The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (191 page)

“On,” comes Corporal Kee’s voice on tightbeam.

“On,” says Rettig a second later.

Sergeant Gregorius pulls the line of boarding collar from around his waist, sets it against the hull, activates the sticktight, and continues kneeling in it. He is within a black hoop a little more than a meter and a half in diameter.

“On the count from three,” he says into his mike. “Three … two … one … deploy.” He touches his wristcontroller and blinks as a microthin canopy of molecular polymer spins up from the hoop, closes over his head, and continues to bulge above him. Within ten seconds he is within a twenty-meter transparent bag, like a combat-armored shape crouching within a giant condom.

“Ready,” says Kee. Rettig echoes the word.

“Set,” says Gregorius, slapping a charge against the hull and setting his gauntleted finger back against his wristplate. “From five …” The ship is rotating under them now, firing thrusters and its main engines almost at random, but the
Raphael
has it locked in a containment-field death grip, and the men on its hull are not thrown free. “Five … four … three … two … one … now!”

The detonation is soundless, of course, but is also without flash or recoil. A 120-centimeter circle of hull flies inward. Gregorius can see only the gossamer hint of Kee’s polymer bag around the curve of the hull, sees the sunlight strike it as it inflates. Gregorius’s bag also inflates like a giant balloon as atmosphere rushes out of the hullbreech and fills the space around him. He hears a hurricane screech through his external pickups for five seconds, then silence as the space around him—now filled with oxygen and nitrogen according to his helmet
sensors—fills with dust and detritus blown out during the brief pressure differential.

“Going in … now!” cries Gregorius, unslinging his reactionless plasma rifle as he kicks his way into the interior.

There is no gravity. That is a surprise to the sergeant—he is ready to hit the decks rolling—but he adapts within seconds and twists in a circle, peering around.

Some sort of common area. Gregorius sees seat cushions, some sort of ancient vid screen, bookshelves with real books—

A man floats up the central dropshaft.

“Halt!” cries Gregorius, using common radio bands and his helmet loudspeaker. The figure—little more than a silhouette—does not halt. The man has something in his hand.

Gregorius fires from the hip. The plasma slug bores a hole ten centimeters wide through the man. Blood and viscera explode outward from the tumbling figure, some of the globules spattering on Gregorius’s visor and armored chestplate. The object falls from the dead man’s hand, and Gregorius glances at it as he kicks by to the stairwell. It is a book. “Shit,” mutters the sergeant. He has killed an unarmed man. He will lose points for this.

“In, top level, no one here,” radios Kee. “Coming down.”

“Engine room,” says Rettig. “One man here. Tried to run and I had to burn him. No sign of the child. Coming up.”

“She must be on the middle level or the air-lock level,” snaps the sergeant into his mike. “Proceed with care.” The lights go out, and Gregorius’s helmet searchlight and the penlight on his plasma rifle come on automatically, beams quite visible through air filled with dust, blood spheres, and tumbling artifacts. He stops at the top of the stairwell.

Someone or something is drifting up toward him. He shifts his helmet, but the light on the plasma rifle illuminates the shape first.

It is not the girl. Gregorius gets a confused impression of great size, razor wire, spikes, too many arms, and blazing red eyes. He must decide in a second or less: if he fires plasma bolts down the open dropshaft, he might hit the child. If he does nothing, he dies—razor talons reach for him even as he hesitates.

Gregorius has lashed the deathwand to his plasma rifle before making the ship-to-ship jump. Now he kicks aside, finds an angle, and triggers the wand.

The razor-wire shape floats past him, four arms limp, the red eyes fading. Gregorius thinks,
The goddamn thing isn’t invulnerable to deathwands. It has synapses
. He catches a glimpse of someone above him, swings the rifle, identifies Kee, and the two men kick down the dropshaft headfirst.
Embarrassing if someone turns the internal field back on now and gravity comes on
, thinks Gregorius.
Make a note of that
.

“I’ve got her,” calls Rettig. “She was hiding in one of the fugue cubbies.”

Gregorius and Kee float down past the common level and kick out into the fugue level. A massive figure in combat armor is holding the child. Gregorius notes the brown-blond hair, the dark eyes, and the small fists flailing uselessly against Rettig’s chest armor.

“That’s her,” he says. He keys the tightbeam to the ship. “Cleared the ship. We have the girl. Only two defenders and the creature this time.”

“Affirmative,” comes de Soya’s voice. “Two minutes fifteen seconds. Impressive. Come on out.”

Gregorius nods, takes a final glance at the captive child—no longer struggling—and keys his suit controls.

He blinks and sees the other two lying next to him, their suits connected umbilically to VR tactical. De Soya has actually turned off the internal fields in the
Raphael
, better to maintain the illusion. Gregorius removes his helmet, sees the other two sweaty faces as they do the same, and begins to help Kee remove his clumsy armor.

The three meet de Soya in the wardroom cubby. They could meet as easily in the stimsim of tactical space, but they prefer physical reality for their debriefings.

“It was smooth,” says de Soya as they take their places around the small table.

“Too smooth,” says the sergeant. “I don’t believe that deathwands are going to kill the Shrike thing. And I screwed up with the guy on the navigation deck.… He just had a book.”

De Soya nods. “You did the right thing, though. Better to take him out than to take chances.”

“Two unarmed men?” says Corporal Kee. “I doubt it. This is about as unrealistic as the dozen armed guys on the third run-through. We should play more of the Ouster encounters … Marine-level lethality, at least.”

“I don’t know,” mutters Rettig.

They look at him and wait.

“We keep getting the girl without any harm coming to her,” says the man at last.

“That fifth sim …,” begins Kee.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Rettig. “I know we accidentally killed her then. But the whole ship was wired to blow in that one. I doubt if that will happen.… Who ever heard of a hundred-million-mark spacecraft having a self-destruct button? That’s stupid.”

The other three look at one another and shrug.

“It
is
a silly idea,” says Father Captain de Soya, “but I programmed the tacticals for wide parameters of …”

“Yeah,” interrupts Lancer Rettig, his thin face as sharp and menacing as a knife blade, “I just mean that if it does come to a firefight, the chances of the girl getting burned are a lot greater than our sims suggest. That’s all.”

This is the most the other three have heard Rettig say in weeks of living and rehearsing on the small ship.

“You’re right,” says de Soya. “For our next sim, I’ll raise the danger level for the child.”

Gregorius shakes his head. “Captain, sir, I suggest we knock off the sims and go back to the physical rehearsals. I mean …” He glances at his wrist chronometer. The memory of the bulky combat suit slows his movements. “I mean, we’ve just got eight hours until this is for real.”

“Yeah,” says Corporal Kee. “I agree. I’d rather be outside doing it for real, even if we can’t sim the other ship that way.”

Rettig grunts his assent.

“I agree,” says de Soya. “But first we eat—double rations.… It’s just been tactical, but you three have each lost twenty pounds the last week.”

Sergeant Gregorius leans over the table. “Could we see the plot, sir?”

De Soya keys the monitor.
Raphael
’s long, ellipsoid trajectory and the escape ship’s translation point are almost intersecting. The intersect point blinks red.

“One more real-space run-through,” says de Soya, “and then I want all of us to sleep at least two hours, go over our equipment, and take it easy.” He looks at his own chronometer, even though the monitor is displaying ship and intercept time. “Barring accidents or the unexpected,” he says, “the girl
should be in our custody in seven hours and forty minutes … and we’ll be getting ready to translate to Pacem.”

“Sir?” says Sergeant Gregorius.

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir,” says the other man, “but there’s no way in the Good Lord’s fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.”

“So,” I said, “What’s your plan?”

Aenea looked up from the book she was reading. “Who says that I have a plan?”

I straddled a chair. “It’s less than an hour until we pop out in the Parvati System,” I said. “A week ago you said that we needed a plan in case they know we’re coming … so what’s the plan?”

Aenea sighed and closed the book. A. Bettik had come up the stairway to the library, and now he joined us at the table—actually sitting with us, which was unusual for him.

“I’m not sure I have a plan,” said the girl.

I’d been afraid of this. The week had passed pleasantly enough; the three of us had read a lot, talked a lot, played a lot—Aenea was excellent at chess, good at Go, and deadly at poker—and the days had passed without incident. Many times I had tried to press her on her plans—Where did she plan to go? Why choose Renaissance Vector? Was finding Ousters part of her quest?—but her answers, while polite, were always vague. What Aenea showed great talent for was getting me talking. I hadn’t known many children—even when I was a child myself, there were few others in our caravan group, and I rarely enjoyed their company, since Grandam was infinitely more interesting to me—but the children and teenagers I’d encountered over the years had never shown this much curiosity or ability to listen.
Aenea got me describing my years as a shepherd; she showed special interest in my apprenticeship as a landscape architect; she asked a thousand questions about my riverbarge days and hunting-guide days—in truth, it was only my soldiering days that she did not show much interest in. What she had seemed especially interested in was my dog, although even discussing Izzy—about raising her, training her as bird dog, about her death—upset me quite a bit.

I noticed that she could even get A. Bettik talking about his centuries of servitude, and here I often joined in the patient listening: the android had seen and experienced amazing things—different worlds, the settling of Hyperion with Sad King Billy, the Shrike’s early rampages across Equus, the final pilgrimage that the old poet had made famous, even the decades with Martin Silenus turned out to be fascinating.

But the girl said very little. On our fourth evening out from Hyperion, she admitted that she had come through the Sphinx into her future not just to escape the Pax troops hunting for her then, but to seek out her own destiny.

“As a messiah?” I said, intrigued.

Aenea laughed. “No,” she said, “as an architect.”

I was surprised. Neither the
Cantos
nor the old poet himself had said anything about the so-called One Who Teaches earning a living as an architect.

Aenea had shrugged. “It’s what I want to do. In my dream the one who could teach me lives in this era. So here I came.”

“The one who could teach you?” I said. “I thought that you were the One Who Teaches.”

Aenea had flopped back onto the holopit cushions and cocked her leg over the back of the couch. “Raul, how could I possibly teach anyone anything? I’m twelve standard years old and I’ve never been off Hyperion before this.… Hell, I never left the continent of Equus until this week. What do I have to teach?”

I had no answer to that.

“I want to be an architect,” she said, “and in my dream the architect who can train me is somewhere out there.…” She waggled her fingers at the outer hull, but I understood her to mean the old Hegemony Web, where we were heading.

“Who is he?” I said. “Or she?”

“He,” said Aenea. “And I don’t know his name.”

“What world is he on?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sure this is the right century?” I asked, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.

“Yeah. Maybe. I think so.” Aenea rarely acted petulant during the days I spent with her that week, but her voice seemed perilously close to that now.

“And you just dreamed about this person?”

She sat up in the cushions. “Not
just
dreamed,” she said then. “My dreams are important to me. They’re sort of more than dreams.…” She broke off. “You’ll see.”

I tried not to sigh aloud. “What happens after you become an architect?”

She chewed on a fingernail. It was a bad habit I planned on breaking her of. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, the old poet’s expecting big things of you.… Being the messiah’s just one part—when does that kick in?”

“Raul,” she said, rising to go down to her fugue cubby, “no offense, but why don’t you just fuck off and leave me alone?”

She had apologized for that crudity later, but as we sat at the table an hour from translation into a strange star system, I was curious if my question about her plan would elicit the same response.

It did not. She started to chew a nail, caught herself, and said, “Okay, you’re right, we need a plan.” She looked at A. Bettik. “Do you have one?”

The android shook his head. “Master Silenus and I discussed this many times, M. Aenea, but our conclusion was that if the Pax somehow arrived first at our destination, then all was lost. It seems an improbability, though, since the torchship pursuing us cannot travel more quickly through Hawking space than we can.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Some of the hunters I’ve guided the past few years talked about rumors that the Pax … or the Church … had these superfast ships.”

A. Bettik nodded. “We have heard similar rumors, M. Endymion, but logic suggests that if the Pax had developed such craft—a breakthrough which the Hegemony never achieved, by the way—then there seems little reason that they would not have
outfitted their warships and Mercantilus vessels with such a drive.…”