everything in a dappled-green, glowing way. The Lady isn’t sure of what to make of it.”

“She notices the light?”

“Of course,” said Mahnmut. “Her job is to report everything to me, to choose the right data and sensory feeds at the right time, and she’s self-aware enough to note all this difference in light, gravity and beauty here. She likes it, too.”

“Good,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “You’d better not ruin it by telling her why we’re here and what we’re swimming toward.”

“She knows,” said Mahnmut, not letting the big moravec ruin his buoyant mood. He watched as the sonar reported a ridgeline ahead—the ridge the wreck was on—rising to a silty bottom less than eighty meters below the surface. He still couldn’t get over how shallow this part of Earth’s ocean was. There was no spot in the Europan seas less than a thousand meters deep and here a ridgeline brought the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean up to not much more than sixty meters beneath the surface.

“I’ve run the full program of the disarmament protocol Suma IV and Cho Li downloaded to us,” continued Orphu. “Have you had time yet to study the details?”

“Not really.” Mahnmut had the long protocol in his active memory, but he’d been busy overseeing The Dark Lady’s exit from the dropship and the submersible’s adaptation to that beautiful, wonderful environment. His beloved sub was as good as new—better than new. The Phobos ‘vec mechanics had done a wonderful job on his boat. And every system that had worked well on Europa before their devastating crash landing in Mars’ Tethys Sea the previous year now worked better than well here in Earth’s gentle sea.

“The good news about the disarming of each black-hole warhead is that it’s theoretically doable,” said Orphu of Io. “We have the tools aboard—including the ten-thousand-degree cutting torch and the focused forcefield generators—and in many of the necessary steps, I can be your arms while you’re my visible-light spectrum eyes. We’ll have to work together on every warhead, but they’re theoretically disarmable.”

“That is good news,” said Mahnmut.

“The bad news is that if we work straight through, without coffee breaks or restroom stops, it’s going to take us a little over nine hours per black hole—not per MRVed warhead, mind you, but for each near-critical black hole.”

“With seven hundred sixty-eight black holes …” began Mahnmut.

“Six thousand nine hundred twelve hours,” said Orphu. “And since we’re on Earth and moravec standard time is real planetary time here, it’s two hundred forty-seven days, twelve hours, if everything goes according to plan and we don’t run into any real problems…”

“Well …” began Mahnmut. “I guess we deal with this factor when we find the wreck and see if we can get to the warheads at all.”