The Pillars of Hercules (55 page)

It just happened to be the wrong one.

The giant sphere cannoned straight into them and just kept going, leaving a Zeus-sized hole in the firmament from which flame immediately began pouring. So great was the heat that Eumenes could feel it wash across him as the railcar continued speeding down the concave side. Earth was getting ever closer, though the firmament and the terrestrial disc didn’t intersect—there was a wide gulf between them even at their closest point. But the competition was in even worse shape. Kalyana gestured up at Kronos, high overhead, where the tiny figures of the four who rode it could still be seen—and whose plan to make the leap down to Zeus was no longer an option.

“No offense to them,” said Kalyana, “but they are fucked.”

Lugorix was thinking the same thing. They were still stuck on the outermost planet, and the amount of wreckage now piling up in the Zeus-orbit had made any kind of move there basically impossible. Just to make matters worse, the Balearic slingers on the wall of the firmament were getting pretty good at using gravity to augment their shots. Rocks were zinging past, and the four who clung to Kronos had no way to shield themselves. They were right on the top of the orb, otherwise they’d slide right off—and there were no crevasses or or pits to hide in, as planetary bodies were perfect by definition.

Which made Lugorix feel like ever more of a sitting duck. It was only a matter of time before they got nailed. Matthias had tried to get a few shots off with his bow, but he was firing against the pull of gravity, and the arrows got nowhere near the Carthaginians. But even though the situation was rapidly coming apart at the seams, the entity within Barsine didn’t seem worried.

“Eurydice,” it said. “How many of those bombs do you have left?”

“That’d be one,” said Aristotle’s daughter. “We used one on the
Xerxes,
one on the roof overhead, so we’re down to our last—”

“Give it to me.” Eurydice handed it over, albeit reluctantly. As she did so, another stone from one of the slingers just missed her hand—she almost dropped the bomb but Barsine reached out with unnatural speed and grabbed the device. She then smeared on the egg-honey mixture they’d used to adhere the previous bomb to the firmament overhead before adjusting the device’s wick and lighting it. As she held it, she looked around slowly—at the Earth far below, at the planetary orbs above that, at the flame jetting in from the ceiling, at all those heads of the hydra reaching down toward them. She seemed to be lost in thought. And all the while that wick was burning down.

“Would you mind getting rid of that thing?” said Eurydice. Barsine looked at her as though genuinely surprised—then in a single fluid motion she threw the bomb directly behind them, right onto Kronos’s rail. For a moment Lugorix watched that bomb recede. But only for a moment.

And then it detonated.

Instantly the rail snapped. As it did so, Lugorix suddenly felt Kronos shift beneath him—and suddenly his heart flew into his mouth as the portion of the rail they were on bent under the weight of the planetary orb…which in turn slowed, stopped, and then slid backward, the rail bending still further as they rolled straight toward the severed end.

“Oh shit,” said Lugorix.

“Everyone hold on,” said Barsine.

They plunged off into space.

“Think that’ll work?” asked Ptolemy as they watched the orb of Kronos tumble away toward the inner solar system.

“Not a chance,” said Eumenes. He could now see hydra-necks coming in through the second hole, the one that the wayward Zeus had created. Apparently fire was no problem for them. That meant two places where the dome was breached.

Suddenly there were a whole lot more.

A short distance behind where Eumenes was: several of the artificial stars past which the Carthaginian railcar was riding suddenly blew open—the furnace windows shattering as hydra-necks crashed through and seized the hapless occupants of the railcar. The two slingers were caught immediately; Hanno was knocked from the railcar altogether and tumbled away. A hydra-neck darted after him, but wasn’t going to catch up with him in time—until its tongue shot out and grabbed him. Eumenes could hear him screaming as he was drawn back to the hydra’s maw.

“We need to get off this ceiling fast,” said Ptolemy, eyeing the still-extant stars around them.

“I am working on that very problem,” said Kalyana.

They hurtled through the solar system, and worlds reeled past them. They shot through the wreckage of Zeus’ orbit, in between the gears and rails and ramps hanging in all directions, and plunged ever further downward. They weren’t falling as fast as Lugorix would have thought—Barsine said that was because they were travelling through something called
aether
—but they were still going down way too quickly for comfort. The disc of Earth grew as they veered in toward it. Lugorix could see the orbs of the inner planets getting ever closer. They were heading for one in particular—much smaller than either Zeus or Kronos, and colored dark-red.

“Get ready!” yelled Barsine, and it was the most emotion they’d heard from that voice since she’d been possessed by the thing within her. Next moment they just missed that red planet and struck the rail on which it was riding, bouncing for a moment… and then the grooves of gears clicked into place as they slid along its orbit, heading in the opposite direction—but no longer falling.

“Welcome to Ares,” said Barsine.

Leosthenes scrambled over the rope first, followed by Agathocles—the two of them disappearing into the window of the Helepolis, that rope slowly growing tauter as the Helepolis kept on cranking forward.

“Now you go,” said Xanthippus to Diocles.

“I’m not sure I can,” said Diocles.

“I’ll be right behind you.
Now go
.”

And Diocles did. He couldn’t face being shamed in Xanthippus’ eyes, and there were only seconds anyway. Not only was the rope on the point of snapping but the Helepolis was about to brush up against the aqueduct a little further down. So he banished all thought and fear from his mind, grabbed onto the rope—almost slipped, but then locked his legs around it while he pulled ahead with his arms. What probably saved him is that he didn’t look down—though looking up was bad enough, for he was staring all the way along the Helepolis, its topmost battlements set against the darkened sky. And then the rough hands of Agathocles and Leosthenes were grabbing him and dragging him through the window, pulling him onto the floor next to the body of the dead archer. It took a moment for Diocles to realize he wasn’t dead too. But then he leapt to his feet—just in time to see Xanthippus pulling himself through the window. Next moment there was a gigantic crashing noise: a mere fraction of the sound the whole of the siege-tower was making, but all too loud in that window as the Helepolis began to scrape the aqueduct. Bricks started falling past the room into which the four men had just climbed. Outside the window Diocles watched as the entire aqueduct swayed, then collapsed amidst clouds of choking dust. Then he felt the floor tilt beneath him as the Helepolis began to move down the far, eastern side of the plateau.

“Next stop central Syracuse,” breathed Agathocles.

“We’d better make this quick,” said Leosthenes.

Which was precisely what Eumenes was thinking as Kalyana accelerated the railcar still further, somehow pushing it way beyond whatever its safety margins were. Next moment, Kalyana hauled on the levers; Eumenes felt a jolt.

Next moment they fell away from the firmament.

Eumenes figured they’d come off the rails altogether, were tumbling down toward oblivion. Beside him Ptolemy was muttering prayers and curses all in the same breath. But then he realized that they were still on a rail—a very slender one, practically impossible to see against all the others that filled this chamber, for it was far narrower than any of the planetary ones and it led in a completely different direction from any of them, past the orbits and gears of Ares and through an opening in the almost-invisible crystal sphere of the Sun, past the orbits of Aphrodite and Hermes—and straight in toward the Earth. They plummeted down toward the disc, which swelled with every passing second. It was all Eumenes could do to catch his breath enough to ask the obvious question.

“What are we on?”
he yelled.

“It is the route of a hairy star,” said Kalyana. “You remember it, no?”

Eumenes remembered all right, but not in his wildest nightmares did he imagine he’d be riding along the path of one, particularly not in some enormous simulation of the universe so far beneath the real one. They streaked in over the edge of the terrestrial disc, right above the hemisphere that stretched above it, containing air and roiling patterns of weather. Then blue of ocean was replaced by the green and brown of continents: there was a long one running north to south that he’d never even
heard
of, and then they were over Asia. He was stunned to see just how much land there was to the east of the furthest extent of Alexander’s march—and then they were cruising in above the mountains of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush where he and Hephaestion had spent so much time in search of the lost treasures of the ancients… the ancients whose world he was even now penetrating straight to the heart of. He wondered if they had populated the disc beneath him with miniature creatures or automata, or if they’d simply left it barren, uninhabited, the only intelligence in here that of the machine itself. He wondered how that machine worked in the first place—how it was controlled, what it controlled (was it
really
the entire world above?—was the
whole universe
simply a huge machine?—were there worlds beyond even it—unseen worlds past the cosmic fire that ringed the universe, that
contained
the universe, nothing but machine encompassing machine encompassing machine?)—and then they were sweeping out above the Mediterranean, over the Pillars of Hercules, past the Fortunate Islands, dropping ever closer to the Ocean. Which was when Eumenes suddenly realized that Kalyana had screwed this one up, that they were going to smash straight into the hemisphere of air—he was close enough to that hemisphere to see the engines and pipes stacked along it that controlled its atmosphere and weather—but then he realized the ramp extended past it, just missed the edge of the disc and continued onward.

Except now they were switching onto yet another ramp and rising up again, the western edge of the Earth dropping away beneath them, nothing but abyss below them.

And nothing but the Moon in front of them.

“Brace yourself,” said Kalyana.

Then they were off, battling their way out into the Helepolis, killing everyone who tried to stop them and sneaking right past all those who didn’t notice. And there were a lot who didn’t: most of the crew were working the siege-engines and firing out the arrow-slits at the mass of targets below—and there was so much smoke and so much noise that most of them never even bothered to turn around.

Not that the intruders were staying in the high-trafficked areas. Leosthenes led the way; apparently he’d seen the plans for this monstrosity, either through Athenian intelligence or because Aristotle had taken it with him when he fled Pella. The place was a veritable maze of catwalks and stairs and ladders. In short order they made their way off the level they’d boarded at and up some rungs onto the next. There was a gap in the floor ahead of them: Diocles suddenly found himself looking out into a vast hollow space, a hole cut through several levels. At each level, hundreds of men were turning gigantic capstans, while rising through the entirety of the open space were enormous clanking engines and whirling gears that hissed and spat as conveyor belts of buckets dumped water to cool them.

“This way,” said Leosthenes. He headed toward an entirely different conveyor belt, one that stretched along one of the exterior walls, rising from a small hole in the floor and through the ceiling. Stone and metal bolts were stacked neatly into each bucket on the belt; Diocles realized this was part of the internal transport system for ammunition. They all grabbed onto rungs and started getting hauled upward—through three levels and then jumping off to run down another passage that ended in one of the corner rooms, domimated by a large window. Protruding through that window was one of the largest weapons that Diocles had ever seen—an enormous barrel to which was attached a metallic sphere fed by bellows. Just as the group reached the room, several crew were hauling on chains to work the bellows; Diocles watched as fire poured out the far end of the barrel, shooting out in an arc and splashing down upon the city far below.

“Kill them,” said Agathocles.

They did. Quickly. The room ran red with blood, the screams unheard over the roaring of the machine in which they were all riding. Yet even as he was gutting unarmed gunners and crew, Diocles found himself staring past them as they begged for mercy—staring at Syracuse like he’d never seen it, sprawling down the eastern side of the plateau all the way toward the Great Harbor. As that slope grew steeper, the floor beneath them was levelling out, as though the Helepolis was so sophisticated that it could somehow adjust its own incline. The butchery done, Diocles glanced around to see Leosthenes shoving a torch up against the wooden portion of the bellows, which quickly caught fire. Next moment they were all running back the way they came, back to that ammunition-belt, clambering back onto it and rising higher into the structure. They’d gone only a few more levels when there was a thunderous boom beneath them. Fire shot past one of the windows outside; the entire edifice shook. Diocles whooped in triumph. But Agathocles just laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Diocles demanded.

“That’d be you,” said Leosthenes, not unkindly. “This machine has at least a
hundred guys
dedicated purely to fire-fighting operations. They’ll clean up the mess we just made and they’ll be quick about it.”

“What are we making for?” asked Diocles. “The command room?”