All six of the little green men nodded and kicked for the surface three meters above them.

A minute later sixty of them returned, some pulling cable, others with the black rods that slid out of the rollers they used to pull the stone heads. Again they worked with improbable efficiency, some working as a team to twist back a few centimeters of the doors at the opposite end of the hold bay, others running cable through as if threading a needle. Within a few minutes, they had dozens of strands of the strong cable running beneath the jammed bay doors. They kicked to the surface again, gesturing Mahnmut to follow.

Again he breathed air, felt sunlight on his polymer and skin, and stood on The Dark Lady ’s hull as hundreds of the little green men rigged the cables through a system of cliff-side pulleys and pulled. And pulled again.

The submersible creaked, the hull groaned, silt surrounded them, and The Dark Lady rolled another thirty degrees to starboard and twisted around until the belly of the ship was in the air and the stern was pointed toward the beach. The alloy bay doors bent but did not open.

Mahnmut attacked the doors with his powered pry bar again. The tortured and twisted metal would not relent. His acetylene torch was out of O2 and energy.

The little green men gently pulled him away from his fruitless labors. Mahnmut pulled free and stumbled across the slippery hull toward the hold again, intent on prying at the warped and jammed doors until his own energy cells died, but then he saw that the LGM weren’t finished with their efforts.

They knotted and spliced cable, turning the fifty stands into one. Then they ran the lengthened cable up the cliff face and through a series of oversized pulleys connected to a latticework of support rods they had somehow driven into the stone. Finally, they ran the cable to the huge stone head and wrapped the ends around the figure’s neck a dozen times before tying it off.

Five of the little green men came over and pushed Mahnmut into the water, pulling him away from the sub.

Mahnmut could not believe what he was seeing. He had assumed that the great stone faces were sacred to the little green men, their positioning and raising along the coast a religious or psychological imperative calling for all of their time, energy, and devotion, the stone heads their only priority. Evidently he was wrong.

Hundreds of the green figures wrestled the head around on its pallet, got behind it, shoved, and pushed it off the cliff.

The stone head—its face to the cliff now—fell sixty meters, striking rocks at the base of the cliff and shattering into a dozen pieces, but the cable whirred on pulleys, rods popped out of stone, and the tied-off ends ripped the hold-bay doors off and threw them twenty meters into the air before dragging the torn metal up the cliff and back down again.

Hundreds of little green men swam for the sub, but Mahnmut reached it first, flicking on his searchlights again.

There were the three objects he’d left in the hold, including the large Device they were supposed to deliver to Mons Olympus. And tucked into the crèche, battered and torn and silent, was Orphu of Io.

Mahnmut used the last power in his pry bar to rip free the arresting flanges and tie-downs. Orphu’s great bulk sagged free, sloshing in seawater. But the bay was opened skyward now, the sub on its back, and there was no way that Mahnmut could ever get the Ionian out of the partially flooded pit the storage bay had become.

A dozen more little green men jumped into the space with Mahnmut, found grasping points on Orphu’s pitted and cracked carapace, and forced green arms and legs under the hard-vac moravec’s ungainly shape. Together, they found leverage and lifted. Working silently, never slipping or dropping him, they lifted Orphu out, gently wrapped more cables around him, slid him across the curve of The Dark Lady’ s hull, lowered him to the water, set buoyant rollers under him, lashed them together into a raft, and gently propelled the Ionian’s body to the beach.

The little green men—at least a thousand strong on the beach now—stood back and gave Mahnmut room as he worked to find out if Orphu was dead or alive. The Ionian lay inert on the red-sand beach like some storm-battered, oversized trilobite washed ashore in one of Earth’s dim prehistoric ages.

Checking the skies for flying chariots that Mahnmut was sure were overdue, he emptied his backpack and waterproof bags of the gear he’d salvaged from The Dark Lady. First, he laid out five of the small but heavy power cells, connected them in series, and ran the cable to one of Orphu’s surviving input connectors. There was no response from the big Ionian, but the virtual indicator showed that the energy was flowing somewhere. Next, Mahnmut crawled up the curve of Orphu’s carapace—marveling at seeing the physical damage clearly for the first time here in the strong morning light—and screwed the radio receiver into the hardline socket. He tested the connection—receiving a carrier wave hum—and activated his own microphone.

“Orphu?”

No response.

“Orphu?”

Silence. The scores of little green men looked on impassively.

“Orphu?”

Mahnmut spent five minutes at the task, calling once every twenty seconds, using all comm frequencies and rechecking the receiver’s connections. The comm unit was receiving his transmission. It was Orphu who was not responding.

“Orphu?”

There wasn’t silence, exactly. From his external pickups, Mahnmut could hear more ambient noise than he’d ever encountered in his life: the lap of waves against the sand, the hiss of wind against the cliff behind him, the soft stir of the little green men shifting position from time to time, and the thousand nuances of vibrations in such a thick planetary atmosphere. It was just the commline and Orphu that were dead.

“Orphu?” Mahnmut checked his chronometer. He had been at it for more than thirty minutes. Reluctantly, in slow motion, he slid down off his friend’s carapace, walked fifteen paces down the beach, and sat in the wet sand where the water rolled in. The little green men made way for him and then surrounded him again at a respectful distance. Mahnmut looked at them—at the wall of tiny green bodies, expressionless faces, and unblinking black eyes.

“Don’t you all have work to do?” he asked, his voice sounding strange and choked to his own auditory inputs. Perhaps it was the acoustics of the Martian atmosphere.

The LGM did not move. The stone head was smashed into rubble of at the base of the cliff, but the little green men ignored it. A score of cables still ran out to the submersible where it lay inert in the low, rolling surf.

Mahnmut felt a sudden and immeasurably deep wave of loss and homesickness roll over him. He’d had three close relationships in his three Jovian decades—more than three hundred Martian years—of existence. First, The Dark Lady, which had been only a semi-sentient machine, but for which he’d been designed and in which he fit perfectly; the Lady was dead. Second, his exploration partner, Urtzweil, killed 18 J-years ago, half of Mahnmut’s lifetime ago. Now Orphu.

Now here he was hundreds of millions of kilometers from home, alone, unfit, untrained, and unprepared for this mission they’d sent him on. How was he supposed to get the 5,000 or so kilometers to Olympus Mons to plant the Device? And what if he did? Koros III may have known what to do there, what this mission was really about, but lowly Mahnmut, late of The Dark Lady, didn’t have a fucking clue.

Quit feeling sorry for yourself, idiot, he thought. Mahnmut glanced at the LGM. It surely must be an illusion that they seemed downcast, even sad. They hadn’t mourned the death of one of their own, how could they show that emotion at the end of a moravec, a sentient machine they’d never imagined?