The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (83 page)

There were no giant screens, but dozens of young FORCE:space officers hunkered over cryptic displays, sat enmeshed in stimsim apparatus, or stood before pulsing callups which seemed to extend from all six bulkheads. Men and women were lashed into their chairs and sensory cradles, with the exception of a few officers—most looking more like harried bureaucrats than craggy warriors—who wandered the narrow aisles, patting subordinates on the back, barking for more information, and plugging into consoles with their own implant jacks. One of these men came over in a hurry, looked at both of us, saluted me, and said, “M. Hunt?”

I nodded toward my companion.

“M. Hunt,” said the overweight young Commander, “Admiral Nashita will see you now.”

The commander of all Hegemony forces in the Hyperion system was a small man with short white hair, skin far smoother than his age suggested, and a fierce scowl that seemed carved in place. Admiral Nashita wore high-necked dress black with no rank insignia except for the single red-dwarf sun on his collar. His hands were blunt and quite powerful-looking, but the nails were recently manicured. The Admiral sat on a small dais surrounded by equipment and quiescent callups.
The bustle and efficient madness seemed to flow around him like a fast stream around an impervious rock.

“You’re the messenger from Gladstone,” he said to Hunt. “Who’s this?”

“My aide,” said Leigh Hunt.

I resisted the urge to raise an eyebrow.

“What do you want?” asked Nashita. “As you see, we’re busy.”

Leigh Hunt nodded and glanced around. “I have some materials for you, Admiral. Is there anyplace we can go for privacy?”

Admiral Nashita grunted, passed his palm over a rheosense, and the air behind me grew denser, coalescing into a semisolid mist as the containment field reified. The noise of the combat control center disappeared. The three of us were in a small igloo of quiet.

“Hurry it up,” said Admiral Nashita.

Hunt unlocked the valise and removed a small envelope with a Government House symbol on the back. “A private communication from the Chief Executive,” said Hunt. “To be read at your leisure, Admiral.”

Nashita grunted and set the envelope aside.

Hunt set a larger envelope on the desk. “And this is a hard copy of the motion of the Senate regarding the prosecution of this … ah … military action. As you know, the will of the Senate is for this to be a speedy exercise of force to achieve limited objectives, with as little loss of life as possible, followed by the standard offer of help and protection to our new … colonial asset.”

Nashita’s scowl twitched slightly. He made no move to touch or read the communication containing the will of the Senate. “Is that all?”

Hunt took his time responding. “That is all, unless you wish to relay a personal message to the CEO through me, Admiral.”

Nashita stared. There was no active hostility in his small, black eyes, only an impatience that I guessed would not be quenched until those eyes were dimmed by death. “I have private fatline access to the Chief Executive,” said the Admiral. “Thank you very much, M. Hunt. No return messages at this time. Now if you will kindly return to the midships farcaster nexus and let me get on with prosecuting this
military action
.”

The containment field collapsed around us, and noise flowed in like water over a melting ice dam.

“There is one other thing,” said Leigh Hunt, his soft voice almost lost under the technobabble of the combat center.

Admiral Nashita swiveled his chair and waited.

“We’d like transport down to the planet,” said Hunt. “Down to Hyperion.”

The Admiral’s scowl seemed to deepen. “CEO Gladstone’s people said nothing about arranging a dropship.”

Hunt did not blink. “Governor-General Lane knows that we might be coming.”

Nashita glanced at one of his callups, snapped his fingers, and barked something at a Marine major who hurried over. “You’ll have to hurry,” the Admiral said to Hunt. “There is a courier just ready to leave from port twenty. Major Inverness will show you the way. You will be brought back up to the primary JumpShip. The
Hebrides
will be departing this position in twenty-three minutes.”

Hunt nodded and turned to follow the Major. I tagged along. The Admiral’s voice stopped us.

“M. Hunt,” he called, “please tell CEO Gladstone that the flagship will be too busy from this point on for any more political visits.” Nashita turned away to flickering callups and a line of waiting subordinates.

I followed Hunt and the Major back into the maze.

“There should be windows.”

“What?” I had been thinking about something, not paying attention.

Leigh Hunt turned his head toward me. “I’ve never been in a dropship without windows or viewscreens. It’s strange.”

I nodded and looked around, noticing the cramped and crowded interior for the first time. It was true that there were only blank bulk-heads, and heaps of supplies and one young lieutenant in the passenger hold of the dropship with us. It seemed to conform to the claustrophobic ambience of the command ship.

I looked away, returning to the thoughts that had preoccupied me since we left Nashita. Following the other two to port twenty, it had suddenly occurred to me that I was not missing something I had
expected
to miss. Part of my anxiety toward this trip had lain in the thought of leaving the datasphere; I was rather like a fish contemplating leaving the sea. Part of my
consciousness
lay submerged somewhere in that sea, the ocean of data and commlinks from two hundred worlds and the Core, all linked by the invisible medium once called datumplane, now known only as the megasphere.

It struck me as we left Nashita that I could still hear the pulse of that particular sea—distant but constant, like the sound of the surf half a mile from the shore—and I had been trying to understand it all during
the rush to the dropship, the buckling in and separation, and the ten-minute cislunar sprint to the fringes of Hyperion’s atmosphere.

FORCE prided itself on using its own artificial intelligences, its own dataspheres and computing sources. The ostenible reason lay in the requirement to operate in the great spaces between Web worlds, the dark and quiet places between the stars and beyond the Web megasphere, but much of the real reason lay in a fierce need for independence which FORCE had shown toward the TechnoCore for centuries. Yet on a FORCE ship in the center of a FORCE armada in a non-Web, non-Protectorate system, I was tuned to the same comforting background babble of data and energy that I would have found anywhere in the Web. Interesting.

I thought of the links the farcaster had brought to Hyperion system: not just the JumpShip and farcaster containment sphere floating at Hyperion’s L3 point like a gleaming new moon, but the miles of gigachannel fiber-optic cable snaking through permanent JumpShip farcaster portals, microwave repeaters mechanically shuttling the few inches to repeat their messages in near real-time, command ship tame AIs requesting—and receiving—new links to the Olympus High Command on Mars and elsewhere. Somewhere the datasphere had crept in, perhaps unknown to the FORCE machines and their operators and allies. The Core AIs knew everything happening here in Hyperion system. If my body were to die now, I would have the same escape path as always, fleeing down the pulsing links that led like secret passages beyond the Web, beyond any vestige of datumplane as humanity had known it, down datalink tunnels to the TechnoCore itself.
Not really
to
the Core
, I thought,
because the Core surrounds, envelops the rest, like an ocean holding separate currents, great Gulf Streams which think themselves separate seas
.

“I just wish there was a window,” whispered Leigh Hunt.

“Yes,” I said. “So do I.”

The dropship bucked and vibrated as we entered Hyperion’s upper atmosphere.
Hyperion
, I thought.
The Shrike
. My heavy shirt and vest seemed sticky and clinging. A faint susurration from without said that we were flying, streaking across the lapis skies at several times the speed of sound.

The young lieutenant leaned across the aisle. “First time down, gentlemen?”

Hunt nodded.

The Lieutenant was chewing gum, showing how relaxed he was. “You two civilian techs from the
Hebrides
?”

“We just came from there, yes,” said Hunt.

“Thought so,” grinned the Lieutenant. “Me, I’m running a courier pack down to the Marine base near Keats. My fifth trip.”

A slight jolt ran through me as I was reminded of the name of the capital; Hyperion had been repopulated by Sad King Billy and his colony of poets, artists, and other misfits fleeing an invasion of their homeworld by Horace Glennon-Height—an invasion which never came. The poet on the current Shrike Pilgrimage, Martin Silenus, had advised King Billy almost two centuries earlier in the naming of the capital.
Keats
. The locals called the old part Jacktown.

“You’re not going to believe this place,” said the Lieutenant. “It’s the real anal end of nowhere. I mean, no datasphere, no EMVs, no farcasters, no stimsim bars, no
nothing
. It’s no wonder that there are thousands of the fucking indigenies camped around the spaceport, just tearing down the fence to get offworld.”

“Are they really attacking the spaceport?” asked Hunt.

“Naw,” said the Lieutenant and snapped his gum. “But they’re
ready
to, if you know what I mean. That’s why the Second Marine Battalion has set up a perimeter there and secured the way into the city. Besides, the yokels think that we’re going to set up farcasters any day now and let ’em step out of the shit they got themselves into.”

“
They
got themselves into?” I said.

The Lieutenant shrugged. “They must’ve done something to get the Ousters cricked at them, right? We’re just here to pull their oysters out of the fire.”

“Chestnuts,” said Leigh Hunt.

The gum snapped. “Whatever.”

The susurration of wind grew to a shriek clearly audible through the hull. The dropship bounced twice and then slid smoothly—ominously smoothly—as if it had encountered a chute of ice ten miles above the ground.

“I wish we had a window,” whispered Leigh Hunt.

It was warm and stuffy in the dropship. The bouncing was oddly relaxing, rather like a small sailing ship rising and falling on slow swells. I closed my eyes for a few minutes.

TEN

Sol, Brawne, Martin Silenus, and the Consul carry gear, Het Masteen’s Möbius cube, and the body of Lenar Hoyt down the long incline to the entrance of the Sphinx. Snow is falling rapidly now, twisting across the already writhing dune surfaces in a complex dance of wind-driven particles. Despite their comlogs’ claim that night nears its end, there is no hint of sunrise to the east. Repeated calls on their comlog radio link bring no response from Colonel Kassad.

Sol Weintraub pauses before the entrance to the Time Tomb called the Sphinx. He feels his daughter’s presence as a warmth against his chest under the cape, the rise and fall of warm baby’s breath against his throat. He raises one hand, touches the small bundle there, and tries to imagine Rachel as a young woman of twenty-six, a researcher pausing at this very entrance before going in to test the anti-entropic mysteries of the Time Tomb. Sol shakes his head. It has been twenty-six long years and a lifetime since that moment. In four days it will be his daughter’s birthday. Unless Sol does something, finds the Shrike, makes some bargain with the creature,
does something
, Rachel will die in four days.

“Are you coming, Sol?” calls Brawne Lamia. The others have stored their gear in the first room, half a dozen meters down the narrow corridor through stone.

“Coming,” he calls, and enters the tomb. Glow-globes and electric lights line the tunnel but they are dead and dust covered. Only Sol’s flashlight and the glow from one of Kassad’s small lanterns light the way.

The first room is small, no more than four by six meters. The other three pilgrims have set their baggage against the back wall and spread
tarp and bedrolls in the center of the cold floor. Two lanterns hiss and cast a cold light. Sol stops and looks around.