“The Valkyrie, the Indomitable, and the Nimitz are going to accompany the robot ship and destroy any approaching leukocytes,” said Suma IV. “While our warships remain stealthed, of course.”

Orphu actually laughed aloud on the common band. “Valkyrie, Indomitable, and Nimitz?” he rumbled. “My, we peaceloving moravecs are getting scarier by the minute, aren’t we.”

No one answered. To break the silence, Mahnmut said, “Which one is that… no, wait, it’s gone.” The matte-black fractal bat had restealthed, its presence not even suggested by a blotted-out patch of starfield or ringfield.

“That was the Valkyrie,” said Suma IV. “Ten seconds.”

No one counted down aloud. Everyone, Mahnmut was sure, was counting silently.

At zero, the high-thrust engine bell was illuminated by the slightest blue glow, reminiscent to Mahnmut of the Cerenkov-radiation glow of the warhead nacelles. The broomstick-mantis began to move, began to climb—with agonizing slowness. But Mahnmut knew that anything under constant thrust long enough would achieve a horrific velocity soon enough, even while climbing up out of Earth’s gravity well, and he also knew that the robot ship would be increasing that thrust as it climbed. Probably by the time the ship and the dead, thermal-blanket-wrapped hulk of The Dark Lady reached the empty orbit of Earth’s moon, the package would have achieved escape velocity. Even if the black holes activated after that point, the singularities would be a hazard in space, no longer the death of Earth.

The robot ship soon disappeared against the moving ringfield. Mahnmut saw not the slightest hint of fusion or ion exhausts from the three stealthed moravec spacecraft that were presumably escorting the robot.

Suma IV closed the cargo bay doors. “All right, everyone, please listen up,” said the pilot. “Some strange things have been going on while our two friends have been busy under the surface of the water-ocean down there. We need to get back to the Queen Mab.”

“What happened to our reconnaissance mission …” began Mahnmut.

“You can download the recorded feed as we climb,” interrupted Suma IV. “But right now the prime integrators want us back aboard. The Mab is leaving for a while… pulling back to lunar orbit at least.”

“No,” said Orphu of Io.

The syllable seemed to echo on the comm line like the single tolling of some huge bell.

“No?” said Suma IV. “Those are our orders.”

“We need to go back down to that Atlantic gap, breach, whatever we call it,” said Orphu. “We need to go back down now.”

“You need to shut up and hang on,” said the big Ganymedan at the controls. “I’m taking the dropship back to the Mab as ordered.”

“Look at the images you shot from ten thousand meters,” said Orphu and fed the image to everyone aboard via their umbilicaled Internet.

Mahnmut looked. It was the same picture he’d looked at before they began work on cutting the warheads free: the startling gap in the ocean, the crumbled bow of the submarine emerging from the north wall of that gap, a small debris field.

“I’m blind on optic frequencies,” said Orphu, “but I kept manipulating the accompanying radar imagery and something’s odd there. Here’s the best magnification and clarification I could get on the visual photograph. You tell me if there’s something there that deserves closer examination.”

“I’ll tell you right now that nothing we see there will make me fly the dropship back there,” Suma IV said flatly. “You two haven’t got the word yet, but the asteroid isle—that huge asteroid where we dropped Odysseus off—is leaving. It’s already changed its axis and aligned itself, and fusion thrusters are igniting as we speak. And your friend Odysseus is dead. And more than a million satellites in the polar and equatorial rings—mass accumulators, the fax-teleport devices, other things—are all coming alive again. We’re leaving.”

“LOOK AT THE GODDAMNED PHOTOGRAPHS,” bellowed Orphu of Io.

All the moravecs on board, even those without ears, tried to put their hands over their ears.

Mahnmut looked at the next photograph in the digital series. It had not only been magnified far beyond their original view, but the pixels cleared up.

“That’s some sort of backpack sitting there on the dry floor of the breach,” said Mahnmut. “And next to it…”

“A pistol,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “A gunpowder slug-thrower, if my guess is correct.”

“And that looks like a human body lying next to the pack,” said one of the black-chitinous troopers. “Something that’s been dead a long time—all mummified and flattened.”

“No,” said Orphu. “I checked the best radar imagery. That’s not a human body, just a human thermskin.”

“So?” said Suma IV from his command chair at the controls. “The submarine wreck expelled one of its passengers or some of a human’s belongings. They’re part of the debris field.”

Orphu snorted loudly. “And it’s all still there after twenty-five hundred standard years? I doubt it, Suma. Look at the pistol. No rust. Look at the rucksack. No rot. That part of the breach-gap is open to the elements—including sunlight and wind—but this stuff hasn’t degraded.”

“It proves nothing,” said Suma IV as he tapped in the rendezvous coordinates for the Queen Mab. Thrusters kicked the dropship into proper alignment for the burn and climb. “Sometime in the past few years some old-style human wandered out there to die. We have more important things to deal with right now.”

“Look in the sand,” said Orphu.

“What?” said their pilot.

“Look at the fifth image I blew up. In the sand. I can’t see it, but the radar was good down to three millimeters. What do you see there—with your eyes?”

“A footprint,” said Mahnmut. “A footprint of a bare human foot. Several footprints. All distinct in the muddy soil and soft sand. All leading west. Rain would wipe away those prints in a few days. Some human has been there in the last forty-eight hours or less—perhaps even while we were working on recovering the warheads.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Suma IV. “Our orders are to return to the Queen Mab and we’re going to…”

“Take the dropship back down to the Atlantic Breach,” commanded Prime Integrator Asteague/Che from thirty thousand kilometers higher on the opposite side of the Earth. “Our review of imagery we took hastily on the last orbit shows what may be the body of a human being in the Breach approximately twenty-three kilometers to the west of the submarine wreckage. Go and recover it at once.”

I flick into solidity and realize that I’ve QT’d myself into Helen of Troy’s private bathing chambers deep within the palace she used to share with her dead husband, Paris, and which she now shares with her former father-in-law, King Priam. I know I have only a few minutes in which to act, but I don’t know what to do.

Slave girls and serving women shriek as I stride from room to room calling Helen’s name. I hear the servants calling for the guards and realize that I may have to QT away quickly if I don’t want to end up on the end of a Trojan spear. Then I see a familiar face in the next chamber. It’s Hypsipyle, the slave woman from Lesbos whom Andromache had used as a personal minder for crazy Cassandra. This Hypsipyle might know where Helen is, since Helen and Andromache were very close the last time I saw them. And at least this slave isn’t running away or calling for the guards.

“Do you know where Helen is?” I ask as I approach the heavyset woman. Her blunt face is as expressionless as a gourd.

As if in answer, Hypsipyle rears back and kicks me in the gonads. I levitate, grab myself, fall to the tiled floor, roll around in agony, and squeak.

She aims another kick that would take my head off if I don’t dodge it, so I try to dodge, take the kick on the shoulder, and end up rolling into the corner, not even able to squeak now, my left shoulder and arm numb all the way down to the fingertips.