Mahnmut tried to imagine the immediate aftermath—the mini-black-holes immediately merging and plunging through the hull of The Dark Lady and the dropship, the mass accelerating toward the center of the Earth at thirty-two feet per second, sucking in all the mass of the two moravec ships with it, and then the air molecules, then the sea, then the sea bottom, then the rock, then the crust of the Earth itself as the black holes plummeted centerward.

How many days or months would the large mini-black-hole, comprised of all seven hundred sixty-eight warhead black holes, ping-pong back and forth through the planet, arcing up into space—for how far?—on each ping or pong? The electronic computing part of Mahnmut’s mind gave him the answer even though he didn’t want it, even though the physical part of his brain was too weary to absorb it. Far enough for the black holes to suck in all of the million-plus objects on the orbital rings in the first hundred ping-pongs through the planet, but not so far that it would eat the moon.

It would make no difference to Mahnmut, Orphu, and the other moravecs, even those on the Queen Mab. The dropship moravecs would be spaghettified almost instantaneously, their molecules stretched toward the center of the earth with the mini-hole as it fell, then farther, elasticating—was that a word? Mahnmut tiredly wondered—back through themselves as the black hole cut another swatch back up through the molten, spinning core of the planet.

Mahnmut closed his virtual eyes and concentrated on breathing, on feeling the dropship accelerate smoothly but constantly as it climbed. It was as if they were on a smooth, glass ramp rising to the heavens. Suma IV was good.

The sky changed from afternoon blue to vacuum black. The horizon bent like an archer’s bow. The stars seemed to explode into sight.

Mahnmut activated his vision and watched out the cockpit window as well as via the dropship’s imager feed via the umbilical connection at his jumpseat station.

They weren’t climbing to the Queen Mab, that was obvious. Suma IV leveled out the dropship at an altitude of not more than three hundred kilometers—barely above the atmosphere—and tapped thrusters to roll the Earth into the overhead cockpit windows so that full sunlight fell on the ship’s cargo bay doors. The rings and the Mab were more than thirty thousand kilometers higher and the moravec atomic spacecraft was on the opposite side of the Earth at the moment.

Mahnmut shut off the virtual feed for a second—feeling the zero-g as a physical release from the gravity of their work the last eighteen hours—and looked up through the clear overheads at the terminator moving across what had once been Europe, at the blue waters and white cloud masses of the Atlantic Ocean—the breach-gap wasn’t even a thin line from this altitude or angle—and not for the first time in the last eighteen hours, Mahnmut the moravec wondered how a living species gifted with such a beautiful homeworld could arm a submarine—themselves, any machine—with such weapons of total mindless destruction. What in any mental universe could seem worth the murder of millions, much less the destruction of an entire planet?

Mahnmut knew that they were not out of harm’s way yet. For all technical purposes, they might as well still be at the bottom of the ocean for all the good these few hundred kilometers did them. If any one of the black holes activated now, tripping the others into singularity, the ping-pong ripping-through-the-heart-of-Earth end of things would be just as certain, just as sure. Being in free fall was not the same as being out of the Earth’s gravitational field. The warheads would have to be far away—far beyond the Moon’s orbit certainly, since it was obvious the Earth’s gravity still reigned there—millions of kilometers away before the threat to Earth was over. The only difference in outcome at this measly altitude, Mahnmut knew, would be that the moravecs’ spaghettification ratio might grow a few percent in the initial minutes.

A matte-black spacecraft uncloaked—unstealthed, deforcefielded, came out of hiding—damn, Mahnmut had no word for it—appeared less than five kilometers from them on the sunward side. The ship was obviously of moravec design, but of a more advanced design than any spacecraft Mahnmut had ever seen. If the Queen Mab had seemed like some artifact from the Earth’s Lost Era Twentieth Century, this just-appeared spacecraft seemed centuries ahead of everything the moravecs had now. Somehow the black shape succeeded in seeming both stubby and deadly sleek, both simple and impossibly complicated in its fractal-batwing geometries, and there was no doubt whatsoever in Mahnmut’s mind that the ship carried awesome weapons.

He wondered for a few seconds if the Prime Integrators were actually going to risk the loss of one of their stealthed warships but… no… even as he wondered, Mahnmut saw an opening morph into being in the warship’s curved belly and a long witch’s broom of a device peroxided itself out into space, rotated along its own axis, lined up with the drop-ship, and used secondary thrusters on either side of an absurdly oversized engine bell to shove itself silently in their direction.

Orphu tightbeamed him. Why are we surprised? The Prime Integrators have had more than eighteen hours to come up with something and we moravecs have always bred good engineers.

Mahnmut had to agree. As the broomstick thrusted closer, slowing and rotating again as it came, putting on the brakes now, keeping the thrust bursts far away from the dropship’s belly, Mahnmut could see that the thing was probably about sixty meters long along its axis with a small AI brain node hitched in the center of mass like a saddle on a skinny nag, lots of silver manipulators and heavy-metal clamps, and one whomping big high-thrust engine just forward of that huge engine bell, along with scores of tiny thruster quads.

“I’m releasing the submersible now,” said Suma IV on the common band.

Mahnmut watched from the dropship hull cameras as the long cargo bays opened and The Dark Lady was floated gently out, propelled by the tiniest puff of gas. His beloved submersible began to rotate very slowly and since its own stabilization system had been shut off, she didn’t even try to stabilize herself. Mahnmut thought that he had never seen anything so out of her element—again—as the Lady was here in space, three hundred kilometers above the bright blue evening ocean of Earth.

The broomstick robot ship didn’t allow the submersible to tumble for long. The thing thrusted carefully, matched velocities perfectly, pulled The Dark Lady close to it with manipulator arms moving as gently as a lover after a long and tentative absence from his beloved, and then latched solid clamps in place—clamps built to lock into the submersible’s docking receptacles and various vents. Again with a sort of loving care, the broomstick AI—or the moravec on the warship currently controlling it—extruded a bright gold-foil molecular blanket and carefully, carefully folded the crinkling thing around the entire sub. The engineers didn’t want changes in temperature to trigger the black holes.

Quad thrusters fired and the praying mantis form of the robot ship and the foil-blanketed bulk of The Dark Lady moved away from the drop-ship, the robot aligning along its axis so that its engine bell was aimed down, toward the blue sea and white clouds and visibly moving terminator crossing Europe.

“What are they going to do about the little laser leukocytes?” Orphu of Io asked on the common band.

Mahnmut had wondered that himself—how were they going to keep the cleanup robotic laser attackers from triggering the warheads—but it hadn’t been his problem so he hadn’t tried to work it out in the past eighteen hours.