The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (131 page)

Hunt staggers, claps his ears as if it is true sound he is missing, taps at his comlog. “Goddamn,” he mutters. “Goddamn. My implant’s malfunctioning. Comlog’s out.”

“No,” I say. “I believe we’re beyond the datasphere.” But even as I say this, I hear a deeper, softer hum—something far greater and far less accessible than the datasphere. The megasphere?
The music of the spheres
, I think, and smile.

“What the hell are you grinning about, Severn? Did you do this on purpose?”

“No. I gave the proper codes for Government House.” The total absence of panic in my voice is a kind of panic itself.

“What is it then? That goddamned Pope’s Door? Did it do this? Some malf or trick?”

“No, I think not. The door didn’t malfunction, Hunt. It brought us just where the TechnoCore wants us.”

“The Core?” What little color left in that basset countenance quickly drains away as the CEO’s aide realizes who controls the farcaster. Who controls
all
farcasters. “My God. My God.” Hunt staggers to the side of the road and sits in the tall grass there. His suede executive suit and soft black shoes look out of place here.

“Where are we?” he asks again.

I take a deep breath. The air smells of fresh-turned soil, newly mown grass, road dust, and the sharp tinge of the sea. “My guess is that we’re on Earth, Hunt.”

“Earth.” The little man is staring straight ahead, focusing on nothing. “Earth. Not New Earth. Not Terra. Not Earth Two. Not …”

“No,” I say. “Earth. Old Earth. Or its duplicate.”

“Its duplicate.”

I go over and sit beside him. I pull a strand of grass and strip the lower part of its outer sheath. The grass tastes tart and familiar. “You remember my report to Gladstone on the Hyperion pilgrims’ stories? Brawne Lamia’s tale? She and my cybrid counterpart … the first Keats retrieval persona … traveled to what they thought was an Old Earth duplicate. In the Hercules Cluster, if I remember correctly.”

Hunt glances up as if he can judge what I am saying by checking constellations. The blue above is graying slightly as the high cirrus spreads across the dome of sky. “Hercules Cluster,” he whispers.

“Why the TechnoCore built a duplicate, or what they’re doing with it now, Brawne didn’t learn,” I say. “Either the first Keats cybrid didn’t know, or he wasn’t saying.”

“Wasn’t saying,” nods Hunt. He shakes his head. “All right, how the hell do we get
out
of here? Gladstone needs me. She can’t … there are dozens of vital decisions to be made in the next few hours.” He jumps to his feet, runs to the center of the road, a study in purposeful energy.

I chew on the stalk of grass. “My guess is that we don’t get out of here.”

Hunt comes at me as if he is going to assault me then and there. “Are you
insane
! No way out? That’s nuts. Why would the Core do that?” He pauses, looks down at me. “They don’t want you talking to her. You know something that the Core can’t risk her learning.”

“Perhaps. ”

“Leave
him
, let
me
go back!” he screams at the sky.

No one answers. Far out across the vineyard, a large black bird takes flight. I think it is a crow; I remember the name of the extinct species as if from a dream.

After a moment, Hunt gives up on addressing the sky and paces back and forth on the stone road. “Come on. Maybe there’s a terminex wherever this thing goes.”

“Perhaps,” I say, breaking off the stalk of grass to get at the sweet, dry upper half. “But which way?”

Hunt turns, looks at the road disappearing around hills in both directions, turns again. “We came through the portal looking … this way.” He points. The road goes downhill into a narrow wood.

“How far?” I ask.

“Goddammit, does it matter?” he barks. “We have to get
somewhere
!”

I resist the impulse to smile. “All right.” I stand and brush off my trousers, feeling the fierce sunlight on my forehead and face. After the incense-laden darkness of the basilica, it is a shock. The air is very hot, and my clothing is already damp with sweat.

Hunt starts walking vigorously down the hill, his fists clenched, his doleful expression ameliorated for once by a stronger expression—sheer resolve.

Walking slowly, in no hurry, still chewing on my stalk of sweet grass, eyes half-closed with weariness, I follow him.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad screamed and attacked the Shrike. The surreal, out-of-time landscape—a minimalist stage designer’s version of the Valley of the Time Tombs, molded in plastic and set in a gel of viscous air—seemed to vibrate to the violence of Kassad’s rush.

For an instant there had been a mirror-image scattering of Shrikes—Shrikes throughout the valley, spread across the barren plain—but with Kassad’s shout these resolved themselves to the single monster, and now it moved, four arms unfolding and extending, curving to greet the Colonel’s rush with a hearty hug of blades and thorns.

Kassad did not know if the energy skinsuit he wore, Moneta’s gift, would protect him or serve him well in combat. It had years before when he and Moneta had attacked two dropships’ worth of Ouster commandos, but time had been on their side then; the Shrike had frozen and unfrozen the flow of moments like a bored observer playing with a holopit remote control. Now they were outside time, and the
was the enemy, not some terrible patron. Kassad shouted and put his head down and attacked, no longer aware of Moneta watching, nor of the impossible tree of thorns rising into the clouds with its terrible, impaled audience, nor even aware of himself except as a fighting tool, an instrument of revenge.

The Shrike did not disappear in its usual manner, did not cease being
there
to suddenly be
here
. Instead, it crouched and opened its arms wider. Its fingerblades caught the light of the violent sky. The Shrike’s metal teeth glistened in what might have been a smile.

Kassad was angry; he was not insane. Rather than rush into that embrace of death, he threw himself aside at the last instant, rolling on arm and shoulder, and kicking out at the monster’s lower leg, below the cluster of thornblades at the knee joint, above a similar array on the ankle.
If he could get it down
 …

It was like kicking at a pipe embedded in half a klick of concrete. The blow would have broken Kassad’s own leg if the skinsuit had not acted as armor and shock absorber.

The Shrike moved, quickly but not impossibly; the two right arms swinging up and down and around in a blur, ten fingerblades carving soil and stone in surgical furrows, arm thorns sending sparks flying as the hands continued upward, slicing air with an audible rush. Kassad was out of range, continuing his roll, coming to his feet again, crouching, his own arms tensed, palms flat, energy-suited fingers rigid and extended.

Single combat
, thought Fedmahn Kassad.
The most honorable sacrament in the New Bushido
.

The Shrike feinted with its right arms again, swung the lower left arm around and up with a sweeping blow violent enough to shatter Kassad’s ribs and scoop his heart out.

Kassad blocked the right-arm feint with his left forearm, feeling the skinsuit flex and batter bone as the steel-and-axe force of the Shrike’s blow struck home. The left-arm killing blow he stopped with his right hand on the monster’s wrist, just above the corsage of curved spikes there. Incredibly, he slowed the blow’s momentum enough that scalpel-sharp fingerblades were now scraping against his skinsuit field rather than splintering ribs.

Kassad was almost lifted off the ground with the effort of restraining that rising claw; only the downward thrust of the Shrike’s first feint kept the Colonel from flying backward. Sweat poured freely under the skinsuit, muscles flexed and ached and threatened to rip in that interminable
twenty seconds of struggle before the Shrike brought its fourth arm into play, slashing downward at Kassad’s straining leg.

Kassad screamed as the skinsuit field ripped, flesh tore, and at least one fingerblade sliced close to bone. He kicked out with his other leg, released the thing’s wrist, and rolled frantically away.

The Shrike swung twice, the second blow whistling millimeters from Kassad’s moving ear, but then jumped back itself, crouching, moving to its right.

Kassad got to his left knee, almost fell, then staggered to his feet, hopping slightly to keep his balance. The pain roared in his ears and filled the universe with red light, but even as he grimaced and staggered, close to fainting from the shock of it, he could feel the skinsuit closing on the wound—serving as both tourniquet and compress. He could feel the blood on his lower leg, but it was no longer flowing freely, and the pain was manageable, almost as if the skinsuit carried medpak injectors like his FORCE battle armor.

The Shrike rushed him.

Kassad kicked once, twice, aiming for and finding the smooth bit of chrome carapace beneath the chest spike. It was like kicking the hull of a torchship, but the Shrike seemed to pause, stagger, step back.

Kassad stepped forward, planted his weight, struck twice where the creature’s heart should be with a closed-fist blow that would have shattered tempered ceramic, ignored the pain from his fist, swiveled, and slammed a straight-armed, open-palmed blow into the creature’s muzzle, just above the teeth. Any human being would have heard the sound of his nose being broken and felt the explosion of bone and cartilage being driven into his brain.

The Shrike snapped at Kassad’s wrist, missed, swung four hands at Kassad’s head and shoulders.

Panting, pouring sweat and blood under his quicksilver armor, Kassad spun to his right once, twice, and came around with a killing blow to the back of the creature’s short neck. The noise of the impact echoed in the frozen valley like the sound of an axe thrown from miles on high into the heart of a metal redwood.

The Shrike tumbled forward, rolled onto its back like some steel crustacean.

It had gone down!

Kassad stepped forward, still crouched, still cautious, but not cautious enough as the Shrike’s armored foot, claw, whatever the hell it was,
caught the back of Kassad’s ankle and half-sliced, half-kicked him off his feet.

Colonel Kassad felt the pain, knew that his Achilles tendon had been severed, tried to roll away, but the creature was throwing itself up and sideways on him, spikes and thorns and blades coming at Kassad’s ribs and face and eyes. Grimacing with the pain, arching in a vain attempt to throw the monster off, Kassad blocked some blows, saved his eyes, and felt other blades slam home in his upper arms, chest, and belly.

The Shrike hovered closer and opened its mouth. Kassad stared up into row upon row of steel teeth set in a metal lamprey’s hollow orifice of a mouth. Red eyes filled his sight through vision already tinged with blood.

Kassad got the base of his palm under the Shrike’s jaw and tried to find leverage. It was like trying to lift a mountain of sharp scrap with no fulcrum. The Shrike’s fingerblades continued to tear at Kassad’s flesh. The thing opened its mouth and tilted its head until teeth filled Kassad’s field of vision from ear to ear. The monster had no breath, but the heat from its interior stank of sulphur and heated iron filings. Kassad had no defense left; when the thing snapped its jaws shut, it would take the flesh and skin of Kassad’s face off to the bone.

Suddenly Moneta was there, shouting in that place where sound did not carry, grabbing the Shrike by its ruby-faceted eyes, skinsuited fingers arching like talons, her boot planted firmly on its carapace below the back spike, pulling, pulling.

The Shrike’s arms snapped backward, as double-jointed as some nightmare crab, fingerblades raked Moneta and she fell away, but not before Kassad rolled, scrambled, felt the pain but ignored it, and leaped to his feet, dragging Moneta with him as he retreated across the sand and frozen rock.

For a second, their skinsuits merged as it had when they were making love, and Kassad felt her flesh next to his, felt their blood and sweat mingling and heard the joined poundings of their hearts.

Kill it
, Moneta whispered urgently, pain audible even through that subvocal medium.

I’m trying. I’m trying
.

The Shrike was on its feet, three meters of chrome and blades and other people’s pain. It showed no damage. Someone’s blood ran in narrow rivulets down its wrists and carapace. Its mindless grin seemed wider than before.

Kassad separated his skinsuit from Moneta’s, lowered her gently to a boulder although he sensed that he had been hurt worse than she. This was not her fight. Not yet.

He moved between his love and the Shrike.

Kassad hesitated, hearing a faint but rising susurration as if from a rising surf on an invisible shore. He glanced up, never fully removing his gaze from the slowly advancing Shrike, and realized that it was a shouting from the thorn tree far behind the monster. The crucified people there—small dabs of color hanging from the metal thorns and cold branches—were making some noise other than the subliminal moans of pain Kassad had heard earlier. They were cheering.

Kassad returned his attention to the Shrike as the thing began to circle again. Kassad felt the pain and weakness in his almost-severed heel—his right foot was useless, unable to bear weight—and he half-hopped, half-swiveled with one hand on the boulder to keep his body between the Shrike and Moneta.

The distant cheering seemed to stop as if in a gasp.

The Shrike ceased being
there
and came into existence
here
, next to Kassad, on top of Kassad, its arms already around him in a terminal hug, thorns and blades already impinging. The Shrike’s eyes blazed with light. Its jaws opened again.

Kassad shouted in pure rage and defiance and struck at it.

Father Paul Duré stepped through the Pope’s Door to God’s Grove without incident. From the incense-laden dimness of the papal apartments, he suddenly found himself in rich sunlight with a lemon sky above and green leaves all around.

The Templars were waiting as he stepped down from the private farcaster portal. Duré could see the edge of the weirwood platform five meters to his right and beyond it, nothing—or, rather, everything, as the treetop world of God’s Grove stretched great distances to the horizon, the rooftop of leaves shimmering and moving like a living ocean. Duré knew that he was high on the Worldtree, the greatest and holiest of all the trees the Templars held sacred.