The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (185 page)

She ignored me and gripped the edges of the mat.

I hesitated a moment, tugging my sleeve back to study my wrist chronometer. Less than two minutes remained before the ship was scheduled to perform its touch-and-go at Chronos Keep. I couldn’t even find the entrance to the Third Cave Tomb in that time—perhaps I could never find it in this carnage. As if to underline that point, a tracked scarab suddenly plowed over a dune, almost grinding us under its treads before it wheeled left, guns firing at something out of sight to the east.

“Hang on!” I shouted again, and keyed the mat to full acceleration, gaining altitude as I went, watching my compass and concentration on flying north until we left the Valley. This was no time to crash into a cliff wall.

A great stone wing passed under us. “Sphinx!” I shouted back to the girl huddling behind me. I realized in an instant how stupid this comment was—she had just come from that tomb.

Guessing our altitude to be several hundred meters, I leveled off and increased our speed. The deflection shield came on, but sand still whirled around us within the nacelle of trapped air. “We shouldn’t hit anything at this altitu—” I began, shouting over my shoulder again, but was interrupted by the looming shape of a skimmer flying directly at us in the storm cloud. I did not have time to react, but somehow I did, diving the mat so quickly that only the containment field held us in place, the shape of the skimmer passing over us with less than a meter to spare. The little hawking mat tumbled and twisted in the monster machine’s lift-wake.

“Heck and spit,” said Aenea behind me. “Hell and shit.”

It was the second utterance I heard from our messiah-to-be.

Leveling off again, I peered over the edge of the mat, trying to make out anything on the ground. It was folly to be flying so high—certainly every tactical sensor, detector, radar, and targeting imager in the area was tracking us. Except for the taste of chaos we had left behind, I had no idea why they hadn’t fired at us yet. Unless … I looked over my shoulder again. The girl was leaning close to my back, shielding her face from the stinging sand.

“Are you all right?” I called.

She nodded, her forehead touching my back. I had the sense that she was crying, but I could not be sure.

“I’m Raul Endymion,” I shouted.

“Endymion,” she said, pulling her head back. Her eyes were red, but dry. “Yes.”

“You’re Aenea …” I stopped. I could not think of anything intelligent to say. Checking the compass, I adjusted our direction of flight and hoped that our altitude was sufficient to clear the dunes here beyond the Valley. Without much hope, I looked up, wondering if the plasma trail of the ship would be visible through the storm. I saw nothing.

“Uncle Martin sent you,” said the girl. It was not a question.

“Yes,” I shouted back. “We’re going … well, the ship … I’d arranged for it to meet us at Chronos Keep, but we’re late.…”

A bolt of lightning ripped the clouds not thirty meters to our right. Both the child and I flinched and ducked. To this day I do not know if it was a lightning discharge or someone shooting at us. For the hundredth time on this endless day, I cursed the crudeness of this ancient flying device—no speed indicators, no altimeter. The wind roar beyond the deflection field suggested that we were traveling at full speed, but with no guidepoints except the shifting curtains of cloud, it was impossible to tell. It was as bad as hurtling through the Labyrinth, but at least there the autopilot program had been dependable. Here, even with the entire Swiss Guard after us, I would have to decelerate soon: the Bridle Range of mountains with their vertical cliffs lay somewhere dead ahead. At almost three hundred klicks per hour, we should reach the mountains and the Keep within six minutes. I had checked my chronometer when we accelerated, now I glanced at it again. Four and a half minutes. According to maps I had studied, the desert ended abruptly at the Bridle Cliffs. I would give it another minute.…

Things happened simultaneously then.

Suddenly we were out of the dust storm; it did not taper off, we just flew out of it the way one would emerge from under a blanket. At that second I saw that we were pitched slightly down—or the ground here was rising—and that we were going to strike some huge boulders within seconds.

Aenea shouted. I ignored her, tweaked the control designs with both hands, we lifted over the boulders with enough g-force to press us heavily against the hawking mat, and at that instant both the child and I saw that we were twenty meters from the cliff face and flying into it. There was no time to stop.

Theoretically, I knew, Sholokov’s design for the hawking mat allowed it to fly vertically, the incipient containment field keeping the passenger—theoretically, his beloved niece—from tumbling off backward. Theoretically.

It was time to test the theory.

Aenea’s arms came around my midsection as we accelerated into a ninety-degree climb. The mat took all of the twenty meters of free space to initiate the climb, and by the time we were vertical, the granite of the rock face was centimeters “beneath” us. Instinctively, I leaned full forward and grabbed the rigid front of the carpet, trying not to lean on the flight-control designs as I did so. Equally instinctively, Aenea leaned forward
and increased her bear hug on my midsection. The effect was that I could not breathe for the minute or so it took the carpet to clear the top of the cliffs. I tried not to look back over my shoulder during the duration of the climb. A thousand or more meters of open space directly beneath me might have been more than my overworked nerves could stand.

We reached the top of the cliffs—suddenly there were stairs carved there, stone terraces, gargoyles—and I leveled the carpet.

The Swiss Guard had set up observation posts, detector stations, and antiaircraft batteries here along the terraces and balconies on the east side of Chronos Keep. The castle itself—carved out of the stone of the mountain—loomed more than a hundred meters above us, its overhanging turrets and higher balconies directly above us. There were more Swiss Guard on these flat areas.

All of them were dead. Their bodies, still clad in impermeable impact armor, were sprawled in the unmistakable attitudes of death. Some were grouped together, their lacerated forms looking as if a plasma bomb had exploded in their midst.

But Pax body armor could withstand a plasma grenade at that distance. These corpses had been shredded.

“Don’t look,” I called over my shoulder, slowing the mat as we banked around the south end of the Keep. It was too late. Aenea stared with wide eyes.

“Damn him!” she cried again.

“Damn who?” I asked, but at that moment we flew out over the garden area on the south end of the Keep and saw what was there. Burning scarabs and an overturned skimmer littered the landscape. More bodies lay thrown like toys scattered by a vicious child. A CPB lancet, its beams capable of reaching to low orbit, lay shattered and burning by an ornamental hedge.

The Consul’s ship hovered on a tail of blue plasma sixty meters above the central fountain. Steam billowed up and around it. A. Bettik stood at the open air-lock door and beckoned us on.

I flew us directly into the air lock, so quickly that the android had to leap aside and we actually skittered down the polished corridor.

“Go!” I shouted, but either A. Bettik had already given the command or the ship did not require it. Inertial compensators
kept us from being smashed to jelly as the ship accelerated, but we could hear the fusion reaction-drive roar, hear the scream of atmosphere from beyond the hull, as the Consul’s spaceship climbed away from Hyperion and entered space again for the first time in two centuries.

“How long have I been unconscious?” Father Captain de Soya is gripping the tunic of the medic.

“Uh … thirty, forty minutes, sir,” said the medic, attempting to pull his shirt free. He does not succeed.

“Where am I?” De Soya feels the pain now. It is very intense—centered in his leg but radiating everywhere—but bearable. He ignores it.

“Aboard the
St. Thomas Akira
, Father sir.”

“The troopship …” De Soya feels light-headed, unconnected. He looks down at his leg, now freed from its tourniquet. The lower leg is attached to the upper only by fragments of muscle and tissue. He realizes that Gregorius must have given him a painkiller—insufficient to block such a torrent of agony, but enough to give him this narcotic high. “Damn.”

“I’m afraid that the surgeons are going to amputate,” says the medic. “The surgeries are working overtime. You’re next, though, sir. We’ve been carrying out triage and …”

De Soya realizes that he is still gripping the young medic’s tunic. He releases it. “No.”

“Excuse me, Father sir?”

“You heard me. There’ll be no surgery until I’ve met with the captain of the
St. Thomas Akira
.”

“But sir … Father sir … you’ll die if you don’t …”

“I’ve died before, son.” De Soya fights off a wave of giddiness. “Did a sergeant bring me to the ship?”

“Yessir.”

“Is he still here?”

“Yes, Father sir, the sergeant was receiving stitches for wounds that …”

“Send him in here immediately.”

“But, Father sir, your wounds require …”

De Soya looks at the young medic’s rank. “Ensign?”

“Yessir?”

“You saw the papal diskey?” De Soya has checked; the platinum template still hangs from the unbreakable chain around his neck.

“Yes, Father sir, that’s what led us to prioritize your …”

“Upon pain of execution … and worse … upon pain of excommunication, shut up and send the sergeant in immediately, Ensign.”

Gregorius is out of his battle armor, but is still huge. The father-captain looks at the bandages and temporary doc paks on the big man’s body and realizes that the sergeant had been badly wounded even as he was carrying de Soya out of danger. He makes a note to respond to that sometime—not now. “Sergeant!”

Gregorius snaps to attention.

“Bring the captain of this ship here immediately. Quickly, before I black out again.”

The captain of the
St. Thomas Akira
is a middle-aged Lusian, as short and powerful looking as all Lusians. He is perfectly bald but sports a neatly trimmed gray beard.

“Father Captain de Soya, I am Captain Lempriere. Things are very hectic now, sir. The surgeons assure me that you require immediate attention. How can I be of help?”

“Tell me the situation, Captain.” De Soya has not met the captain before, but they have spoken on tightbeam. He hears the deference in the troopship captain’s voice. Out of the corner of his eye, de Soya sees Sergeant Gregorius excusing himself from the room. “Stay, Sergeant. Captain? The situation?”

Lempriere clears his throat. “Commander Barnes-Avne is dead. As far as we can tell, about half of the Swiss Guard in the
Valley of the Time Tombs are also dead. Thousands of other casualties are pouring in. We have medics on the ground setting up mobile surgical centers, and we are ferrying the most severely wounded here for urgent care. The dead are being recovered and tagged for resurrection upon return to Renaissance Vector.”

“Renaissance Vector?” De Soya feels as if he is floating within the confined space of the surgical prep room. He
is
floating—within the confines of the gurney restraints. “What the hell happened to the gravity, Captain?”

Lempriere smiles wanly. “The containment field was damaged during the battle, sir. As for Renaissance Vector … well, it was our staging area, sir. Standing orders call for us to return there after the mission is completed.”

De Soya laughs, stopping only when he hears himself. It is not a totally sane laugh. “Who says our mission is completed, Captain? What battle are we talking about?”

Captain Lempriere glances at Sergeant Gregorius. The Swiss Guard does not break his fixed, at-attention stare at the bulkhead. “The support and covering craft in orbit were also decimated, sir.”

“Decimated?” The pain is making de Soya angry. “That means one in ten, Captain. Are ten percent of ship’s personnel on the casualty list?”

“No, sir,” says Lempriere, “more like sixty percent. Captain Ramirez of the
St. Bonaventure
is dead, as is his executive officer. My own first is dead. Half the crew of the
St. Anthony
have not answered roll.”

“Are the ships damaged?” demands Father Captain de Soya. He knows that he has only a minute or two of consciousness … and perhaps life … left.

“There was an explosion on the
St. Bonaventure
. At least half the compartments aft of the CIC vented to space. The drive is intact.…”

De Soya closes his eyes. As a torchship captain himself, he knows that opening the craft to space is the penultimate nightmare. The ultimate nightmare was the implosion of the Hawking core itself, but at least that indignity would be instantaneous. Having a hull breached across so many of the ship’s areas was—like this shattered leg—a slow, painful path to death.

“The
St. Anthony
?”

“Damaged, but operable, sir. Captain Sati is alive and …”

“The girl?” demands de Soya. “Where is she?” Black spots dance in the periphery of his vision, and the cloud of them grows.

“Girl?” says Lempriere. Sergeant Gregorius says something to the captain that de Soya does not hear. There is a loud buzzing in his ears.

“Oh, yes,” says Lempriere, “the acquisition objective. Evidently a ship retrieved her from the surface and is accelerating toward C-plus translation.…”

“A ship!” De Soya fights away unconsciousness with a sheer effort of will. “Where the hell did a ship come from?”

Gregorius speaks without breaking his staring match with the bulkhead. “From the planet, sir. From Hyperion. During the … during the Charlie Fox event, the ship skipped through the atmosphere, set down at the castle … Chronos Keep, sir … and plucked the kid and whoever was flying her—”

“Flying her?” interrupts de Soya. It is hard to hear through the growing buzz.

“Some sort of one-person EMV,” says the sergeant. “Although why it works, the tech boffins don’t know. Anyway, this ship got ’em, got past the COP during the carnage, and is spinning up to translation.”