The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (22 page)

There were no quick victories in space to shift the balance on South Bressia. Despite feints and occasional fierce battles, the Ousters retained complete control of everything within three AU of Bressia. FORCE:space units fell back and concentrated on keeping the fleet within farcaster range and protecting the primary JumpShip.

What had been forecast as a two-day battle ground on for thirty days, then sixty. Warfare had been thrown back to the twentieth or twenty-first century: long, grim campaigns fought through the brick dust of ruined cities over the corpses of civilians. The eighty thousand
original FORCE troops were ground up, reinforced with a hundred thousand more, and were still being decimated when the call went out for two hundred thousand more. Only the grim resolve of Meina Gladstone and a dozen other determined senators kept the war alive and the troops dying while the billions of voices of the All Thing and the AI Advisory Council called for disengagement.

Kassad had understood the change of tactics almost at once. His street-fighting instincts had risen to the forefront even before most of his division was wiped out in the Battle of the Stoneheap. While other FORCE commanders were all but ceasing to function, frozen into indecision by this violation of the New Bushido, Kassad—in command of his regiment and in temporary command of his division after the nuking of Command Group Delta—was trading men for time and calling for the release of fusion weapons to spearhead his own counterattack. By the time the Ousters withdrew ninety-seven days after the FORCE “rescue” of Bressia, Kassad had earned the double-edged nickname of the Butcher of South Bressia. It was rumored that even his own troops were afraid of him.

And Kassad dreamed of
her
with dreams that were more—and less—than dreams.

On the last night of the Battle for Stoneheap, in the maze of dark tunnels where Kassad and his hunter-killer groups used sonics and T-5 gas to flush out the last warrens of Ouster commandos, the Colonel fell asleep amid the flame and screams and felt the touch of her long fingers on his cheek and the soft compression of her breasts against him.

When they entered New Vienna on the morning after the space strike Kassad had called in, the troops following the glass-smooth, twenty-meter-wide burn grooves into the lanced city, Kassad had stared without blinking at the rows of human heads lying on the pavement, carefully lined up as if to welcome the rescuing FORCE troops with their accusatory stares. Kassad had returned to his command EMV, closed the hatches, and—curling up in the warm darkness smelling of rubber, heated plastics, charged ions—had heard
her
whispers over the babble of the C3 channels and implant coding.

On the night before the Ouster retreat, Kassad left the command
conference on the
HS Brazil
, farcast to his HQ in the Indelibles north of the Hyne Valley, and took his command car to the summit to watch the final bombardment. The nearest of the tactical nuclear strikes was forty-five kilometers away. The plasma bombs blossomed like orange and blood-red flowers planted in a perfect grid. Kassad counted more than two hundred dancing columns of green light as the hellwhip lances ripped the broad plateau to shreds. And even before he slept, while he sat on the flare skirt of the EMV and shook pale afterimages from his eyes, she came. She wore a pale blue dress and walked lightly between the dead burr-root plants on the hillside. The breeze lifted the hem of the soft fabric of her dress. Her face and arms were pale, almost translucent. She called his name—he could almost hear the words—and then the second wave of bombardment rolled in across the plain below him and everything was lost in noise and flame.

   As tends to be the case in a universe apparently ruled by irony, Fedmahn Kassad passed unscathed through ninety-seven days of the worst fighting the Hegemony had ever seen, only to be wounded two days after the last of the Ousters had retreated to their fleeing swarmships. He was in the Civic Center Building in Buckminster, one of only three buildings left standing in the city, giving curt answers to stupid questions from a Worldweb newsteep when a plasma booby trap no larger than a microswitch exploded fifteen floors above, blew the newsteep and two of Kassad’s aides through a ventilator grille into the street beyond, and dropped the building on him.

Kassad was medevacked to division HQ and then farcast to the JumpShip now in orbit around Bressia’s second moon. There he was resuscitated and put on full life support while the military brass and Hegemony politicians decided what to do with him.

Because of the farcaster connection and the real-time media coverage of Bressia, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had become somewhat of a
cause célèbre
. Those billions who had been appalled by the unprecedented savagery of the South Bressia campaign would have been pleased to see Kassad court-martialed or tried for war crimes.
CEO Gladstone and many others considered Kassad and the other FORCE commanders as saviors.

In the end, Kassad was put on a hospital spinship for the slow trip back to the Web. Since most of the physical repair would be done in fugue anyway, it made some sense to let the old hospital ships work on the seriously wounded and the revivable dead. By the time Kassad and the other patients reached the Worldweb, they would be ready for active duty. More importantly, Kassad would have accrued a time-debt of at least eighteen standard months and whatever controversy surrounded him might well be over by that time.

   Kassad awoke to see the dark shape of a woman bending over him. For a second he was sure that it was
she
, and then he realized that it was a FORCE medic.

“Am I dead?” he whispered.

“You were. You’re on the
HS Merrick
. You’ve been through resuscitation and renewal several times but you probably don’t remember because of the fugue hangover. We’re ready to start the next step in physical therapy. Do you feel like trying to walk?”

Kassad lifted his arm to cover his eyes. Even through the disorientation of fugue state, he now remembered the painful therapy sessions, the long hours in the RNA virus baths, and the surgery. Most of all the surgery. “What’s our route?” he asked, still shielding his eyes. “I forget how we’re getting back to the Web.”

The medic smiled as if this were a question he asked each time he came out of fugue. Perhaps it was. “We’ll be putting in at Hyperion and Garden,” she said. “We’re just entering the orbit of …”

The woman was interrupted by the sound of the end of the world—great brass trumpets blowing, metal ripping, furies screaming. Kassad rolled off the bed, wrapping the mattress around him as he fell in the one-sixth g. Hurricane winds slid him across the deck and hurled pitchers, trays, bedclothes, books, bodies, metal instruments, and countless other objects at him. Men and women were screaming, their voices rising through falsetto as the air rushed
out of the ward. Kassad felt the mattress slam into the wall; he looked out between clenched fists.

A meter from him, a football-sized spider with wildly waving legs was trying to force itself into a crack which had suddenly appeared in the bulkhead. The thing’s jointless legs seemed to be swatting at the paper and other detritus whirling around it. The spider rotated and Kassad realized that it was the head of the medic; she had been decapitated in the initial explosion. Her long hair writhed at Kassad’s face. Then the crack widened to the width of a fist and the head disappeared through it.

Kassad pulled himself up just as the boom arm quit spinning and “up” ceased to be. The only forces now in play were the hurricane winds still flinging everything in the ward toward the cracks and gaps in the bulkhead and the sickening lurch and tumble of the ship. Kassad swam against it all, pulling himself toward the door to the boom-arm corridor, using every handhold he could find, kicking free the last five meters. A metal tray struck him above the eye; a corpse with hemorrhaged eyes almost tumbled him back into the ward. The airtight emergency doors were slamming uselessly into a dead Marine whose spacesuited body blocked the seal from closing. Kassad rolled through into the boom-arm shaft and pulled the corpse after him. The door sealed behind him, but there was no more air in the shaft than there had been in the ward. Somewhere a claxon’s scream thinned to inaudibility.

Kassad also screamed, trying to relieve the pressure so that his lungs and eardrums would not burst. The boom arm was still draining air; he and the corpse were being sucked the hundred and thirty meters to the main body of the ship. He and the dead Marine tumbled along the boom-arm shaft in a grisly waltz.

It took Kassad twenty seconds to slap open the emergency releases on the Marine’s suit, another minute to eject the man’s corpse and to get his own body in. He was at least ten centimeters taller than the dead man, and although the suit was built to allow some expansion, it still pinched painfully at his neck and wrists and knees. The helmet squeezed his forehead like a cushioned vise. Gobbets of blood and a moist white material clung to the inside of the visor.
The piece of shrapnel which had killed the Marine had left entrance and exit holes, but the suit had done its best to seal itself. Most of the chest lights were red and the suit did not respond when Kassad ordered it to give a status report, but the rebreather worked, although with a worrying rasp.

Kassad tried the suit radio. Nothing, not even background static. He found the comlog lead, jacked into a hull termex. Nothing. The ship pitched again then, metal reverberating to a succession of blows, and Kassad was thrown against the wall of the boom-arm shaft. One of the transport cages tumbled by, its severed cables whipping like the tentacles of an agitated sea anemone. There were corpses in the cage and more bodies tangled along the segments of spiral staircase still intact along the shaft wall. Kassad kicked the remaining distance to the end of the shaft and found all of the airtight doors there sealed, the boom-arm shaft itself irised shut, but there were holes in the primary bulkhead large enough to drive a commercial EMV through.

The ship lurched again and began to tumble more wildly, imparting complex new Coriolis forces to Kassad and everything else in the shaft. Kassad hung on torn metal and pulled himself through a rent in the triple hull of the
HS Merrick
.

He almost laughed when he saw the interior. Whoever had lanced the old hospital ship had done it right, chopping and stabbing the hull with CPBs until pressure seals failed, self-seal units ruptured, damage-control remotes overloaded, and the interior bulkheads collapsed. Then the enemy ship had put missiles into the guts of the hulk with warheads of what the FORCE:space people quaintly called cannister shot. The effect had been quite similar to setting off an antipersonnel grenade in a crowded rat maze.

Lights shone through a thousand holes, here and there becoming colorful rays where they found a colloidal base in floating haze of dust or blood or lubricant. From where Kassad hung, twisting with the lurch and tumble of the ship, he could see a score or more of bodies, naked and torn, each moving with the deceptive underwater-ballet grace of the zero-gravity dead. Most of the corpses floated within their own small solar systems of blood and tissue. Several of them watched Kassad with the cartoon-character stares of their pressure-expanded
eyes and seemed to beckon him closer with random, languid movements of arms and hands.

Kassad kicked through the wreckage to reach the main dropshaft to the command core. He had seen no weapons—it seemed that no one except the Marine had managed to suit up—but he knew that there would be a weapons locker in the command core or in the Marine quarters aft.

Kassad stopped at the last torn pressure seal and stared. He did laugh this time. Beyond this point there was no main dropshaft, no aft section. There was no ship. This section—a boom-arm and medical ward mod, a ragged chunk of the hull—had been ripped free of the ship as easily as Beowulf had torn the arm from Grendel’s body. The final, unsealed doorway to the dropshaft led to open space. Some kilometers away, Kassad could see a dozen other ravaged fragments of the
HS Merrick
tumbling in the glare of sunlight. A green and lapis planet loomed so close that Kassad felt a surge of acrophobia and clung more tightly to the doorframe. Even as he watched, a star moved above the limb of the planet, laser weapons winked their ruby morse, and a gutted ship section half a kilometer away across the gulf of vacuum from Kassad burst again in a gout of vaporized metal, freezing volatiles, and tumbling black specks which Kassad realized were bodies.

Kassad pulled himself deeper into the concealing tangle of wreckage and considered his situation. The Marine’s suit could not last more than another hour—already Kassad could smell the rotten-eggs stench of the malfunctioning rebreather—and he had seen no airtight compartment or container during his struggle through the wreckage. And even if he found a closet or airlock to shelter in, what then? Kassad did not know if the planet below was Hyperion or Garden, but he was sure that there was no FORCE presence on either world. He was also quite sure that no local defense forces would challenge an Ouster warship. It would be days before any patrol craft investigated the wreckage. It was quite possible, Kassad knew, that the orbit of the tumbling piece of junk he now inhabited would decay before they sent anyone up to check on it, sending thousands of tons of twisted metal burning through the atmosphere. The locals would not like that, Kassad knew, but from their point
of view it might be preferable to let a bit of sky fall than to antagonize the Ousters. If the planet had primitive orbital defenses or ground-based CPBs, he realized with a grim smile, it would make more sense for them to blast the wreckage than to fire on the Ouster ship.

It would make no difference to Kassad. Unless he did something quickly, he would be dead long before the remnants of the ship entered atmosphere or the locals took action.

The Marine’s amplification shield had been cracked by the shrapnel which had killed him, but now Kassad tugged what was left of the viewplate down over the visor. Telltales winked red but there was still enough suit power to show the amplified view glowing pale green through the spiderweb of cracks. Kassad watched as the Ouster torchship stood off a hundred klicks, its defense fields blurring background stars, and launched several objects. For an instant Kassad was sure that these were the coup de grâce missiles and he found himself grinning joylessly at the certainty of having only a few seconds to live. Then he noticed their low velocity and notched the amplification higher. The power lights blinked red and the amplifier failed, but not before Kassad had seen the tapering ovoid shapes, spotted with thrusters and cockpit blisters, each trailing a tangle of six jointless manipulator arms. “Squids,” the FORCE:space people had called the Ouster boarding craft.