A slow nod. “We can develop something autonomous that will still work much better than a land car.”

“Good. Do. But it’ll take you a month or two to design it, especially if you’re not going to ask the Utopians to design it for you. Jeeps, you can get the plans from a museum and start building them tomorrow. Build me fifty thousand jeeps, and when you have something better build me fifty thousand of that, but we’ll still use the jeeps, just like we’ll use wagons, and horses, and wheelbarrows, and sticks and stones. This is war. Better a spear than a rock, but better a rock than nothing.”

MASON took a long breath. “Very well. I’ll build jeeps.”

“Weapons are a more complicated question. We’ll look together at what the history of warfare has to offer that still makes any kind of sense.”

We had landed now, and guards and Martin waited with salutes and reports. MASON ignored them. “Anything else?”

Stag-light Achilles leapt down to the waiting stone. “I’ve found a bull.”

“A bull?”

“A fine bull, yearling, fed right, reared close to Parnassus. I’m going to sacrifice it to father Zeus and the other deathless gods, to ask them for victory.” The ancient King of the Myrmidons offered Caesar his hand to help him down. “Would you like to join me?”

Emperor he may be, reader, heir to Alexander and Augustus, but there is a modern person beneath the death-black uniform, and that person took some moments to wrap his mind around the notion of actually, in real life, not in metaphor, drawing a knife across a living creature’s throat and watching the red blood flow. “Yes,” he answered. “Yes, I’d be honored to join you.”

It was done, and done well, a satisfying ceremony, as I understood from the new vigor which armored both of them against the next chaotic weeks. I was glad. They are both men who need friends. I did not attend. I could not. I am a parricide. My unclean presence would make the sacrifice unfit, the prayers unheeded. Nothing in any universe can wash the blood of my adopted parents from my hands. These days that fact grows harder to forget.

CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH

Some Notes of Martin Guildbreaker on the Simultaneous Advancement of Four Investigations

(Abridged and translated from the Latin by Martin themself.—9A)

Cumulative through June 10, 2454

Events of April, May, and June

Written at Alexandria

OVERALL THOUGHTS (written May 9, 2454):

Prioritizing is impossible when one faces two different tasks, each of which has claim to be the most important problem in the world. I face three.