by Dan Simmons
“I mean it,” says the child on the screen. Instantly, a circular section of hull opens under and around Corporal Kee, and atmosphere blasts into vacuum, filling Kee’s boarding collar bag like a balloon and tumbling him into it as both crash into the external field and slide toward the stern of the ship. Kee’s reaction pak fires madly, and he stabilizes himself before being blown into the fusion tale of the ship.
Gregorius sets his finger on the shaped-charge detonator. “Captain!” he cries.
“Wait,” subvocalizes de Soya. It is the sight of the girl in her shirtsleeves that freezes his heart with anxiety. Space between the two ships is now filled with colloidal particles and ice crystals.
“I’m sealed away from the top room,” says the girl, “but if you don’t call your men back, I’ll open all the levels.”
In less than a second the air lock blasts open, and a two-meter circle opens in the hull where Gregorius had been standing. The sergeant had burned his way through the collar bag and jetted to another location as soon as the girl spoke. Now he tumbles away from the blast of atmosphere and small debris jetting from the opening, fires his thrusters, and plants his boots on a section of hull five meters farther down the ship. In his mind he can see the schematic, knows that the girl is just inside—a few meters from his grasp. If she was to blow this section, he would catch her, bag her, and have her in the Raphael’s surgery within two minutes. He checks his tactical display: Rettig had jumped into space seconds before a section of hull opened under him. Now the other was station-keeping three meters from the hull. “Captain!” Gregorius calls on the tightbeam.
“Wait,” orders de Soya. To the girl, he says, “We mean you no harm—”
“Then call them off,” snaps the girl. “Now! Or I open this last level.”
Federico de Soya feels time slow down as he weighs his options. He knows that he has less than a minute before he has to throttle back—alarms and telltales are flashing throughout his tactical connections to the ship and across the boards. He does not want to leave his men behind, but the most important factor is the child. His orders are specific and absolute—Bring the child back alive.
De Soya’s entire tactical virtual environment begins to pulse red, a warning that the ship must decelerate in one minute or automatic overrides will kick in. His control boards tell the same story. He keys the audible mike channels, broadcasts on common bands as well as tightbeam.
“Gregorius, Rettig, Kee … return to the Raphael. Now!”
Sergeant Gregorius feels the fury and frustration surge through him like a blast of cosmic radiation, but he is a member of the Swiss Guard. “Returning now, sir!” he snaps, peels off his shaped charge, and kicks off toward the archangel. The other two rise from the hull with blue pinpricks of reaction thrusters. The merged fields flicker just long enough to allow the three armored men to pass through. Gregorius reaches the Raphael’s hull first, grabs a holdon, and literally flings his men into the sally-port lock as they float by. He pulls himself in, confirms that the others are clinging to web restraints, and keys his mike. “In and tight, sir.”
“Breaking off,” says de Soya, broadcasting in the clear so that the girl can also hear. He switches from tactical space to real time and tweaks the omnicontroller.
Raphael cuts back from its 110 percent thrust, separates its field from the target’s, and begins to fall behind. De Soya widens the distance from the girl’s ship, keeping Raphael as far away from the other craft’s fusion tail as he can: all indications are that the other ship is unarmed, but that term is relative when the thing’s fusion drive can reach a hundred kilometers through space. Raphael’s external fields are on full defensive, the ship’s countermeasures on full automatic, ready to react in a millionth of a second.
The girl’s ship continues accelerating off the plane of the ecliptic. Parvati is not the child’s destination.
A rendezvous with the Ousters? wonders de Soya. His ship’s sensors still show no activity beyond Parvati’s orbital patrols, but entire Ouster Swarms could be waiting beyond the heliosphere.
Twenty minutes later, the child’s ship already hundreds of thousands of klicks ahead of Raphael, the question is answered.
“We’ve got Hawking-space distortion here,” Father Captain de Soya reports to the three men still clinging to restraints in the sally-port lock. “Her ship is preparing to spin up.”
“To where?” asks Gregorius. The huge sergeant’s voice reveals none of his fury at the near miss.
De Soya pauses and rechecks his readings before answering. “Renaissance Vector space,” he says. “Very close to the planet.”
Gregorius and the other two Swiss Guard troopers are silent. De Soya can guess their unspoken questions. Why Renaissance Vector? It’s a Pax stronghold … two billion Christians, tens of thousands of troops, scores of Pax warships. Why there?
“Perhaps she doesn’t know what’s there,” he muses aloud over the intercom. He switches to tactical space and hovers above the plane of the ecliptic, watching the red dot spin up to C-plus and disappear from the solar system. The Raphael still follows its stern chase course, fifty minutes from translation vector. De Soya leaves tactical, checks all systems, and says, “You can come up from the lock now. Secure all boarding gear.”
HE DOES NOT ASK THEIR OPINION. THERE IS NO DISCUSSION of whether he will translate the archangel to Renaissance Vector space—the course has already been set in and the ship is climbing toward quantum leap—and he does not ask them again if they are prepared to die again. This jump will be as fatal as the last, of course, but it will put them into Pax-occupied space five months ahead of the girl’s ship. The only question in de Soya’s mind is whether or not to wait for the St. Anthony to spin down into Parvati space so he can explain the situation to the captain.
He decides not to wait. It makes little sense—a few hours’ difference in a five-month head start—but he does not have the patience to wait. De Soya orders Raphael to prepare a transponder buoy, and he records the orders for Captain Sati on the Anthony: immediate translation to Renaissance Vector—a ten-day trip for the torchship with the same five-month time-debt that the girl will pay—with readiness for combat immediately upon spinning down to RV space.
When he has launched the buoy and tightbeamed standdown orders to the Parvati command, de Soya turns his acceleration couch to face the other three men. “I know how disappointing that was to you,” he begins.
Sergeant Gregorius says nothing, and his dark face is as impassive as stone, but Father Captain de Soya can read the message behind the silence: Another thirty seconds and I would have had her.
De Soya does not care. He has commanded men and women for over a decade—has sent braver, more loyal underlings than this to their deaths without allowing remorse or the need for explanation to overwhelm him—so he does not blink now in front of the giant trooper. “I think the child would have carried out her threat,” he says, his tone of voice conveying the message that this is not open to discussion or argument, now or later, “but that’s a moot point now. We know where she’s going. It may be the one system in this sector of Pax space where no one—not even an Ouster Swarm—could get in or out unseen and uninterdicted. We’re going to have five months to prepare for the ship’s arrival, and this time we won’t be operating alone.” De Soya pauses to take a breath. “You three have worked hard, and this failure in Parvati system is not yours. I’ll see to it that you are returned to your unit immediately upon arrival in Renaissance Vector space.”
Gregorius does not even have to glance at his two men before speaking for them. “Begging the father-captain’s pardon, but if we have a say in it, sir, we’d choose to stay with you and Raphael until this young ’un’s safely in the net and on her way to Pacem, sir.”
De Soya tries not to show his surprise. “Hmmm … well, we’ll see what happens, Sergeant. Renaissance Vector is Fleet Headquarters for the navy, and a lot of our bosses will be there. We’ll see what happens. Let’s
get everything tied down.… We translate in twenty-five minutes.”
“Sir?”
“Yes, Corporal Kee?”
“Will you be hearing confessions before we die this time?”
De Soya works again to keep his expression neutral. “Yes, Corporal. I’ll finish the checklist here and be in the wardroom cubby for confession in ten minutes.”
“Thank you, sir,” says Kee with a smile.
“Thank you,” says Rettig.
“Thank ’ee, Father,” rumbles Gregorius.
De Soya watches the three jump to tie-down activities, shedding their massive combat armor as they go. In that instant he catches an intuitive glimpse of the future and feels the weight of it on his shoulders. Lord, give me strength to carry out Thy will … in Jesus‘ name I ask.… Amen.
Swiveling his heavy couch back to the command panels, de Soya begins the final checklist before translation and death.
25
Once, while guiding some duck hunters born on Hyperion into the fens, I asked one of them, an airship pilot who commanded the weekly dirigible run down the Nine Tails from Equus to Aquila, what his job was like. “Piloting an airship?” he’d said. “As the ancient line goes—long hours of boredom broken by minutes of sheer panic.”
This trip was a bit like that. I don’t mean to say that I was bored—just the interior of the spaceship with its books and old holos and grand piano was interesting enough to keep me from being bored for the next ten days, not to mention getting to know my traveling companions—but already we had experienced these long, slow, pleasantly idle periods punctuated by interludes of wild adrenaline rush.
I admit that it had been disturbing in Parvati System to sit out of sight of the vid pickup and watch this child threaten to kill herself—and us!—if the Pax ship did not back off. I’d spent ten months dealing blackjack on Felix, one of the Nine Tails, and had watched a lot of gamblers; this eleven-year-old was one hell of a poker player. Later, when I asked her if she would have carried through on the threat and opened our last pressurized level to space, she only smiled that mischievous smile and made a vague gesture with her right hand, a sort of flicking away, as if she were brushing the thought out of the air. I grew used to that gesture in later months and years.
“Well, how did you know that Pax captain’s name?” I asked.
I expected to hear some revelation about the powers of a proto-messiah, but Aenea only said, “He was waiting at the Sphinx when I stepped out a week ago. I guess I heard someone call his name.”
I doubted that. If the father-captain had been at the Sphinx, Pax-army standard procedure would have had him buttoned into combat armor and communicating on secure channels. But why would the child lie?
Why am I seeking logic or sanity here? I’d asked myself at the moment. There hasn’t been any so far.
When Aenea had gone belowdecks to take a shower after our dramatic departure from Parvati System, the ship had tried to reassure A. Bettik and me. “Do not worry, gentlemen. I would not have allowed you to die from decompression.”
The android and I had exchanged a look. I think that both of us were wondering whether the ship knew what it would have done, or whether the child had some special control over it.
As the days of the second leg of the voyage passed, I found myself brooding about the situation and my reaction to it. The main problem, I realized, had been my passivity—almost irrelevancy—during this whole trip. I was twenty-seven years old, an ex-soldier, man of the world—even if the world was only backwater Hyperion—and here I had let a child deal with the one real emergency we’d faced. I understood why A. Bettik had been so passive in the situation; he was, after all, conditioned by bioprogramming and centuries of habit to defer to human decisions. But why had I been such a stump? Martin Silenus had saved my life and sent me on this insane quest to protect the girl, to keep her alive and help her get wherever she had to go. So far, all I had done was fly a carpet and hide behind a piano while the kid dealt with a Pax warship.
The four of us, including the ship, talked about that Pax warship during those first few days out from Parvati space. If Aenea was right, if Father Captain de Soya had been on Hyperion during the opening of the tomb, then the Pax had found some way to take a shortcut through Hawking space. The implications of that reality were more than sobering; they scared the shit out of me.
Aenea did not seem overly worried. The days passed and we fell into the comfortable, if a bit claustrophobic, shipboard routine—Aenea playing the piano after dinner, all of us grazing in the library, checking the ship’s holos and navigation logs for any clue as to where it had taken the Consul (there were many clues, none definitive), playing cards in the evening (she was a formidable poker player), and occasionally exercising, which I did by asking the ship to set the containment field to one-point-three-g just in the stairwell, and then running up and down the six stories’ worth of spiral steps for forty-five minutes. I’m not sure what it did for the rest of my body, but my calves, thighs, and ankles soon looked like they belonged to some Jovian-world elephantoid.
When Aenea realized that the field could be tailored to small regions of the ship, there was no stopping her. She began sleeping in a bubble of zero-g on the fugue deck. She found that the table on the library deck could be morphed into a billiard table, and she insisted on at least two games a day—each time under different g-loads. One night I heard a noise while reading on the navigation level, went down the stairs to the holopit level, and found the hull irised open, the balcony extended without the piano there, and a giant sphere of water—perhaps eight or ten meters across—floating between the balcony and the outer containment field.
“What the hell?”
“It’s fun!” came a voice from within the pulsing blob of shifting water. A head with wet hair broke the surface, hanging upside down two meters above the floor of the balcony. “Come on in!” cried the girl. “The water’s warm.”
I leaned away from the apparition, putting my weight on the railing and trying not to think of what would happen if that localized bubble of the field failed for a second.
“Has A. Bettik seen this?” I said.
The pale shoulders shrugged. The fractal fireworks were pulsing and folding out beyond the balcony, casting incredible colors and reflections on the sphere of water. The sphere itself was a great blue blob with lighter patches on the surface and interior, where bubbles of air shifted. Actually, it reminded me of photos of Old Earth I had seen.
Aenea ducked her head under, was a pale form kicking through the water for a moment, and reemerged five meters up the curved surface. Smaller globules splashed free and curved back to the surface of the larger sphere—herded there by the field differential, I assumed—splashing and sending complex, concentric circles rippling across the surface of the water globe.
“Come on in,” she said again. “I mean it!”
“I don’t have a suit.”
Aenea floated a second, kicked over onto her stomach, and dived again. When she emerged, head completely upside down from my perspective this time, she said, “Who has a suit? You don’t need one!”
I knew she was not joking because during her dive I had seen the pale vertebrae pressing against the skin of her back, her ribs, and her still-boylike butt reflecting the fractal light like two small white mushrooms poking up from a pond. All in all, the sight of our twelve-year-old messiah-to-be’s backside was about as sexually arousing as seeing holoslides of Aunt Merth’s new grandkiddies in the tub.
“Come on in, Raul!” she called again, and dived for the opposite side of the sphere.
I hesitated only a second before kicking off my robe and outer clothes. I kept on not only my undershorts, but the long undershirt I often wore as pajamas.
For a moment I stood on the balcony, not having the slightest clue as to how to get into the sphere several meters above me. Then I heard, “Jump, dummy!” from somewhere on the upper arc of the blob, and I jumped.
&nbs
p; The transition to zero-g began about a meter and a half up. The water was damned cold.
I pivoted, shouted from the cold, felt everything contractable on my body contract, and began splashing around, trying to keep my head above the curved surface. I was not surprised when A. Bettik came out on the balcony to see what the shouting was all about. He folded his arms and leaned against the railing, crossing his legs at the ankles.
“The water’s warm!” I lied through chattering teeth. “C’mon in!”
The android smiled and shook his head like a patient parent. I shrugged and pivoted and dived.
It took me a second or two to remember that swimming is much like moving in zero-g; that floating in water in zero-g is much like ordinary swimming. Either way, the resistance of the water made the experience more swimlike than zero-g-like, although there was the added fun of coming across an air bubble somewhere inside the sphere and pausing there to catch one’s breath before paddling around underwater again.
After a moment of cartwheeling disorientation, I came to a meter-wide bubble, stopped myself before tumbling out into the sphere, and looked directly above me to see Aenea’s head and shoulders emerging. She looked down at me and waved. The skin on her bare chest was goose-bumpy from either the cool water or cooler air.
“Some fun, huh?” she said, spluttering water out of her face and brushing back her hair with both hands. Her blond-brown hair looked much darker when wet. I looked at the girl and tried to see her mother in her, the dark-haired Lusian detective. It was no use—I had never seen an image of Brawne Lamia, only heard descriptions from the Cantos.
“The hard part’s keeping yourself from flying out of the water when you get to the edge,” said Aenea as our bubble shifted and contracted, the wall of water curving around and above us. “Race you to the outside!”
