The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (321 page)

I was fast when I boxed … but that was more than a decade ago. I was strong … but I have not formally trained or worked out in all the intervening years. I could take hard blows in the ring, which is different than giving in to pain … I’d never been knocked out in the ring, even when a better fighter had sent me down a dozen times before the fight was called.

Besides boxing, I’d been a bouncer at one of the bigger Nine Tails casinos on Felix. But that was mostly psychology, knowing how to avoid fighting while moving the obnoxious drunk out the door. I had made sure that the few actual fights were over in a few seconds.

I had been trained for hand-to-hand fighting in the Home Guard, taught to kill at close range, but that sort of business was about as rare as a bayonet charge.

While working as a bargeman, I had gotten into my most serious fights—once with a man ready and willing to carve me up with a long knife. I had survived that. But that other bargeman had knocked me out. As a hunting guide, I’d survived an offworlder coming at me with a flechette gun. But I had accidentally killed him, and he had testified against me after he was resurrected. Come to think of it, that’s how all this started.

Of all my weaknesses, this was the most serious—I do not really want to hurt anyone. In all of my fights—with the possible exception of the bargemaster with the knife and the Christian
hunter with his flechette gun—I had held something back, not wanting to hit them as hard as I could, not wanting to hurt them too badly.

I have to change that way of thinking immediately. This is no person … this is a killing machine, and if I do not disable or destroy it quickly, it will kill me even more quickly.

Nemes jumps at me, claws raking, her right arm pulling back and then slashing like a scythe
.

I jump back, dodge the scythe, almost dodge all the claws, see the shirt on my left upper arm shred, see blood mist the air, and then I step in quickly and hit her—fast—hard—three times to the face
.

Nemes jumps back as quickly as she came in. There is blood on the long nails of her left hand. My blood. Her nose has been smashed flat so that it lies sideways on her thin face. I have broken something—bone, cartilage, metal fiber—where her left brow was. There is no blood on her face. She does not seem to notice any of the damage. She is still grinning
.

I glance at my left arm. It burns ferociously
. Poison? Perhaps—it makes sense—but if she uses poison, I should be dead in seconds. No reason she would use long-acting agents.

Still here. Just burns because of the slashes. Four, I think … deep, but not muscle deep. They don’t matter. Concentrate on her eyes. Guess what she’ll do next
.

Never use your bare hands. Home Guard teaching. Always find a weapon for close-in fighting. If one’s personal weapon is destroyed or missing, find something else, improvise—a rock, a heavy branch, a torn piece of metal—even stones wrapped in one’s fist or keys between the fingers are preferable to one’s bare hands. Knuckles break more quickly than jawbones, the drill instructor always reminded us. If you absolutely
have
to use only hands, use the flat of your hand to chop. Use rigid fingers to impale. Use clawed fingers to go for the eyes and Adam’s apple.

No loose rocks here, no branches, no keys … no weapons at all. This thing has no Adam’s apple. I suspect that her eyes are as cool and hard as marbles.

Nemes moves to the left again, glancing toward Aenea
. “I’m coming, sweetheart,” hisses the thing to my friend.

I catch a glimpse of Aenea out of the corner of my eye. She is standing on the ledge just beyond the platform. She is not moving. Her face is impassive. This is unlike my beloved … 
normally she would be throwing stones, leaping on an enemy’s back … anything but allowing me to fight this thing alone.

This is your moment, Raul, my darling
. Her voice is as clear as a whisper in my mind.

It
is
a whisper. Coming from the auditory pickups in my folded-back skinsuit cowl. I am still wearing the damned thing, as well as my useless climbing harness. I start to subvocalize in response, but remember that I’d jacked into the ship’s communicator in my upper pocket when I called the ship from the summit of T’ien Shan and I will be broadcasting to the ship as well as Aenea if I use it now.

I move to my left, blocking the creature’s way again. Less room to maneuver now
.

Nemes moves faster this time, feinting left and slashing in from my right, swinging her right arm backhand toward my ribs
.

I leap back but the blade slices meat just below my lowest right rib. I duck, but her claws flash—her left claws go for my eyes—I duck again, but her fingers slice a section of my scalp away. For an instant the air is filled with atomized blood again
.

I take one step and swing my own right arm backhand, chopping down as if I were swinging a sledgehammer, my fist connecting with the side of her neck just below her right jawline. Synthetic flesh pulps and tears. The metal and tubes beneath do not bend
.

Nemes slashes backhand again with her scythe arm and claws with her left hand. I leap away. She misses completely
.

I step in quickly and kick the back of her knees, hoping to sweep her legs out from under her. It is eight meters to the broken railing at the far edge. If I could get her rolling … even if we both go over …

It is like kicking a steel stanchion. My leg goes numb at the force of my kick, but she does not budge. Fluids and flesh collapse over her endoskeleton, but she does not lose her footing. She must weigh twice what I do
.

She kicks back and breaks a left rib or two of mine. I hear them crack. The wind goes out of me suddenly, explosively
.

I reel backward, half expecting a ring rope to be there, but there is only the cliff face, a wall of hard, slick, vertical rock. A piton bolt slams into my back, stunning me for an instant
.

I know now what I will do.

The next breath is like breathing through fire, so I quickly take several more painful breaths, confirming that I can
breathe, trying to get my wind back. I feel lucky—I don’t think the broken ribs have penetrated my left lung
.

Nemes opens her arms to prevent my escape and moves in closer
.

I step
into
her foul embrace, getting inside the killing sweep of the bladed forearm, and bring my fists together as hard as I can on either side of her head. Her ears pulp—this time there is a yellow fluid filling the air—but I feel the permasteel solidity of the skull under the bruised flesh. My hands rebound. I stagger backward, hands and arms and fists temporarily useless
.

Nemes leaps
.

I lean back on the rock, raise both legs, catch her on the chest as she descends, and kick out with all of the strength in my body
.

She slashes as she flies backward, slicing through part of my harness, most of my jacket and skinsuit, and the muscle above my chest
. It is on the right side of my chest. She has not cut through the comlink. Good.

She backflips and lands on her feet, still five meters from the edge
. There is no way that I am going to get her to and over the platform edge. She will not play the game under my rules.

I rush her, fists raised
.

Nemes brings her left hand up, cupped and clawed, in a quick, disembowling scoop. I have slid to a stop millimeters short of that death blow and now, as she pulls her right arm back in preparation to scythe me in two, I pivot on one foot and kick her in her flat chest with all the strength of my body
.

Nemes grunts and bites at my leg, her jaws snapping forward like a large dog’s. Her teeth chew off the heel and sole of my boot, but miss flesh
.

Catching my balance, I lunge forward again, gripping her right wrist with my left hand to keep the scythe arm from scraping my back clear of flesh down to my spine, and stepping in close to get a handful of her hair. She is snapping at my face, her rows of teeth directly in front of my eyes, the air between us filled with her yellow saliva or blood substitute. I am bending her head back as we pivot, two violent dancers straining against one another, but her lank, short hair is slippery with my blood and her lubricant and my fingers are slipping.

Lunging against her again to keep her off balance, I shift my fingers to her eye sockets and pull back with all of the strength in my arms and upper body
.

Her head tilts back, thirty degrees—fifty—sixty—I should be
hearing the snap of her spinal cord—eighty degrees—ninety. Her neck is bent backward at right angles to her torso, her marble eyes cold against my straining fingers, her wide lips stretching wider as the teeth snap at my forearm
.

I release her
.

She comes forward as if propelled by a giant spring. Her claws sink into my back, scrape bone at the right shoulder and left shoulder blade
.

I crouch and swing short, hard blows, pounding her ribs and belly. Two—four—six fast shots, pivoting inside, the top of my head against her torn and oily chest, blood from my lacerated scalp flowing over both of us. Something in her chest or diaphragm snaps with a metallic twang and Nemes vomits yellow fluid over my neck and shoulders
.

I stagger back and she grins at me, sharpened teeth gleaming through the bubbling yellow bile that drips from her chin onto the already slippery boards of the platform
.

She screams—steam hissing from a dying boiler—and rushes again, scythe arm slicing through the air in an invisible arc
.

I leap back. Three meters to the rock wall or ledge where Aenea stands
.

Nemes swings backarm, her forearm a propeller, a whizzing pendulum of steel. She can herd me anywhere she wants me now
.

She wants me dead or out of the way. She wants Aenea
.

I jump back again, the blade cutting through the fabric just above belt line this time. I have jumped left this time, more toward the rock wall than the ledge
.

Aenea is unprotected for this second. I am no longer between her and the creature
.

Nemes’s weakness. I am betting everything … Aenea … on this: she is a born predator. This close to a kill, she cannot resist finishing me
.

Nemes swings to her right, keeping the option open of leaping toward Aenea, but also pursuing me toward the cliff face. The scythe swings backhand at my head for a clean decapitation
.

I trip and roll farther to my left, away from Aenea. I am on the boards now, legs flailing
.

Nemes straddles me, yellow fluid spattering my face and chest. She raises the scythe arm, screams, and brings the arm down
.

“Ship! Land on this platform. Immediately. No discussion!”

I gasp this into the comthread pickup as I roll against Nemes’s legs. Her bladed forearm slams into the tough bonsai cedar where my head was a second before
.

I am under her. The blade of her arm is sunk deep into the dense wood. For just a few seconds, she is bent over to claw at me and does not have the leverage to free the cutting edge. A shadow falls over both of us
.

The nails of her left hand slash the right side of my head—almost severing my ear, slicing along the jawbone, and just missing my jugular. My right hand is palm up under her jaw, trying to keep those teeth from opening and closing on my neck or face. She is stronger than I am
.

My life depends upon getting out from under her
.

Her forearm is still stuck in the platform floor, but this serves her purpose, anchoring her to me
.

The shadow deepens
. Ten seconds. No more.

Nemes claws my restraining hands away and wrenches the blade from the wood, staggering to her feet. Her eyes move left to where Aenea stands unguarded
.

I roll away from Nemes … and away from Aenea … leaving my friend undefended. Claw cold rock to get to my feet. My right hand is useless—some tendon slashed in these final seconds—so I raise my left hand, pull the safety line from my harness—
I
can only hope it is still intact—and clip the combiner onto the piton bolt with a metallic slap, like handcuffs slamming home
.

Nemes pivots to her left, dismissing me now, black marble eyes on Aenea. My friend stands her ground
.

The ship lands on the platform, turning off its EM repellors as ordered, allowing its full weight to rest on the wood, crushing the pavilion of Right Meditation with a terrible splintering, the ship’s archaic fins filling most of the space, just missing Nemes and me
.

The creature glances once over her shoulder at the huge black ship looming above her, obviously dismisses it, and crouches to leap at Aenea
.

For a second I think that the bonsai cedar will hold … that the platform is even stronger than Aenea’s calculations and my experience suggest … but then there is one horrendous, tearing, splintering sound, and the entire top Right Meditation platform and much of the stairway down to the Right Mindfulness pavilion tear away from the mountain
.

I see the people watching from the ship’s balcony thrown back into the interior of the ship as it falls
.

“Ship!” I gasp into the comthread pickup. “Hover!” Then I turn my attention back to Nemes.

The platform falls away beneath her. She leaps toward Aenea. My friend does not step back
.

Only the platform falling out from beneath her keeps Nemes from completing her leap. She falls just short, but her claws strike the stone ledge, throw sparks, find a hold
.

The platform rips and tears away, disintegrating as it tumbles into the abyss, some parts striking the main platform below, tearing it away in places, piling debris at other places
.