They were built to withstand far greater pressures, although Orphu was used to negative pressure differentials as he worked in the radiation-and sulfur-filled space around the moon Io.

And speaking of radiation, there was a lot of it around. They both registered it and the Lady monitored it and relayed her readings. It was not dangerous to moravecs of their design, but the feeling of the neutron and gamma rays pouring through them caught their attention.

Mahnmut explained that under this pressure, if they had been human beings and if they had been breathing tanked standard Earth air—a mixture of twenty-one percent oxygen with seventy-nine percent nitrogen—the multiplying and expanding nitrogen bubbles under eight atmospheres would be playing havoc with them, giving them nitrogen narcosis, distorting their judgment and emotions, and not allowing them to surface without hours of slow decompression at different depths. But the moravecs were breathing pure O-two, with their rebreathing systems compensating for the added pressure.

“Shall we look at our adversaries?” asked Orphu of Io.

Mahnmut led the way. As careful as he was climbing the curved hull of the wreck, silt rose around them like a terrestrial dust storm.

“Can you still see by fine radar?” asked Mahnmut. “This crap is blinding me on visual frequencies. I’ve read about this in all the old Earth-based diving stories. The first diver at a wreck site on the bottom or inside the wreck would get a view—all the others would have zero viz—at least until the silt and crud settles.”

“Zero viz, huh?” said Orphu. “Well, welcome to the club, amigo. The detailed radar I use in the sulphur-mess vacuum near Io serves to probe through these little silt clouds just fine. I see the hull, the hump of the missile compartment, the whatchamacallit—the broken sail—thirty meters forward. If you need help, just ask and I’ll lead you by the hand.”

Mahnmut grunted and switched his primary vision to thermal and radar frequencies.

They drifted over the missile compartment, five meters above the warheads themselves, both moravecs using their built-in thrusters to maneuver, each being careful not to squirt any thrust in the direction of the tumbled warheads.

And tumbled they were. There were forty-eight missile tubes and forty-eight missile tube hatches wide open.

These hatches look heavy, said Mahnmut over their tightbeam. Everything they said and saw, of course, including tightbeam, was being relayed up to the Queen Mab and the dropship via a relay radio buoy Mahnmut had deployed from The Dark Lady.

Ophu had been gripping one of the huge hatches—its diameter as large as the Ionian—and now he said, “Seven tons.”

Even after the crew had ordered the sub’s AI to open the forty-eight missile tube hatches, the missiles themselves still had been covered by blue fiberglass domes that held out the sea. Mahnmut saw at a glance how the missiles—propelled to the surface by huge charges of nitrogen gas, their engines to ignite only after each missile reached air—would easily burst through those fiberglass covers.

But the missiles had not exploded from their tubes in rising bubbles of nitrogen, nor had their engines ignited. The fiberglass dome-covers had long since worn away; only brittle blue fragments remained.

“What a mess,” said Orphu.

Mahnmut nodded. Whatever had hit the stern of The Sword of Allah, breaking its back just above the engine room, severing its propulsion jets, and sending the ocean rushing in through the length of the boomer as a wall of shock wave and seawater, had breached the various missile compartments and tumbled the missiles themselves. It looked like a heap of ancient straw. In some cases the warheads were still pointing vaguely upward, but in others the ancient, corroded rocket engines and their solid fuel were at the top and the warheads buried in silt.

Forget that easy six thousand nine hundred twelve hours of work, tight-beamed Orphu. It’ll take that long just to get to some of those warheads. And odds are overwhelming that any serious torch cutting or twisting on one will detonate another one.

Yeah, said Mahnmut. There was no silt obscuring his view now and he looked at the tangled mess primarily on his optical frequencies.

“Do either of you have a suggestion?” asked Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

Mahnmut almost jumped. He’d known they were being monitored by everyone on the Mab, but he had been so absorbed with studying the wreckage that the connection had almost slipped his mind.

“Yes,” said Orphu of Io, switching to the common band. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

He described the procedure as succinctly and nontechnically as he could. Rather than try to disarm each warhead through the long protocol the Prime Integrators had downloaded, the Ionian now planned for Mahnmut and him to do it the quick and messy way. Mahnmut would bring The Dark Lady right above the wreck, extending her landing legs to full length until she was squatting over the boomer like a mother hen on her nest. They’d use all the ship’s belly searchlights to illuminate their work. Then Orphu and Mahnmut would separately use the torches to cut each warhead away from its missile, using a simple chain and pulley system to haul the nose cones directly up into The Dark Lady’s cargo hold and setting them in place in cargo baffles there like eggs in a carton.

“Isn’t there a great chance of the black holes going critical during this rough and tumble process?” asked Cho Li from the bridge of the Queen Mab.

“Yeah,” rumbled Orphu over the comm, “but the odds are one hundred percent that one of the black holes will activate if we spend a year or more futzing around with them. We’re doing it this way.”

Mahnmut touched one of the Ionian’s manipulators and nodded agreement, sure that his nod would be picked up by Orphu’s close radar.

Suma IV’s stern voice broke in over the commlink. “And what do you propose to do with the forty-eight warheads with their seven hundred sixty-eight black holes once you get them loaded in your submersible?”

“You’re going to pick us up,” said Mahnmut. “The dropship will haul The Dark Lady and its bellyful of death into outer space and we’ll send the holes on their way.”

“The dropship isn’t configured to fly out beyond the rings,” snapped Suma IV. “And the leukocyte robotic attack drones in the e—and p-rings will certainly mob us on the way up.”

“That’s your problem,” rumbled Orphu. “We’re going to get to work now. It should take us ten to twelve hours to hack and cut these warheads free and load them into The Dark Lady. When we break surface, you’d better have a plan. We know you have other spacecraft than the Mab up there on this mission—stealthed, out beyond the rings, whatever. You’d better have one ready to meet the dropship in low Earth orbit and take this mess off our hands. We don’t want to have come all this way to Earth just to destroy it.”

“Acknowledge your transmission,” said Asteague/Che. “Please be advised that we have a visitor up here. A small spacecraft—a sonie, I believe—is rendezvousing with Sycorax’s orbital isle as I speak.”