by Dan Simmons
I was shocked out of my reverie by a man’s voice calling musically, the words echoing down the stone-and-steel canyons of the city. It seemed to be coming from the park only a block or two to my left, and I ran in that direction, holding my hand on the grip of my pistol in the unbuttoned holster as I went.
“You hear this?” I said into the bead mike as I ran.
“Yes,” came A. Bettik’s voice in my hearplug. “I have the door to the terrace open and the sound is quite clear here.”
“It sounds Arabic. Can you translate?” I was panting only slightly as I finished the two-block sprint and came out into the open park area where the mosque dominated the entire block. A few minutes before, I had looked down one of the connecting streets and glimpsed the last of the red sunset painting the side of one of the minarets, but now the stone tower was a dull gray and only the highest wisps of cirrus caught the light.
“Yes,” said A. Bettik. “It is a muezzin call to evening prayer.”
I pulled the binoculars from my belt pouch and scanned the minarets. The man’s voice was coming from loudspeakers on a balcony encircling each tower. There was no sign of movement there. Suddenly the rhythmic cry ended and birds chattered within the branches of the forested square.
“It is most probably a recording,” said A. Bettik.
“I’ll check it out.” Setting away the binoculars, I followed a crushed-stone path through the extensive lawns and yellowish palm trees to the mosque’s entrance. I passed through a courtyard and paused at the entrance to the mosque proper. I could see the interior—it was filled with hundreds of the prayer mats. Elaborate arches of striped stone were supported by elegant pillars, and on the far wall a beautiful arch opened on a semicircular niche. To the right of this niche there was a flight of steps guarded by a lovingly carved stone railing, and a stone-canopied platform at the top. Not yet entering the large space, I described it to A. Bettik.
“The niche is the mihrab,” he responded. “It’s reserved for the prayer leader, the imam. The balcony to the right of it is the minbar, the pulpit. Is there anyone in either place?”
“No.” I could see the red dust on the prayer rugs and stone steps.
“Then there is no doubt that the call to prayer was a timed recording,” said A. Bettik.
I had the urge to enter the great stone space, but the urge was canceled by my reluctance to profane anyone’s sacred house. I had felt this as a child in the Catholic cathedral at Beak’s End, and as an adult when a friend in the Home Guard wanted to take me to one of the last Zen Gnostic temples on Hyperion. I had realized when I was a boy that I would always be an outsider when it came to holy places … never having one of my own, never feeling comfortable in another’s. I did not enter.
Walking back through the cooling and darkening streets, I found a palm-lined boulevard through an attractive section of town. Pushcarts held food and toys for sale. I paused by a cart selling fried dough and sniffed one of the bracelet-sized dough rings. It had gone bad days, not weeks or months, ago.
The boulevard came out by the river, and I turned to my left, taking the riverside esplanade back to the street that would lead me once again to the clinic. Occasionally I checked in with A. Bettik. Aenea was still sleeping soundly.
The stars were dimmed by dust in the atmosphere as night settled on the city. Only a few of the downtown buildings had lights on—whatever had stolen the populace must have happened in the daytime—but stately old streetlamps ran the length of the esplanade and they were glowing with gaslight. If it had not been for one of these lamps at the street end of the pier where we had tied the raft, I probably would have turned back toward the clinic without seeing it. As it was, the lamplight allowed me to spot it from more than a hundred meters away.
Someone was standing on our raft. The figure was motionless, very tall, and seemed to be wearing a silver suit. Lamplight gleamed from the figure’s surface as if it were wearing a chrome spacesuit.
Whispering to A. Bettik to guard the girl, that there was an intruder on the raft, I pulled my pistol from my holster and the binoculars from my belt. The second I focused the glasses, the gleaming silver shape turned its head in my direction.
49
Father Captain de Soya awakens in the familiar warmth of Raphael’s creche. After the first few moments of inevitable confusion and disorientation, he pulls himself from the enclosed couch and drifts, naked, to the command console.
Things are as they should be: in orbit around Sol Draconi Septem—the world a blinding white sphere just beyond the command console’s windows, the braking burn optimum, the other three creches close to reawakening their valuable human cargo, the internal field set to zero-g until they all reacquire strength, internal temperature and atmosphere optimum for reawakening, the ship in proper geosynchronous orbit. The priest-captain gives his first command of this new life—he orders the ship to begin brewing coffee for all of them in the wardroom cubby. Usually his first thought upon resurrection is of his coffee bulb, tucked in the plotting table/wardroom table niche, filling with the hot black drink.
Then de Soya notices the ship’s computer flashing a priority-message light. No message had arrived while he was conscious in Pacem System, and it seems unlikely that one has found them here in this remote ex-colony system. There is no Pax presence in Sol Draconi System—at most, transiting torchships use the three gas giants in the system for refueling their hydrogen tanks—and a brief query of the ship’s computer confirms that no other ship was contacted during the three days of braking and orbit insertion. The same query brings forth the fact that there is no Church mission on the planet below them, the last missionary contact lost more than fifty standard years ago.
De Soya plays the message. Papal authority routed through Pax Fleet. According to the display codes, the message arrived mere hundredths of a second before Raphael had gone quantum in Pacem space. It is a text-only message and brief—HIS HOLINESS COUNTERMANDS MISSION TO SOL DRACONI SEPTEM. NEW AREA OF ACQUISITION: GOD’S GROVE. PROCEED THERE IMMEDIATELY. AUTHORIZATION LOURDUSAMY AND MARUSYN. MESSAGE ENDS.
De Soya sighs. This trip, these deaths and resurrections, have been for nothing. For a moment the priest-captain does not move but sits naked in the command couch, pondering the glaring white limb of the ice planet that fills the curved window above him. Then he sighs again and moves off to shower, stopping by the wardroom cubby to take his first sip of coffee. He reaches out automatically for the bulb while he taps commands into the shower-cubby console—needle spray, as hot as he can stand it. He makes a note to find some bathrobes somewhere. This is no longer an all-male locker room.
Suddenly de Soya freezes in irritation. His questing hand has not closed on the handle of his coffee bulb. Someone has shifted the bulb in its niche.
Their new recruit, Corporal Rhadamanth Nemes, is the last to leave her creche. All three of the men avert their eyes as she leaves her creche and kicks off for the shower/wardrobe cubby, but there are enough reflective surfaces in Raphael’s crowded command bubble for each of them to catch a glimpse of the small woman’s firm body, her pale skin, and the livid cruciform between her small breasts.
Corporal Nemes joins them in taking Communion and seems disoriented and vulnerable as they sip their coffee and allow the internal fields to build to one-sixth-g.
“Your first resurrection?” de Soya asks gently.
The corporal nods. Her hair is very black and cut short, the bangs hanging limply on the pale forehead.
“I’d like to say that you get used to it,” says the priest-captain, “but the truth is, every awakening is like the first one … difficult and exhilarating.”
Nemes sips her coffee bulb. She seems tentative in the microgravity. Her crimson-and-black uniform makes her skin seem all the more pale in contrast.
“Shouldn’t we be leaving immediately for the God’s Grove system?” she says tentatively.
“Soon enough,” says Father Captain de Soya. “I’ve instructed Rapha
el to break orbit here in fifteen minutes. We’ll accelerate out to the closest translation point at two-g’s so we can recover for a few hours before we have to go back to the couches and the creches.”
Corporal Nemes appears to shudder a bit at the thought of another resurrection. As if eager to change the subject, she glances at the blinding limb of the planet filling the windows and viewscreen. “How can anyone be traveling a river on all that ice?”
“Under it, I’d think,” says Sergeant Gregorius. The giant trooper has been watching Nemes carefully. “ ’Tis the atmosphere that’s frozen there again since the Fall. The Tethys must flow beneath it.”
Corporal Nemes raises a dark eyebrow in surprise. “And what is God’s Grove like?”
“Ye don’t know it?” asks Gregorius. “I thought everyone in the Pax’d heard of God’s Grove.”
Nemes shakes her head. “I grew up on Esperance. It’s a farming and fishing world, mostly. People there don’t pay too much interest in other places. Not other worlds of the Pax … not old stories of the Web. Most of us are too busy scraping a living from the land or sea.”
“God’s Grove is the old Templar world,” says Father Captain de Soya, setting his coffee bulb in its niche in the plotting table. “It was burned pretty badly during the Ouster invasion preceding the Fall. In its time it was beautiful.”
“Aye,” nods Sergeant Gregorius, “the Templar Brotherhood of the Muir was a sort of nature-worship cult. They turned God’s Grove into a world forest—trees taller and more beautiful than the redwoods and sequoias of Old Earth. The Templars lived there, all twenty-some million’ve ’em—in cities and platforms in those lovely trees. But they chose the wrong side in the war.…”
Corporal Nemes looks up from sipping her coffee. “You mean they were on the Ousters’ side?” She sounds shocked at the idea.
“That they were, lass,” says Gregorius. “Perhaps it was because they had spacegoing trees in those days.…”
Nemes laughs. It is a short, brittle sound.
“He’s serious,” says Corporal Kee. “The Templars used ergs—energy-binders from Aldebaren—to encapsulate the trees in a Class-nine containment field and provide a reaction drive in-system. They even had regular Hawking drives installed for interstellar flight.”
“Flying trees,” says Corporal Nemes, and laughs harshly again.
“Some o’ them flew off in such trees when the Ousters paid back their allegiance with a Swarm attack on God’s Grove,” continues Gregorius, “but most of them burned … just as most of the planet burned. For a century, they say, most of the world was ash. The clouds o’ smoke created a nuclear winter effect.”
“Nuclear winter?” says Nemes.
De Soya is watching the young woman carefully, wondering why one so naive has been chosen to carry the papal diskey under certain circumstances. Was the ingenuousness part of her strength as a killer, should the need arise?
“Corporal,” he says, speaking to the woman, “you say you grew up on Esperance.… Did you join the Home Guard there?”
She shakes her head. “I went directly into the Pax army, Father Captain. There was a potato famine … the recruiters offered offworld travel … and, well …”
“Where did ye serve?” asks Gregorius.
“Just training on Freeholm,” says Nemes.
Gregorius leans on his elbows. The one-sixth g makes sitting easier. “Which brigade?”
“The Twenty-third,” says the woman. “Sixth Regiment.”
“The Screaming Eagles,” says Corporal Kee. “I had a female buddy who transferred there. Was Commander Coleman your CO?”
Nemes shakes her head again. “Commander Deering was in charge while I was there. I just spent ten local months … ah … about eight and a half standard, I guess. I was trained as a general combat specialist. Then they asked for volunteers for the First Legion.…” She trails off as if this is classified material.
Gregorius scratches his chin. “It’s odd I haven’t heard of this outfit in the building. Nothing stays secret very long in the military. How long did ye say ye were training with this … legion?”
Nemes gives the big man a direct stare. “Two standard years, Sergeant. And it has been secret … until now. Most of our training was on Lee Three and the Lambert Ring Territories.”
“Lambert,” muses the big sergeant. “So ye’ve had your share of low-g and zero-g training.”
“More than my share,” agrees Corporal Rhadamanth Nemes with a thin smile. “While in the Lambert Ring, we trained in the Peregrine Trojan Cluster for five months.”
Father Captain de Soya feels the conversation turning into an interrogation. He does not want their new crewmate to feel assaulted by their questions, but he is as curious as Kee and Gregorius. Besides that, he feels something … not right. “So the Legions’ job will be pretty much like the Marines?” he says. “Ship-to-ship fighting?”
Nemes shakes her head. “Uh-uh … Captain. Not just zero-g combat tactics for ship to ship. The Legions are being formed to take the war to the enemy.”
“What does that mean, Corporal?” asks the priest-captain softly. “In all my years in the Fleet, ninety percent of our battles were in Ouster territory.”
“Yes,” says Nemes, her small smile returning, “but you hit and run … Fleet actions. The Legions will occupy.”
“But most of the Ouster holdings are in vacuum!” says Kee. “Asteroids, orbital forests, deep space itself …”
“Exactly,” says Nemes, her smile remaining. “The Legions will fight them on their own ground … or vacuum, as the case may be.”
Gregorius catches de Soya’s glance saying, No more questions, but the sergeant shakes his head and says, “Well, I don’t see what these vaunted legions are learning that the Swiss Guard hasn’t done—and done well—for sixteen centuries.”
De Soya floats to his feet. “Acceleration in two minutes. Let’s get to our couches. We’ll talk more about God’s Grove and the mission there during our drive to the translation point.”
• • •
It had taken Raphael almost eleven hours of braking deceleration at two hundred gravities to kill its near light-speed upon entry into the system, but the computer has located an adequate translation point to God’s Grove only thirty-five million klicks out from Sol Draconi Septem. The ship could accelerate at a leisurely one-g and reach that point in around twenty-five hours, but de Soya has ordered it to lift out of the planet’s gravity well at a constant two-g’s for six hours before using more energy to bring on the internal fields during the last hour’s dash at one-hundred-g’s.
When the fields finally come up, the team goes through their final checklist for God’s Grove—three days to resurrect, then immediate dropship deployment with Sergeant Gregorius in charge of the ground party, surveillance of the fifty-eight-klick Tethys River segment between portals, and then final preparation for the capture of Aenea and her party.
“After all this, why does His Holiness start directing us in the search?” asks Corporal Kee as they move to their creches.
“Revelation,” says Father Captain de Soya. “Okay … everyone tuck in. I’ll watch the boards.”
For the last few minutes before translation, it has been their custom to close their creches. Only the captain stays on watch.
In the few minutes he has alone at the command board, de Soya quickly calls up the records of their abortive entry and escape from Hebron System. He had viewed these before their departure from Pacem System, but now he fast-forwards through the visual and data records again. It’s all there and it all seems correct: the shots from orbit around Hebron while he and his two troopers were still in creche—the burning cities, cratered landscape, and shattered villages of Hebron lifting smoke into the desert atmosphere, New Jerusalem in radioactive ruins—and then the radar acquisition by three Swarm cruisers. Raphael had aborted the resurrection cycles and made a run for it, lifting out of the system at the two hundred and eighty gravities her
enhanced fusion drive could provide with her cargo of dead men. The Ousters, on the other hand, had to divert energy to their internal fields or die—no resurrection for heathens—and could never muster more than eighty-g’s during the stern chase.
The visuals were there, though—the long green tails of the Ouster fusion drives, their attempts to lance Raphael at a distance of almost a full AU, the ship’s record of the defense fields easily handling the lance energy at that distance, the final translation to Mare Infinitus System since that was the closest jump point …
It all made sense. The visuals were compelling. De Soya did not believe a bit of it.
The father-captain was not sure why he was so skeptical. The visual records meant nothing, of course; for more than a thousand years, since the beginning of the Digital Age, even the most compelling visual images could be faked by a child at a home computer. But ship’s records would require a gigantic effort—a technical conspiracy—to falsify. Why should he not trust Raphael’s memory now?
With only a few minutes before translation, de Soya calls up the records of their recent descent into Sol Draconi Septem’s system. He glances over his shoulder from the command couch—all three creche couches are sealed and silent, their telltales green. Gregorius, Kee, and Nemes are still awake, waiting for translation and death. De Soya knows that the sergeant prays during these last minutes. Kee usually reads a book from his creche monitor. De Soya has no idea what the woman is doing within her comfortable coffin.
He knows he is being paranoid. My coffee bulb was moved out of place. The handle was shifted sideways. During his hours awake de Soya has tried to remember whether someone might have been in the wardrobe cubby and jarred the bulb in Pacem System. No—they had not used the wardrobe cubby during the climb out of Pacem’s gravity well. The woman, Nemes, had been aboard before the others, but de Soya had used the coffee bulb and returned it to its place after she had gone to her couch/creche. He was sure of that. He had been the last to turn in, just as he always was. Acceleration or deceleration might smash bulbs not designed for terrible gravities, but the deceleration vector Raphael had been following was linear along the courier ship’s line of travel and would not have moved things laterally. The coffee-bulb niche was designed to hold things in place.
