Blood of the Heroes by Steve White

Author:Steve White [White, Steve ]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 1-4165-0924-0
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Oannes rejoined them. He took no apparent notice of the embarrassed and abrupt halt to their whispered conversation.

"I have set in our course. Ah, we are moving now." They felt a slight surge.

"Should we get seated again?" asked Jason.

"No. We are proceeding at a leisurely rate. This craft's full speed would bring us to our destination in little more than an hour. But the energy expenditure involved would make us easier for the Teloi to detect, besides imposing an uncomfortable acceleration." Jason didn't doubt this in the least; he knew what submersibles with supercavitating hulls could do.

"What about the ship that brought us?" asked Deirdre.

"It is moving on a southerly course. Evidently the captain decided to depart when you failed to return. His action is understandable, given these waters' grim reputation."

"Will he escape?"

"Probably. I have detected no indication that the Teloi have connected that ship with you, or that they are taking any action against it."

"Good," Jason said, and meant it. He liked Sotades.

There was a stirring from the direction of Perseus' recliner. "Your companion is awakening," Oannes observed. "Perhaps you should—"

"Let me," said Deirdre quickly. "Maybe I can, well, ease him into things if I'm there for him when he comes to."

"Maybe you're right," said Jason. "And now, Oannes," he continued as Deirdre went to Perseus' side, "tell us about this 'destination' of ours."

"It is one of the equipment caches I mentioned. We Nagommo established it several centuries ago, when the Teloi were first beginning to take an interest in this region."

"Will others of your race be there?"

"No. I am the last in this sea. As I indicated, we are spread very thin these days. The others—even older than I—have gone to the islands off northwestern Europe, where the Teloi have become more active in the identities they long ago assumed among the Celtic peoples. They will do what they can there."

"The Silkies," Deirdre breathed, as she knelt beside Perseus. Jason wondered what she meant.

"The cache in this region," Oannes continued, "was positioned to be close to the Teloi activities on the island of Crete." He used the current word for Crete: Keftiu. "There, the Teloi were in the process of establishing the kind of society they always try to create: the closest approximation they can manage to the glorified slave pens into which they originally crammed their human subjects. We have been able to ameliorate it, although it will probably take a conquest by the mainland Greek-speakers—the kind of conquest that has been going on for the past two generations in the Middle East—to completely sweep it away."

A totalitarian theocracy, thought Jason. He made eye contact with Nagel, and for once they shared a moment of wordless empathy. So much for Arthur Evans' innocent, carefree, peaceful, egalitarian, et cetera Minoans. They're just as imaginary as Margaret Mead's Polynesians.

The difference is that Evans was merely too opinionated—and his opinions were mistaken. He, at least, wasn't falsifying evidence to advance the twentieth-century Western intelligentsia's ideology of self-loathing.

"Unfortunately," Oannes was saying, "we put it a little too close to Crete.

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