The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (223 page)

De Soya can only blink. “You are being very thorough,” he says at last. He is thinking,
They must be using both of the other archangel couriers to carry out such an investigation. Why?

“Yes,” says Father Farrell.

Father Captain de Soya sighs and slumps a bit in the soft cushions of the rectory chair. “So they found us in Svoboda System and could not resuscitate Lancer Rettig.…”

There is the slightest downward twitch of Farrell’s thin lips. “Svoboda System, Father Captain? No. It is my understanding that your courier ship was discovered in System Seventy Ophiuchi
A, while decelerating toward the ocean world of Mare Infinitus.”

De Soya sits up. “I don’t understand. I’d programmed
Raphael
to translate to the next Pax system on her original search pattern if she had to leave Hebron System prematurely. The next world should have been Svoboda.”

“Perhaps the form of its pursuit by hostile craft in the Hebron System precluded such a translation alignment,” says Farrell without emphasis. “The ship’s computer could have then decided to return to its starting point.”

“Perhaps,” says de Soya, trying to read the other’s expression. It is useless. “You say ‘could have decided,’ Father Farrell. Don’t you know by now? Haven’t you examined the ship’s log?”

Farrell’s silence could communicate affirmation or nothing at all.

“And if we returned to Mare Infinitus,” continues de Soya, “why are we waking up here on Pacem? What happened in Seventy Ophiuchi A?”

Now Farrell does smile. It is the narrowest extension of those thin lips. “By coincidence, Father Captain, the archangel courier
Michael
was in the Mare Infinitus garrison space when you translated. Captain Wu was aboard the
Michael
—”

“Marget Wu?” asks de Soya, not caring if he irritates the other man by interrupting.

“Precisely so.” Farrell removes an imaginary bit of lint from his starched and creased black trousers. “Considering the … ah … consternation that your previous visit had caused on Mare Infinitus—”

“Meaning my removal of Bishop Melandriano to a monastery to get him out of my way,” says de Soya. “And the arrest of several treasonous and corrupt Pax officers who were almost certainly carrying out their theft and conspiracy under Melandriano’s supervision …”

Farrell holds up one hand to stop de Soya. “These events are not under my wing of the investigation, Father Captain. I was simply answering your question. If I may continue?”

De Soya stares, feeling the anger mix with his sorrow at Rettig’s death, all swirling amid the narcotic high of resurrection.

“Captain Wu, who had already heard the protests of Bishop Melandriano and other Mare Infinitus administrators, decided
that it would be most felicitous if you were returned to Pacem for resurrection.”

“So our resurrection was interrupted a second time?” asks de Soya.

“No.” There is no irritation in Farrell’s voice. “The resurrection process had not been initiated in System Seventy Ophiuchi A when the decision was made to return you to Pax Command and the Vatican.”

De Soya looks at his own fingers. They are trembling. In his mind’s eye he can see the
Raphael
with its cargo of corpses, his included. First a death tour of Hebron System, then decelerating toward Mare Infinitus, then the spinup to Pacem. He looks up quickly. “How long have we been dead, Father?”

“Thirty-two days,” says Farrell.

De Soya almost pulls himself up out of the chair. Finally he settles back and says in his most controlled voice, “If Captain Wu decided to route the ship back here
before
resurrection was begun in Mare Infinitus space, Father, and if no resurrection was achieved in Hebron space, we should have been dead less than seventy-two hours at that point. Assuming three days here … where were the other twenty-six days spent, Father?”

Farrell runs his fingers along his trouser crease. “There were delays in Mare Infinitus space,” he says coolly. “The initial investigation was begun there. Protests were filed. Lancer Rettig was buried in space with full honors. Other … duties … were carried out. The
Raphael
returned with the
Michael
.”

Farrell stands abruptly and de Soya gets to his feet as well. “Father Captain,” Farrell announces formally, “I am here to extend Cardinal Secretary Lourdusamy’s compliments to you, sir, his wish for your full recovery in health and life in the arms of Christ, and to request your presence, tomorrow morning at oh-seven-hundred hours, at the Vatican offices of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to meet with Monsignor Lucas Oddi and other appointed officials of the Sacred Congregation.”

De Soya is stunned. He can only click his heels and bow his head in compliance. He is a Jesuit and an officer in the Pax Fleet. He has been trained to discipline.

“Very good,” says Father Farrell, and takes his leave.

Father Captain de Soya stands in the rectory foyer for several minutes after the Legionary of Christ has left. As a mere priest
and a line officer, de Soya has been spared most Church politics and infighting, but even a provincial priest or preoccupied Pax warrior knows the basic structure of the Vatican and its purpose.

Beneath the Pope, there are two major administrative categories—the Roman Curia and the so-called Sacred Congregations. De Soya knows that the Curia is an awkward and labyrinthine administrative structure—its “modern” form was set down by Sixtus V in
A.D
. 1588. The Curia includes the Secretariat of State, Cardinal Lourdusamy’s power base, where he serves as a sort of prime minister with the misleading title of Cardinal Secretary of State. This Secretariat is a central part of what is often referred to as the “Old Curia,” used by popes since the sixteenth century. In addition, there is the “New Curia,” begun as sixteen lesser bodies created by the Second Vatican Council—still popularly known as Vatican II—which concluded in
A.D
. 1965. Those sixteen bodies have grown to thirty-one intertwining entities under Pope Julius’s 260-year reign.

But it is not the Curia to which de Soya has been summoned, but to one of its separate and sometimes countervailing clusters of authority, the Sacred Congregations. Specifically, he has been ordered to appear before the so-called Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, an organization that has gained—or, to be more precise,
regained
—enormous power in the past two centuries. Under Pope Julius, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith again welcomed the Pope as its Prefect—a change in structure that revitalized the office. For the twelve centuries prior to Pope Julius’s election, this Sacred Congregation—known as the Holy Office from
A.D
. 1908 to
A.D
. 1964—had been deemphasized to the point it had become almost a vestigial organ. But now, under Julius, the Holy Office’s power is felt across five hundred light-years of space and back through three thousand years of history.

De Soya returns to the sitting room and leans against the chair he had been sitting in. His mind is swirling. He knows now that he will not be allowed to see Gregorius or Kee before his meeting in the Holy Office the next morning. He may never see them again. De Soya tries to unravel the thread that has pulled him to this meeting, but it becomes lost in the snarl of Church politics, offended clerics, Pax power struggles, and the swirl of his own befuddled, born-again brain.

He knows this: the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, previously known as the Sacred Congregation of the
Holy Office, had—for many centuries prior to that—been known as the Sacred Congregation of Universal Inquisition.

And it is under Pope Julius XIV that the Inquisition has once again begun living up to its original name and sense of terror. And, without preparation, counsel, or knowledge of what accusations may be levied against him, de Soya must appear before them at oh-seven-hundred hours the next morning.

Father Baggio bustles in, a smile on the chubby priest’s cherubic features. “Did you have a nice conversation with Father Farrell, my son?”

“Yes,” says de Soya distractedly. “Very nice.”

“Good, good,” says Father Baggio. “But I think it’s time for a bit of broth, a bit of prayer—the Angelus, I think—and then an early beddie-bye. We must be fresh for whatever tomorrow brings, mustn’t we?”

When I was a child listening to Grandam’s endless parade of verses, one short piece I demanded to hear over and over started—“Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice.” Grandam did not know the name of the poet—she thought it might be by a pre-Hegira poet named Frost, but even at my young age I thought that was too cute to be true for a poem about fire and ice—but the
idea
of the world ending in either fire or ice had long stayed with me, as enduring as the singsong rhythm of the simple verse.

My world seemed to be ending in ice.

It was dark beneath the ice wall, and too cold for me to find adequate words to describe. I had been burned before—once a gas stove had exploded on a barge going upriver on the Kans and gave me slight but painful burns over my arms and chest—so I knew the intensity of fire. This cold seemed that intense, sort of slow-motion flames cutting my flesh to shreds.

The rope was secured under my arms, and the powerful current soon whirled me around so I was being dragged feet-first down the black chute, my hands raised to keep my face from bashing against inverted ridges of rock-hard ice, my chest and underarms constrained by the tight rope as A. Bettik acted as brake by staying on belay. My knees were soon torn by razor-sharp ice as the current kept throwing my body higher, striking
the uneven ceiling of passing ice like someone being dragged across rocky ground.

I had worn socks with the ice more in mind than the cold, but they did little to protect my feet as I banged into the ice ridges. I was also wearing undershorts and undershirt, but they provided no buffer against the needles of cold. Around my neck was the band of the com unit, the mike-patches pressed against my throat for voice or subvocal transmission, the hearplug in place. Over my shoulder and tightly secured with tape was the waterproof bag with the plastique, detonators, cord, and two flares I had put in at the last moment. Taped to my wrist was my little flashlight laser, its narrow beam cutting through the black water and bouncing off ice, but illuminating little. I had used the laser sparingly since the Labyrinth on Hyperion: the hand-lamps were more useful in widebeam and required less charge. The laser was largely useless as a cutting weapon, but should serve to bore holes in ice for the plastique.

If I lived long enough to bore holes.

The only method behind my madness of allowing myself to be swept away down this subterranean river had been a bit of knowledge from my Home Guard training on the Iceshelf of the continent Ursus. There, on the Bearpaw Glacial Sea, where the ice froze and refroze almost daily through the brief antarctic summer, the risk of breaking through the thin surface ice had been very high. We had been trained that even if we were swept away beneath the thickest ice, there was always a thin layer of air between the sea and icy ceiling. We were to rise to that brief layer, set our snouts into it even if it meant that the rest of our faces had to stay submerged, and move along the ice until we came to a break or thin-enough patch that we could smash our way out.

That had been the theory. My only actual test of it had been as a member of a search party fanning out to hunt for a scarab driver who had stepped out of his vehicle, broken through not two meters from where the ice supported the weight of his four-ton machine, and disappeared. I was the one who found him, almost six hundred meters from the scarab and safe ice. He had used the breathing technique. His nose was still pressed tight against the too-thick ice when I found him—but his mouth was open underwater, his face was as white as the snow that blew across the glacier, and his eyes were frozen as solid as steel bearings. I tried not to think of this as I fought my way to the
surface against the current, tugged on the rope to signal A. Bettik to stop me, and scraped my face against shards of ice to find air.

There were several centimeters of space between water and ice—more where fissures ran up into the glacier of frozen atmosphere like inverted crevasses. I gasped the cold air into my lungs, shined the flashlight laser into the crevasses, and then moved the red beam back and forward along the narrow tunnel of ice. “Going to rest a minute,” I gasped. “I’m okay. How far have I come?”

“About eight meters,” whispered A. Bettik’s voice in my ear.

“Shit,” I muttered, forgetting that the com would send the subvocal. It had seemed like twenty or thirty meters, at least. “All right,” I said aloud. “I’m going to set the first charge here.”

My fingers were still flexible enough to trigger the flashlight laser to high intensity and burn out a small niche into the side of the fissure. I had premolded the plastique, and now I worked it, shaped it, and vectored it. The material was a shaped explosive—that is, the blast would discharge itself in precisely the directions I wanted, provided that my preparations were correct. In this case I had done most of the work ahead of time, knowing that I wanted the blast directed upward and back toward the ice wall behind me. Now I aimed precise tendrils of that explosive force: the same technology that allowed a plasma bolt to cut through steel plate like hot bolts dropped into butter would send these plasma tendrils lancing back through the incredible mass of the ice behind me. It should cut the eight-meter section of ice wall into chunks and drop them into the river very nicely. We were counting on the fact that the atmosphere generators through the years of terraforming had added enough nitrogen and CO
₂
to the atmosphere to keep the explosion from turning into one massive blast of burning oxygen.

Because I knew exactly where I wanted to aim the force of the blast, the shaping of the charges took less than forty-five seconds and required little dexterity. Still, I was shaking and almost numb by the time the tiny detonator squibs were set in place. Since I knew the com units had no trouble penetrating this amount of ice, I set the detonators to the preset code and ignored the wire in my bag.