The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (24 page)

Kassad struggled to stay conscious as the violent tumbling continued. Various voice and visual alarms were screaming for his attention. Kassad tapped at thruster controls, considered it a success, and pulled his hands away when he felt as if he were being pulled apart in only two directions rather than five.

A random camera shot showed him that the torchship was receding. Good. Kassad had no doubt that the Ouster warship could destroy him at any second, and that it
would
if he approached or threatened it in any way. He did not know if the squid was armed, personally doubted if it would carry anything larger than antipersonnel weapons, but he knew beyond a doubt that no torchship commander would allow an out-of-control shuttlecraft to come anywhere near his ship. Kassad assumed that the Ousters all knew by now that the squid had been hijacked by the enemy. He would not be surprised—disappointed, but not surprised—if the torchship vaporized him at any second, but in the meantime he was counting on two emotions that were quintessentially human if not necessarily Ouster human: curiosity and the desire for revenge.

Curiosity, he knew, could easily be overridden in times of stress, but he counted on a paramilitary, semifeudal culture like the Ousters’ to be deeply involved with revenge. Everything else being equal, with no chance to hurt them further and almost no chance to escape, it would seem that Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had become a prime candidate for one of their dissection trays. He hoped so.

Kassad looked at the forward video display, frowned, and loosened his harness long enough to look out the overhead blister. The ship was tumbling but not nearly so violently as before. The planet
seemed closer—one hemisphere filled the view “above” him—but he had no idea how close the squid was to atmosphere. He could read none of the data displays. He could only guess what their orbital velocity had been and how violent a reentry shock would be. His one long glimpse from the wreckage of the
Merrick
had suggested to Kassad that they were very close, perhaps only five or six hundred klicks above the
surface
, and in the kind of parking orbit which he knew preceded the launching of dropships.

Kassad tried to wipe his face and frowned when the tips of loose gauntlet fingers tapped at his visor. He was tired. Hell, only a few hours earlier he had been in fugue and just a few ship-weeks before
that
he had almost certainly been body-dead.

He wondered if the world below was Hyperion or Garden; he had been to neither but knew that Garden was more widely settled, closer to becoming a Hegemony colony. He hoped it was Garden.

The torchship launched three assault boats. Kassad saw them clearly before the aft camera panned beyond range. He tapped at the thruster controls until it felt as though the ship was tumbling more quickly toward the wall of planet above. There was little else he could do.

   The squid reached atmosphere before the three Ouster assault boats reached the squid. The boats undoubtedly were armed and well within range, but someone on the command circuit must have been curious. Or furious.

Kassad’s squid was in no way aerodynamic. As with most ship-to-ship craft, the squid could flirt with planetary atmospheres but was doomed if it dove too deeply into the gravity well. Kassad saw the telltale red glow of reentry, heard the ion buildup on the active radio channels, and suddenly wondered if this had been such a good idea.

Atmospheric drag stabilized the squid and Kassad felt the first tentative tug of gravity as he searched the console and the command chair arms for the control circuit he prayed would be there. A static-filled video screen showed one of the dropships growing a blue-plasma tail as it decelerated. The illusion created was similar to
that encountered when one skydiver watched another open his chute or activate his suspension rig; the assault boat seemed to climb suddenly.

Kassad had other things to worry about. There seemed to be no obvious bail-out control, no ejection apparatus. Every FORCE:space shuttle carried some sort of atmospheric egress device—it was a custom dating back almost eight centuries to when the entire realm of space flight consisted only of tentative excursions just above the skin of Old Earth’s atmosphere. A ship-to-ship shuttle probably would never need a planetary bail-out device, but age-old fears written into ancient regulations tended to die hard.

Or so the theory went. Kassad could find nothing. The ship was quaking now, spinning, and beginning to heat up in earnest. Kassad slapped open his harness release and pulled himself toward the rear of the squid, not even sure what he was looking for. Suspension packs? Parachutes? A set of wings?

There was nothing in the troop carrier section except the corpse of the Ouster pilot and a few storage compartments not much larger than lunchboxes. Kassad tore through them, finding nothing bigger than a medkit. No miracle devices.

Kassad could
hear
the squid shaking and beginning to break up as he hung on a pivot ring and all but accepted the fact that the Ousters had not wasted money or space on such low-probability rescue devices for their squids. Why should they? Their lifetimes were spent in the darknesses between star systems; their concept of an atmosphere was the eight-klick pressurized tube of a can city. The external audio sensors on Kassad’s bubble helmet began to pick up the raging hiss of air on the hull and through the broken blister in the aft section. Kassad shrugged. He had gambled too many times and lost.

The squid shuddered and bounced. Kassad could hear the manipulator tentacles tearing away from the bow. The Ouster’s corpse suddenly was sucked up and out of the broken blister like an ant into a vacuum cleaner. Kassad clung to the pivot ring and stared through the open hatch at the control seats in the cockpit. It struck him that they were wonderfully archaic, like something out of a textbook of the earliest spacecraft. Parts of the ship’s exterior were
burning away now, roaring past the observation blisters like gobbets of lava. Kassad closed his eyes and tried to remember lectures from Olympus Command School on the structure and layout of ancient spacegoing craft. The squid began a terminal tumble. The noise was incredible.

“By Allah!” gasped Kassad, a cry he had not uttered since childhood. He began pulling himself forward into the cockpit, bracing himself on the open hatch, finding handholds on the deck as if he were climbing a vertical wall. He
was
climbing a wall. The squid had spun, stabilized in a stern-first death dive. Kassad climbed under a 3-g load, knowing that a single slip would break every bone in his body. Behind him, atmospheric hiss turned to a scream and then to a dragon roar. The troop carrier section was burning through in fierce, molten explosions.

Climbing into the command seat was like negotiating a rock overhang with the weight of two other climbers swinging from his back. The clumsy gauntlets made his grip on the headrest even less sure as Kassad hung over the vertical drop to the flaming cauldron of the carrier section. The ship lurched, Kassad swung his legs up, and he was in the command seat. The display videos were dead. Flame heated the overhead blister to a sick red. Kassad almost lost consciousness as he bent forward, his fingers feeling in the darkness below the command seat, between his knees. There was nothing. Wait … a handgrip. No, sweet Christ and Allah … a D-ring. Something out of the history books.

The squid began to break up. Overhead, the blister burned through and spattered liquid Perspex throughout the interior of the cockpit, splashing Kassad’s suit and visor. He smelled plastic melting. The squid was spinning as it broke up. Kassad’s sight turned pink, dimmed, was gone. He used numb fingers to tighten the harness … tighter … either it was cutting into his chest or the Perspex had burned through. His hand went back to the D-ring. Fingers too clumsy to close around it … no.
Pull
.

Too late. The squid flew apart in a final screech and explosion of flame, the control console tearing through the cockpit in ten thousand shrapnel-sized bits.

Kassad was slammed into his seat. Up. Out. Into the heart of the flame.

Tumbling.

Kassad was dimly aware that the seat was projecting its own containment field as it tumbled. Flame was centimeters from his face.

Pyrobolts fired, kicking the ejection seat out of the squid’s blazing slipstream. The command seat made its own track of blue flame across the sky. Microprocessors spun the seat so that the disc of the forcefield was between Kassad and the furnace of friction. A giant sat on Kassad’s chest as he decelerated across two thousand kilometers of sky at eight gravities.

Kassad forced his eyelids open once, noted that he lay curled in the belly of a long column of blue-white flame, and then he closed his eyes again. He saw no sign of a control for a parachute, suspension pack, or any other braking device. It didn’t matter. He could not move his arms or hands in any case.

The giant shifted, grew heavier.

Kassad realized that part of his helmet bubble had melted or been blown away. The noise was indescribable. It didn’t matter.

He closed his eyes more tightly. It was a good time to take a nap.

   Kassad opened his eyes and saw the dark shape of a woman bending over him. For a second he thought it was
her
. He looked again and realized that it
was
her. She touched his cheek with cool fingers.

“Am I dead?” whispered Kassad, raising his own hand to grip her wrist.

“No.” Her voice was soft and throaty, burred with the hint of an accent he could not place. He had never heard her speak before.

“You’re real?”

“Yes.”

Kassad sighed and looked around. He lay naked under a thin robe on some sort of couch or platform set in the middle of a dark, cavernous room. Overhead, starlight was visible through a broken roof. Kassad raised his other hand to touch her shoulder. Her hair was a dark nimbus above him. She wore a loose, thin gown
which—even in the starlight—allowed him to see the outlines of her body. He caught her scent, the fragrant hint of soap and skin and
her
that he knew so well from their other times together.

“You must have questions,” she whispered as Kassad released the gold clasp which held her gown in place. The gown whispered to the floor. She wore nothing underneath. Above them, the band of the Milky Way was clearly visible.

“No,” said Kassad and pulled her to him.

   Toward morning a breeze arose, but Kassad pulled the light cover over them. The thin material seemed to preserve all of their body heat and they lay together in perfect warmth. Somewhere sand or snow rasped at bare walls. The stars were very clear and very bright.

They awoke at the first hint of dawn, their faces close together under the silken coverlet. She ran her hand down Kassad’s side, finding old and recent scars.

“Your name?” whispered Kassad.

“Hush,” she whispered back, her hand sliding lower.

Kassad moved his face into the scented curve of her neck. Her breasts were soft against him. Night paled to morning. Somewhere sand or snow blew against bare walls.

   They made love, slept, made love again. In full light they rose and dressed. She had laid out underwear, gray tunic and trousers for Kassad. They fit perfectly, as did the spongesocks and soft boots. The woman wore a similar outfit of navy blue.

“Your name?” Kassad asked as they left the building with the shattered dome and walked through a dead city.

“Moneta,” said his dream, “or Mnemosyne, whichever name pleases you more.”

“Moneta,” whispered Kassad. He looked up at a small sun rising into a lapis sky. “This is Hyperion?”

“Yes.”

“How did I land? Suspensor field? Parachute?”

“You descended under a wing of gold foil.”

“I don’t hurt. There were no wounds?”

“They were tended to.”

“What is this place?”

“The City of Poets. Abandoned more than a hundred years ago. Beyond that hill lie the Time Tombs.”

“The Ouster assault boats that were following me?”

“One landed nearby. The Pain Lord took the crew unto himself. The other two set down some distance away.”

“Who is the Pain Lord?”

“Come,” said Moneta. The dead city ended in desert. Fine sand slid across white marble half buried in dunes. To the west an Ouster dropship sat with its portals irised open. Nearby, on a fallen column, a thermcube yielded hot coffee and fresh-baked rolls. They ate and drank in silence.

Kassad worked to recall the legends of Hyperion. “The Pain Lord is the Shrike,” he said at last.

“Of course.”

“You’re from here … from the City of Poets?”

Moneta smiled and slowly shook her head.

Kassad finished his coffee and set the cup down. The feeling that he was in a dream persisted, much stronger than during any sim he had ever participated in. But the coffee had tasted pleasantly bitter; the sun was warm on his face and hands.

“Come, Kassad,” said Moneta.

They crossed expanses of cold sand. Kassad found himself glancing skyward, knowing that the Ouster torchship could lance them from orbit … then knowing with a sudden certainty that it would not.

The Time Tombs lay in a valley. A low obelisk glowed softly. A stone sphinx seemed to absorb the light. A complex structure of twisted pylons threw shadows onto itself. Other tombs were silhouettes against the rising sun. Each of the tombs had a door and each door was open. Kassad knew that they had been open when the first explorers discovered the Tombs and that the structures were empty. More than three centuries of searching for hidden rooms, tombs, vaults, and passageways had been fruitless.

“This is as far as you can go,” Moneta said as they neared the cliff at the head of the valley. “The time tides are strong today.”

Kassad’s tactical implant was silent. He had no comlog. He searched his memory. “There are anti-entropic forcefields around the Time Tombs,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The tombs are ancient. The anti-entropic fields keep them from aging.”

“No,” said Moneta. “The time tides drive the Tombs backward through time.”