by Dan Simmons
“Now,” said the woman, “where were we?” She came forward at an easy walk.
In those last seconds of the battle, it was not easy getting the Sphinx trap in place. Nemes is using all her energy fighting off the Shrike’s whirring blades. It is like fighting several spinning propellers at once, she thinks. She has been on worlds with propeller-driven aircraft. Two centuries earlier she had killed the Hegemony Consul on such a world.
Now she bats away whirling arms, never removing her gaze from the glaring red eyes. Your time has passed, she thinks at the Shrike as their displacement-shrouded arms and legs slash and counterslash like invisible scythes. Reaching through the thing’s less-focused field, she seizes a joint on its upper arm and rips thorns and blades away. That arm falls away, but five scalpels on the lower hand dig at her abdomen, trying to disembowel her through the field.
“Uh-uh,” she says, kicking the thing’s right leg out from under it for a split second. “Not so fast.”
The Shrike staggers, and in that instant of vulnerability she slips the Sphinx card from her wristband, slides it through a five-nanosecond gap in her displacement field squarely into the palm of her hand, and slaps it onto a spike rising from the Shrike’s banded neck.
“That’s all,” cries Nemes as she jumps back, shifts to fast time to bat away the Shrike’s attempt to remove the card, and activates it by thinking of a red circle.
She leaps back farther as the hyperentropic field hums into existence, propelling the flailing monster five minutes into the future. It has no way back while the field exists.
Rhadamanth Nemes shifts down from fast time and drops the field. The breeze—superheated and ember laden as it is—feels delightfully cool to her. “Now,” she says, enjoying the look in the two pairs of human eyes, “where were we?”
“Do it!” shouts Corporal Kee.
“I can’t,” says de Soya at the controls. His finger is in the tactical omnigrip. “Groundwater. Steam explosion. It would kill them all.” Raphael’s boards show every erg of energy diverted, but it does no good.
Kee flips down his microphone bead, throws the switch to all channels, and begins broadcasting on tightbeam, making sure that the reticule is on the man and girl, not on the advancing woman.
“That won’t do any good,” says de Soya. He has never been so frustrated in his life.
“Rocks,” Kee is shouting into his bead mike. “Rocks!”
• • •
I was standing, pushing Aenea behind and wishing that I had the pistol, the flashlight laser, anything, as the woman approached. The plasma rifle was still in the watertight shoulder bag near the riverbank just two meters away. All I had to do was jump, unseal the bag, lever off the safety, snap open the folding stock, aim, and fire. I did not think that the smiling woman would give me the time. Nor did I believe that Aenea would be alive when I turned to fire.
At that moment the idiot comlog bracelet on my wrist started vibrating its inner lining against my skin like one of those antique soundless alarm watches. I ignored it. The comlog began pricking tiny needles into my wrist. I raised the stupid thing to my ear. It whispered at me, “Get to the rocks. Take the girl and get to the lava rocks.”
Nothing made sense. I looked down at A. Bettik, the telltales shifting from green through amber as I watched, and began backing away from the smiling woman, keeping my body between her and Aenea as we stumbled backward.
“Now, now,” said the woman. “That’s not very nice. Aenea, if you come here, your boyfriend can live. Your phony blue man can live also, if your boyfriend can keep him alive.”
I glanced down to see Aenea’s face, afraid that she would accept the offer. She clung to my arm. Her eyes showed a terrible intensity, but still no fear. “It’ll be all right, kiddo,” I whispered, still moving to our left. Behind us was the river. Five meters to our left and the lava rocks began.
The woman moved right, blocking our movement. “This is taking too long,” she said softly. “I only have another four minutes. Oodles and oodles of time. An eternity of time.”
“Come on.” I grabbed Aenea’s wrist and ran for the rocks. I had no plan. I had only the nonsensical words whispered in a voice that was not the comlog’s.
We never reached the lava rocks. There was a blast of heated air and the chrome shape of the woman was ahead of us, standing three meters above us on the black rock face. “Bye, bye, Raul Endymion,” the chrome mask said. The shimmering metal arm rose.
The blast of heat burned off my eyebrows, set fire to my shirt, and threw the girl and me backward through the air. We hit hard and rolled away from the unspeakable heat. Aenea’s hair was smoldering, and I batted my forearms against her, trying to keep her hair from bursting into flame. A. Bettik’s medkit was screeching again, but the avalanche roar of superheated air behind us drowned the noise. I saw that my shirtsleeve was smoking, and I ripped it away before it ignited. Aenea and I turned our backs to the heat and crawled and scrabbled away as quickly as we could. It was like being on the lip of a volcano.
We grabbed A. Bettik’s body and pulled him to the riverbank, not hesitating a second before sliding into the steaming current. I struggled to keep the unconscious android’s head above water while Aenea fought to keep both of us from sliding away on the current. Just above the surface of the water, where our faces were pressed against the wet mud of the riverbank, the air was almost cool enough to breathe.
Feeling the blisters forming on my forehead, not yet knowing that my eyebrows and swaths of hair were missing, I raised my head to the edge of the riverbank and peered over.
The chromed figure stood in the center of a three-meter circle of orange light that stretched up to the heavens and disappeared only when it narrowed to an infinite point hundreds of kilometers above. The air rippled and roiled where the beam of almost solid energy ripped through the atmosphere.
The metallic woman-shape tried to move toward us, but the high-energy lance seemed to exert too much pressure. Still, she stood, the chrome field around her turning red, then green, then a blinding white. But still she stood, her fist raised and shaking at the sky. Beneath her feet the lava rock boiled, turned red, and ran downhill in great molten rivers. Some ran into the river not ten meters downstream from us, and the steam clouds billowed up with a loud hissing. At that moment I admit that I considered becoming religious for the first time in my life.
The chrome shape seemed to see the danger seconds before it was too late. It disappeared, reappeared as a blur—fist shaking toward the sky—disappeared again, reappeared a final time, and then sank into the lava under its feet where solid rock had been an instant earlier.
The beam stayed on for another full minute. I could not look directly at it any longer, and the heat was burning away the skin of my cheeks. I pressed my face against the cool mud again and held A. Bettik and the girl against the bank even as the current tried to pull us downstream into the steam and lava and microfilament wires.
I looked up one final time, saw the chromed fist sinking beneath the surface of the lava, and then the field seemed to shift down in colors for a moment before it winked off. The lava began to cool at once. By the time I had pulled Aenea and A. Bettik out of the water and we had begun CPR again, the rock was solidifying with only rivulets and pseudo-pods of lava still flowing. Bits of cooling rock flaked off and rose in the heated air, joining the embers from the forest fire still raging behind us. There was no sign of the chrome woman.
Amazingly, the medkit was still functioning. Lights went from red to amber as we kept blood moving to A. Bettik’s brain and limbs and breathed life back into him. The tourniquet sleeve was tight. When he seemed to be holding his own, I looked up at the girl crouched across from me. “What next?” I said.
There was a soft implosion of air behind us, and I turned in time to see the Shrike flash into existence.
“Jesus wept,” I said softly.
Aenea was shaking her head. I could see the heat blisters on her lips and
forehead. Strands of her hair had burned away, and her shirt was a sooty mess. Other than that, she seemed all right. “No,” she said. “It’s all right.”
I had stood and was fumbling in the shoulder bag for the plasma rifle. No use. It had been too close to the beam of energy. The trigger guard was half-melted and plastic elements in the folded stock had fused with the metal barrel. It was a miracle that the plasma cartridges had not gone off and blasted us to vapor. I dropped the bag and faced the Shrike with my fists balled. Let it come through me, goddamn it.
“It’s all right,” Aenea said again, pulling me back. “It won’t do anything. It’s all right.”
We crouched next to A. Bettik. The android’s eyelashes were fluttering. “Did I miss anything?” he whispered hoarsely.
We did not laugh. Aenea touched the blue man’s cheek and looked at me. The Shrike stayed where it had first appeared, burning embers drifting by its red eyes and soot settling on its carapace.
A. Bettik closed his eyes and the telltales began to blink again. “We need to get him serious help,” I whispered to Aenea, “or we’re going to lose him.”
She nodded. I thought she had whispered something back, but it was not her voice speaking.
I lifted my left arm, ignoring the tattered shirt and rising red welts there. All the hair had been burned off my forearm.
We both listened. The comlog was speaking in a familiar man’s voice.
56
Father de Soya is surprised when they finally respond on the common band. He had not thought their archaic comlog capable of transmitting on the tightbeam the ship was holding on them. There is even a visual display—the fuzzy holographic image of two burned and sooty faces float above the main monitor.
Corporal Kee looks at de Soya. “Well I’ll be damned, Father.”
“Me too,” says de Soya. To the waiting faces he says, “I am Father Captain de Soya on the Pax ship Raphael.…”
“I remember you,” says the girl. De Soya realizes that the ship is transmitting holo images and that they can see him—no doubt a miniature ghostly face above a Roman collar, all floating above the comlog on the man’s wrist.
“I remember you, too,” is all de Soya can think to say. It has been a long search. He looks at the dark eyes and pale skin beneath the soot and superficial burns. So close …
The image of Raul Endymion speaks. “Who was that? What was that?”
Father Captain de Soya shakes his head. “I don’t know. Her name was Rhadamanth Nemes. She was assigned to us just a few days ago. She said that she was part of a new Legion they are training—” He stops. All of this is classified. He is speaking to the enemy. De Soya looks at Corporal Kee. In the other man’s slight smile, he sees their situation. They are condemned men anyway. “She said she was part of a new Legion of Pax warriors,” he continues, “but I don’t think that was the truth. I don’t think she was human.”
“Amen,” says the image of Raul Endymion. The face looks away from the comlog for a minute and then returns. “Our friend is dying, Father Captain de Soya. Can you do anything to help?”
The priest-captain shakes his head. “We can’t get to you. The Nemes creature took our dropship and overrode the remote autopilot. We can’t even get the beacon to respond. But if you can get to it, it has an autosurgeon.”
“Where is it?” says the girl.
Corporal Kee leans into the imaging field. “Our radar shows it to be about a klick and a half southeast of you,” he says. “In the hills. It has some camouflage crap on it, but you’ll be able to find it. We’ll lead you there.”
Raul Endymion says, “It was your voice on the comlog. Telling us to get to the rocks.”
“Well, yeah,” says Kee. “We had everything diverted into the ship’s tactical fire-control system—that was about eighty gigawatts that we could deliver through atmosphere—but the groundwater would have turned to steam and killed all of you. The rocks seemed the best bet.”
“She beat us there,” says Raul with a crooked smile.
“That was the idea,” responds Corporal Kee.
“Thank you,” says Aenea.
Kee nods, embarrassed, and ducks out of the imaging field. “As the good corporal said,” continues Father Captain de Soya, “we will help guide you to the dropship.”
“Why?” says the blurred image of Raul. “And why did you kill your own creature?”
De Soya shakes his head. “She was not my creature.”
“The Church’s, then,” insists Raul. “Why?”
“I hope she was not the Church’s creature,” de Soya says quietly. “If she was, then my Church has become the monster.”
There is a silence broken only by the hiss of the tightbeam. “You’d better get moving,” de Soya says at last. “It is getting dark.”
Both faces in the holo look around them almost comically, as if they have forgotten their surroundings. “Yeah,” says Raul, “and your lance or CPB or whatever it was melted my hand-lamp to slag.” “I could light your way,” says de Soya without smiling, “but it would mean activating the main weapons system again.”
“Never mind,” says Raul. “We’ll manage. I’m shutting down the imager, but I’ll keep the audio channel open until we get to the dropship.”
57
It took us more than two hours to go the kilometer and a half. The lava hills were very rough. It would have been easy to break an ankle on those rills and fissures without the added weight of A. Bettik on my back. It was very dark—clouds had moved in to occlude the stars—and I don’t think we would have made it at all that night if Aenea hadn’t found the flashlight laser lying in the grass when we were packing up to move out.
“How the hell did that get there?” I said. The last I remembered of the little laser, I had been ready to trigger it at the hell-woman’s eyes. Then it had been gone. Well, I thought, to hell with it. It had been a day for mysteries. We left with one last mystery behind us—the silent form of the Shrike, still frozen where it had reappeared. It did not attempt to follow us.
With Aenea leading the way with the flashlight set at widebeam, we struggled and scrabbled our way across the black rock and shifting ash back into the hills. We would have made it in half the time if A. Bettik had not required constant treatment.
The medkit had used up its modest share of antibiotics, stimulants, painkillers, plasma, and IV drip. A. Bettik was alive because of the kit’s work, but it was still a close thing. He had simply lost too much blood in the river; the tourniquet had made a difference, but the belt had not been tight enough to staunch all the bleeding. We administered CPR when we had to, just to keep the blood flowing to his brain if nothing else, and stopped when the medkit alarms started squawking. The comlog kept us on track in the Pax corporal’s voice, and I decided that even if this was all a trick to capture Aenea, we owed those two men up there a hell of a debt of gratitude. And all the time we were scrambling through the darkness, Aenea’s flashlight beam playing over black lava and the skeletons of dead trees, I expected that hell-woman’s chromed hand to slash up through the rock and grab me by the ankle.
We found the dropship right where they said it would be. Aenea started up the metal ladder, but I grabbed her tattered pant leg and made her come down.
“I don’t want you in the ship, kiddo,” I said. “We only have their word that they can’t fly it by remote. If you get in and they can fly it from up there, they’ve got you.”
She sagged against the ladder. I had never seen her look so exhausted. “I trust them,” she said. “They said—”
“Yeah, but they can’t grab you if you’re not in there. You stay here while I carry A. Bettik up and see if there’s an autosurgeon.”
As I went up the ladder, I had a stomach-twisting thought. What if the metal door above me was locked and the keys were in the hell-woman’s jumper pocket?
There was a lighted diskey pad. “Six-nine-nine-two,” said Corporal Kee’s voice from the comlog.
I
tapped it in and the outer air-lock door slid open. The autosurgeon was in there and it came alive with a touch. I gently lowered my blue friend into the cushioned enclosure—taking great pains not to hit the raw stump of his arm—made sure that the diagnostic patches and pressure cuffs were placing themselves properly, and then closed the lid. It felt too much like closing a coffin.
The readouts were not promising, but the surgeon went to work. I watched the monitor for a moment until I realized that my eyes were blurring and that I was dozing on my feet. Rubbing my cheeks, I went back to the open air lock.
“You can stand on the ladder, kiddo. If the ship starts to take off, jump.”
Aenea stepped up onto the ladder and winked off the flashlight laser. Our light came from the glowing autosurgeon and from some of the console lights. “Then what?” said Aenea. “I jump off and the ship takes off with you and A. Bettik. Then what do I do?”
“Head for the next farcaster portal,” I said.
The comlog said, “We don’t blame you for being suspicious.” It spoke in Father Captain de Soya’s voice.
Sitting in the open hatch, listening to the breeze rustle the broken branches tossed atop the aircraft-sized lifting body, I said, “Why this change of heart and program, Father Captain? You came to get Aenea. Why the turnabout?” I remembered the chase through Parvati System, his order to fire on us at Renaissance Vector.
Instead of answering, the priest-captain’s voice said, “I have your hawking mat, Raul Endymion.”
“Yeah?” I said tiredly. I tried to remember where I had seen it last. Flying toward the platform station on Mare Infinitus. “Small universe,” I said as if it did not matter. Inwardly, I would have given anything to have that little flying carpet right now. Aenea clung to the ladder and listened. From time to time, we both glanced over to make sure the autosurgeon had not given up.
“Yes,” said the voice of Father Captain de Soya, “and I have begun to understand a little of how you think, my friends. Perhaps someday you will understand how I think.”
