by Dan Simmons
“You’re right,” says de Soya. “For our next sim, I’ll raise the danger level for the child.”
Gregorius shakes his head. “Captain, sir, I suggest we knock off the sims and go back to the physical rehearsals. I mean …” He glances at his wrist chronometer. The memory of the bulky combat suit slows his movements. “I mean, we’ve just got eight hours until this is for real.”
“Yeah,” says Corporal Kee. “I agree. I’d rather be outside doing it for real, even if we can’t sim the other ship that way.”
Rettig grunts his assent.
“I agree,” says de Soya. “But first we eat—double rations.… It’s just been tactical, but you three have each lost twenty pounds the last week.”
Sergeant Gregorius leans over the table. “Could we see the plot, sir?”
De Soya keys the monitor. Raphael’s long, ellipsoid trajectory and the escape ship’s translation point are almost intersecting. The intersect point blinks red.
“One more real-space run-through,” says de Soya, “and then I want all of us to sleep at least two hours, go over our equipment, and take it easy.” He looks at his own chronometer, even though the monitor is displaying ship and intercept time. “Barring accidents or the unexpected,” he says, “the girl should be in our custody in seven hours and forty minutes … and we’ll be getting ready to translate to Pacem.”
“Sir?” says Sergeant Gregorius.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“Meaning no disrespect, sir,” says the other man, “but there’s no way in the Good Lord’s fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.”
23
“So,” I said, “What’s your plan?”
Aenea looked up from the book she was reading. “Who says that I have a plan?”
I straddled a chair. “It’s less than an hour until we pop out in the Parvati System,” I said. “A week ago you said that we needed a plan in case they know we’re coming … so what’s the plan?”
Aenea sighed and closed the book. A. Bettik had come up the stairway to the library, and now he joined us at the table—actually sitting with us, which was unusual for him.
“I’m not sure I have a plan,” said the girl.
I’d been afraid of this. The week had passed pleasantly enough; the three of us had read a lot, talked a lot, played a lot—Aenea was excellent at chess, good at Go, and deadly at poker—and the days had passed without incident. Many times I had tried to press her on her plans—Where did she plan to go? Why choose Renaissance Vector? Was finding Ousters part of her quest?—but her answers, while polite, were always vague. What Aenea showed great talent for was getting me talking. I hadn’t known many children—even when I was a child myself, there were few others in our caravan group, and I rarely enjoyed their company, since Grandam was infinitely more interesting to me—but the children and teenagers I’d encountered over the years had never shown this much curiosity or ability to listen. Aenea got me describing my years as a shepherd; she showed special interest in my apprenticeship as a landscape architect; she asked a thousand questions about my riverbarge days and hunting-guide days—in truth, it was only my soldiering days that she did not show much interest in. What she had seemed especially interested in was my dog, although even discussing Izzy—about raising her, training her as bird dog, about her death—upset me quite a bit.
I noticed that she could even get A. Bettik talking about his centuries of servitude, and here I often joined in the patient listening: the android had seen and experienced amazing things—different worlds, the settling of Hyperion with Sad King Billy, the Shrike’s early rampages across Equus, the final pilgrimage that the old poet had made famous, even the decades with Martin Silenus turned out to be fascinating.
But the girl said very little. On our fourth evening out from Hyperion, she admitted that she had come through the Sphinx into her future not just to escape the Pax troops hunting for her then, but to seek out her own destiny.
“As a messiah?” I said, intrigued.
Aenea laughed. “No,” she said, “as an architect.”
I was surprised. Neither the Cantos nor the old poet himself had said anything about the so-called One Who Teaches earning a living as an architect.
Aenea had shrugged. “It’s what I want to do. In my dream the one who could teach me lives in this era. So here I came.”
“The one who could teach you?” I said. “I thought that you were the One Who Teaches.”
Aenea had flopped back onto the holopit cushions and cocked her leg over the back of the couch. “Raul, how could I possibly teach anyone anything? I’m twelve standard years old and I’ve never been off Hyperion before this.… Hell, I never left the continent of Equus until this week. What do I have to teach?”
I had no answer to that.
“I want to be an architect,” she said, “and in my dream the architect who can train me is somewhere out there.…” She waggled her fingers at the outer hull, but I understood her to mean the old Hegemony Web, where we were heading.
“Who is he?” I said. “Or she?”
“He,” said Aenea. “And I don’t know his name.”
“What world is he on?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you sure this is the right century?” I asked, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.
“Yeah. Maybe. I think so.” Aenea rarely acted petulant during the days I spent with her that week, but her voice seemed perilously close to that now.
“And you just dreamed about this person?”
She sat up in the cushions. “Not just dreamed,” she said then. “My dreams are important to me. They’re sort of more than dreams.…” She broke off. “You’ll see.”
I tried not to sigh aloud. “What happens after you become an architect?”
She chewed on a fingernail. It was a bad habit I planned on breaking her of. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, the old poet’s expecting big things of you.… Being the messiah’s just one part—when does that kick in?”
“Raul,” she said, rising to go down to her fugue cubby, “no offense, but why don’t you just fuck off and leave me alone?”
She had apologized for that crudity later, but as we sat at the table an hour from translation into a strange star system, I was curious if my question about her plan would elicit the same response.
It did not. She started to chew a nail, caught herself, and said, “Okay, you’re right, we need a plan.” She looked at A. Bettik. “Do you have one?”
The android shook his head. “Master Silenus and I discussed this many times, M. Aenea, but our conclusion was that if the Pax somehow arrived first at our destination, then all was lost. It seems an improbability, though, since the torchship pursuing us cannot travel more quickly through Hawking space than we can.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some of the hunters I’ve guided the past few years talked about rumors that the Pax … or the Church … had these superfast ships.”
A. Bettik nodded. “We have heard similar rumors, M. Endymion, but logic suggests that if the Pax had developed such craft—a breakthrough which the Hegemony never achieved, by the way—then there seems little reason that they would not have outfitted their warships and Mercantilus vessels with such a drive.…”
Aenea tapped the table. “It doesn’t really matter how they get there first,” she said. “I’ve dreamed that they will. I’ve been considering plans, but …”
“What about the Shrike?” I said.
Aenea glanced sideways at me. “What about it?”
“Well,” I said, “it provided a pretty convenient deus ex machina for us on Hyperion, so I just thought that if it could …”
“Damn it, Raul!” cried the girl. “I didn’t ask that creature to kill those people on Hyperion. I wish to God it hadn’t.”
“I know, I know,” I said, touching her sleeve to calm her. A. Bettik had cut down several of the Consul’s old shirts for
her, but her wardrobe was still meager.
I knew that she had been upset about the carnage during our escape. She later admitted that it had been part of the reason for her sobbing that second night out.
“I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. “I didn’t mean to be flippant about the … thing. I just thought that if someone tried to stop us again, maybe …”
“No,” said Aenea. “I’ve dreamed that someone tries to stop us from getting to Renaissance Vector. But I haven’t dreamed that the Shrike helps us. We have to come up with our own plan.”
“What about the Core?” I said tentatively. It was the first time I’d mentioned the TechnoCore since she had brought it up that first day.
Aenea seemed lost in thought; or at least she ignored my question. “If we’re going to get ourselves out of whatever trouble might be waiting for us, it will have to be our doing. Or maybe …” She turned her head. “Ship?”
“Yes, M. Aenea.”
“Have you been listening to this conversation?”
“Of course, M. Aenea.”
“Do you have any ideas that could help us?”
“Help you to avoid capture if Pax ships are waiting for you?”
“Yeah,” said Aenea, her voice irritable. She frequently lost patience with the ship.
“Not any original ideas,” said the ship. “I have been trying to remember how the Consul avoided the local authorities when we were just passing through a system.…”
“And?” said Aenea.
“Well, as I have mentioned, my memory is not as complete as it should be.…”
“Yes, yes,” said Aenea, “but do you remember any clever ways you avoided local authorities?”
“Well, primarily by outrunning them,” said the ship. “As we have discussed previously, the Ouster modifications were to the containment field and the fusion drive. The latter changes allow me to reach C-plus translation velocities much more quickly than standard spinships … or so it was when I last traveled between the stars.”
A. Bettik folded his hands and spoke to the same bulkhead area that Aenea had been watching. “You are saying that if the authorities … in this case the Pax ships … left from the planet Parvati, or near it, you would be able to make the translation to Renaissance Vector before they could intercept us.”
“Most assuredly,” said the ship.
“How long will the turnaround take?” I asked.
“Turnaround?”
“The time in-system before we can spin up to the quantum jump to Renaissance Vector’s system,” I said.
“Thirty-seven minutes,” said the ship. “Which includes reorientation, navigation checks, and system checks.”
“What if a Pax ship is waiting right there when we spin down?” asked Aenea. “Do you have any Ouster modifications that could help us?”
“Not that I can think of,” said the ship. “You know of the enhanced containment fields, but they are still no match for a warship’s weapons.”
The girl sighed and leaned on the table. “I’ve been over this and over this, but I don’t see how it can help.”
A. Bettik looked thoughtful, but then again, he always looked thoughtful. “During the time we were concealing and caring for the ship,” he said, “one other Ouster modification became apparent.”
“What’s that?” I said.
A. Bettik gestured downward, toward the holopit level below us. “They enhanced the ship’s morphing ability. The way it can extrude the balcony is one example. Its ability to extend wings during atmospheric flight. It is able to open each separate living level to atmosphere, thus bypassing the old air-lock entrance if necessary.”
“Neat,” said Aenea, “but I don’t see how that would help, unless the ship can morph to the point of passing itself off as a Pax torchship or something. Can you do that, Ship?”
“No, M. Aenea,” said the soft male voice. “The Ousters carried out some fascinating piezodynamic engineering on me, but there is still the conservation of mass to reckon with.” After a second of silence, “I am sorry, M. Aenea.”
“Just a silly idea,” said Aenea, then she sat straight up. It was so obvious that something had occurred to her that neither A. Bettik nor I interrupted her train of thought for two minutes. Finally she said, “Ship?”
“Yes, M. Aenea?”
“You’re able to morph an air lock … or a simple opening … anywhere on your hull?”
“Almost anywhere, M. Aenea. There are communications pods and certain drive-related areas in which I could not—”
“But on the living decks?” interrupted the girl. “You could just open them the way you let the upper hull go transparent?”
“Yes, M. Aenea.”
“Would the air rush out if you did that?”
The ship’s voice sounded mildly shocked as it answered. “I would not allow that to happen, M. Aenea. As with the piano balcony, I would preserve the integrity of all external fields so that—”
“But you could open each deck, not just the air lock, and depressurize it?” The girl’s persistence was new to me then. It is familiar now.
“Yes, M. Aenea.”
A. Bettik and I listened without comment. I could not speak for the android, but I had no idea where the kid was headed with all this. I leaned toward her. “Is this part of a plan?” I said.
Aenea smiled crookedly. It was what I would later think of as her mischievous smile. “It’s too primitive to be a plan,” she said, “and if my assumptions about why the Pax wants me are wrong … well, it won’t work.” The mischievous smile took on a wry twist. “It probably wouldn’t work anyway.”
I glanced at my wrist. “We have forty-five minutes until we spin down and find out if someone’s waiting,” I said. “Do you want to share your plan that wouldn’t work?”
The girl began speaking. She did not talk long. When she was finished, the android and I looked at each other. “You’re right,” I said to her, “it’s not much of a plan and it wouldn’t work.”
Aenea’s smile did not falter. She took my hand and turned my wrist so that my chronometer was face-up. “We have forty-one minutes,” she said. “Come up with a better one.”
24
The Raphael is on the final part of her return ellipsoid, rushing in-system toward Parvati’s sun at .03 of light-speed. The archangel-class courier/warship is ungainly—massive drive bays, cobbled-together com-pods, spin-arms, weapons’ platforms and antennae array protruding, its tiny environmental sphere and attached dropship shuttle tucked into the mess almost as an afterthought—but it becomes a serious warship now as it rotates 180 degrees so that it hurtles stern-first toward the projected translation point of the ship it pursues.
“One minute to spindown,” de Soya says over the tactical band. The three troopers in the open sally-port air lock do not need to acknowledge the transmission. They also know that even after the other ship appears in real space, it will not be visible to them—even with visor magnifiers—for another two minutes.
Strapped in his acceleration couch with the control panels arrayed around him, his gauntleted hand on the omnicontroller, his tactical shunt in place so that he and the ship are effectively one, Father Captain de Soya listens to the breathing of the three troopers over the com channel while he watches and senses the other ship’s approach. “Picking up Hawking-drive distortion reading down angle thirty-nine, coordinates zero-zero-zero, thirty nine, one-nine-niner,” he says into his mike. “Exit point at zero-zero-zero, nine hundred klicks. Single vehicle probability, ninety-nine percent. Relative velocity nineteen kps.”
Suddenly the other ship becomes visible on radar, t-dirac, and all passive sensors. “Got it,” Father Captain de Soya says to the waiting troopers. “On time, on schedule … damn.”
“What?” says Sergeant Gregorius. He and his men have checked their weapons, charges, and boarding collars. They are ready to jump in less than three minutes.
“The ship’s begun accelerating, not decelerating as we
’d guessed in most of the sims,” says de Soya. On the tactical channel he enables the ship to carry out preprogrammed alternatives. “Hang on!” he says to the troopers, but the thrusters have already fired, Raphael is already rotating. “No problem,” he says as the main drive kicks on, boosting them to 147 gravities. “Just stay within the field during the jump. It’ll take just an extra minute to match velocities.”
Gregorius, Kee, and Rettig do not respond. De Soya can hear their breathing.
Two minutes later de Soya says, “I have a visual.”
Sergeant Gregorius and his two troopers lean out of the open air lock. Gregorius can see the other ship as a ball of fusion flame. He keys the mag-lenses so he can see beyond that, raises the filters, and sees the ship itself. “Pretty much like the tacticals,” says Kee.
“Don’t think that way,” snaps the sergeant. “The real thing’s never like the tacticals.” He knows that both these men realize that; they have been in combat. But Sergeant Gregorius was an instructor at Pax Command on Armaghast for three years, and the instinct is hard to break.
“This thing’s fast,” says de Soya. “If we didn’t have the bounce on them, I don’t think we’d catch them. As it is, we’ll just be able to match velocities for five or six minutes.”
“We only need three,” says Gregorius. “Just get us alongside, Captain.”
“Coming alongside now,” says de Soya. “She’s painting us.” The Raphael was not designed with stealth capabilities, and now every instrument records the other ship’s sensors on her. “One klick,” he reports, “still no weapons activity. Fields on full. Delta-v dropping. Eight hundred meters.”
Gregorius, Kee, and Rettig unsling their plasma rifles and crouch.
“Three hundred meters … two hundred meters …,” says de Soya. The other ship is passive, its acceleration high but constant. In most of the sims de Soya had factored in a wild chase before matching speeds and disrupting the other ship’s fields. This is too easy. The father-captain feels concern for the first time. “Inside minimum lance range,” he reports. “Go!”
