The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  “It will be a dangerous trip,” said Aenea. “I believe that you can do it, Raul. I trust you to find the ship and then find us.”

  I felt my shoulders slump. “All right,” I said. “Do we head back to where we came through the farcaster before?” We had come through from God’s Grove on a small stream near the Old Architect’s masterpiece building, Fallingwater. It was two thirds of a continent away.

  “No,” said Aenea. “Closer. On the Mississippi River.”

  “All right,” I said again. I had flown over the Mississippi. It was almost two thousand klicks east of here. “When do I go? Tomorrow?”

  Aenea touched my wrist. “No,” she said, tiredly but firmly. “Tonight. Right now.”

  I did not protest. I did not argue. Without speaking, I took the bow of the kayak, A. Bettik took the stern, Aenea held the center steady, and we carried the damned thing back to the dropship in the deepening desert night.

  3

  The Grand Inquisitor was late.

  Vatican Air/Space Traffic Control routed the Inquisitor’s EMV across normally closed airspace near the spaceport, shut down all airborne traffic on the east side of the Vatican, and held a thirty-thousand-ton robot freighter in orbital final approach until after the GI’s car had flown across the southeast corner of the landing grid.

  Inside the specially armored EMV, the Grand Inquisitor—His Eminence John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa—did not glance out the window or at the video monitors at the lovely sight of the approaching Vatican, its walls rosy in the morning light, or at the busy, twenty-lane highway called the Ponte Vit-torio Emanuele beneath them, glimmering like a sunlit river because of sunlight on windshields and bubbletops. The Grand Inquisitor’s attention was focused solely on the intelligence update scrolling by on his comlog template.

  When the last paragraph had scrolled past and was committed to memory and deleted to oblivion, the Grand Inquisitor said to his aide, Father Farrell, “And there have been no more meetings with the Mercantilus?”

  Father Farrell, a thin man with flat gray eyes, never smiled, but a twitch of his cheek muscle conveyed the simulation of humor to the Cardinal. “None.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely.”

  The Grand Inquisitor sat back in the EMV’s cushions and allowed himself a brief smile. The Mercantilus had made only that one early, disastrous approach to any of the papal candidates—the sounding out of Lourdusamy—and the Inquisitor had heard the complete recording of that meeting. The Cardinal allowed himself another few seconds of smile: Lourdusamy had been right to think that his conference room was bugproof—absolutely resistant to taps, bugs, wires, and squirts. Any recording device in the room—even implanted in one of the participants—would have been detected and homed in on. Any attempt to tightbeam out would have been detected and blocked. It had been one of the Grand Inquisitor’s finest moments, getting the complete visual and auditory recording of that meeting.

  Monsignor Lucas Oddi had gone in to the Vatican Hospital for a routine eyes, ears, and heart replacement two local years ago. The surgeon had been approached by Father Farrell and the full weight of the Holy Office had been shown ready to descend upon the poor medico’s neck if he did not implant certain state-of-the-art devices in the Monsignor’s body. The surgeon did so and died the true death—no resurrection possible—in a car accident far out over the Big North Shallow shortly after that.

  Monsignor Lucas Oddi had no electronic or mechanical bugs in his system, but connected to his optic nerve were seven fully biological nano recorders. Four auditory nanorecorders were tapped into his auditory nerve system. These biorecorders did not transmit inside the body, but stored the data in chemical form and physically carried it through the bloodstream to the squirt transmitter—also fully organic—set into Monsignor Oddi’s left ventricle. Ten minutes after Oddi had left the secured area of Cardinal Lourdusamy’s office, the transmitter had squirted a compressed record of the meeting to one of the Grand Inquisitor’s nearby relay transponders. It was not realtime eavesdropping from Lourdusamy’s bugproof rooms—a fact that still worried Cardinal Mustafa—but it was as close to it as current technology and stealth could get.

  “Isozaki is frightened,” said Father Farrell. “He thinks …”

  The Grand Inquisitor raised one finger. Farrell stopped in midsentence. “You do not know that he is frightened,” said the Cardinal. “You do not know what he thinks. You can only know what he says and does and infer his thoughts and reactions from that. Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.”

  Father Farrell bowed his head in agreement and submission.

  The EMV touched down on the landing pad atop Castel Sant’ Angelo. The Grand Inquisitor was out the hatch and down the ramp so quickly that Farrell had to trot to catch up to his master. Security commandos, dressed in Holy Office red armor-cloth, fell into escort step ahead and behind, but the Grand Inquisitor waved them away. He wanted to finish his conversation with Father Farrell. He touched his aide’s left arm—not out of affection, but to close the bone-conduction circuits so that he could subvocalize—and said, “Isozaki and the Mercantilus leaders are not frightened. If Lourdusamy wanted them purged, they would be dead by now. Isozaki had to get his message of support to the Cardinal and he did. It’s the Pax military who are frightened.”

  Farrell frowned and subvocalized on the bone circuit. “The military? But they haven’t played their card yet. They have done nothing disloyal.”

  “Precisely,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “The Mercantilus has made its move and knows that Lourdusamy will turn to them when the time comes. Pax Fleet and the rest have been terrified for years that they’ll make the wrong choice. Now they’re terrified that they’ve waited too long.”

  Farrell nodded. They had taken a dropshaft deep into the stone bowels of Castel Sant’ Angelo, and now they moved past armed guards and through lethal forcefields down a dark corridor. At an unmarked door, two red-garbed commandos stood at attention, energy rifles raised.

  “Leave us,” said the Grand Inquisitor and palmed the door’s ideyplate. The steel panel slid up and out of sight.

  The corridor had been stone and shadows. Inside the room, everything was bright light, instruments, and sterile surfaces. Technicians looked up as the Grand Inquisitor and Farrell entered. One wall of the room was taken up by square doors, looking like nothing so much as the multitiered human file drawers of an ancient morgue. One of those doors was open and a naked man lay on a gurney that had been pulled from the cold storage drawer there.

  The Grand Inquisitor and Farrell stopped on either side of the gurney.

  “He is reviving well,” said the technician who stood at the console. “We’re holding him just beneath the surface. We can bring him up in seconds.”

  Father Farrell said, “How long was his last cold sleep?”

  “Sixteen local months,” said the technician. “Thirteen and a half standard.”

  “Bring him up,” said the Grand Inquisitor.

  The man’s eyelids began to flutter within seconds. He was a small man, muscular but compact, and there were no marks or bruises on his body. His wrists and ankles were bound by stick-tite. A cortical shunt had been implanted just behind his left ear and an almost invisible bundle of microfibers ran from it to the console.

  The man on the gurney moaned.

  “Corporal Bassin Kee,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “Can you hear me?”

  Corporal Kee made an unintelligible sound.

  The Grand Inquisitor nodded as if satisfied. “Corporal Kee,” he said pleasantly, conversationally, “shall we pick up where we left off?”

  “How long …” mumbled Kee between dry, stiff lips. “How long have I been …”

  Father Farrell had moved to the technician’s console. Now he nodded to the Grand Inquisitor.

  Ignoring the corporal’s question, John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa said softly, “Why did yo
u and Father Captain de Soya let the girl go?”

  Corporal Kee had opened his eyes, blinking as if the light pained him, but now he closed them again. He did not speak.

  The Grand Inquisitor nodded to his aide. Father Farrell’s hand passed over icons on the console diskey, but did not yet activate any of them.

  “Once again,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “Why did you and de Soya allow the girl and her criminal allies to escape on God’s Grove? Who were you working for? What was your motivation?”

  Corporal Kee lay on his back, his fists clenched and his eyes shut fast. He did not answer.

  The Grand Inquisitor tilted his head ever so slightly to the left and Father Farrell waved two fingers over one of the console icons. The icons were as abstract as hieroglyphics to the untutored eye, but Farrell knew them well. The one he had chosen would have translated as crushed testicles.

  On the gurney, Corporal Kee gasped and opened his mouth to scream, but the neural inhibitors blocked that reaction. The short man’s jaws opened as wide as they could and Father Farrell could hear the muscles and tendons stretching.

  The Grand Inquisitor nodded and Farrell removed his fingers from the activation zone above the icon. Corporal Kee’s entire body convulsed on the gurney, his stomach muscles rippling in tension.

  “It is only virtual pain. Corporal Kee,” whispered the Grand Inquisitor. “A neural illusion. Your body is not marked.”

  On the slab, Kee was straining to raise his head to look down at his body, but the sticktite band held his head in place.

  “Or perhaps not,” continued the Cardinal. “Perhaps this time we have resorted to older, less refined methods.” He took a step closer to the gurney so that the man could see his face. “Again … why did you and Father Captain de Soya let the girl go on God’s Grove? Why did you attack your crewmate, Rhadamanth Nemes?”

  Corporal Kee’s mouth worked until his back teeth became visible. “F … f … fuck you,” he managed, his jaws tight against the shaking that was wracking him.

  “Of course,” said the Grand Inquisitor and nodded to Father Farrell.

  This time, the icon Farrell activated could be translated as hot wire behind the right eye.

  Corporal Kee opened his mouth in a silent scream.

  “Again,” said the Grand Inquisitor softly. “Tell us.”

  “Excuse me, Your Eminence,” said Father Farrell, glancing at his comlog, “but the Conclave Mass begins in forty-five minutes.”

  The Grand Inquisitor waved his fingers. “We have time, Martin. We have time.” He touched Corporal Kee’s upper arm. “Tell us these few facts, Corporal, and you will be bathed, dressed, and released. You have sinned against your Church and your Lord by this betrayal, but the essence of the Church is forgiveness. Explain your betrayal, and all will be forgiven.”

  Amazingly, muscles still rippling with shock, Corporal Kee laughed. “Fuck you,” he said. “You’ve already made me tell you everything I know under Truthtell. You know why we killed that bitch-thing and let the child go. And you’ll never let me go. Fuck you.”

  The Grand Inquisitor shrugged and stepped back. Glancing at his own gold comlog, he said softly, “We have time. Much time.” He nodded to Father Farrell.

  The icon that looked like a double parentheses on the virtual pain console stood for broad and heated blade down esophagus. With a graceful motion of his fingers, Father Farrell activated it.

  Father Captain Federico de Soya was returned to life on Pacem and had spent two weeks as a de facto prisoner in the Vatican Rectory of the Legionaries of Christ. The rectory was comfortable and tranquil. The plump little resurrection chaplain who attended to his needs—Father Baggio—was as kindly and solicitous as ever. De Soya hated the place and the priest.

  No one told Father Captain de Soya that he could not leave the Legionaries rectory, but he was made to understand that he should stay there until called. After a week of gaining strength and orientation after his resurrection, he was called to Pax Fleet headquarters, where he met with Admiral Wu and her boss, Admiral Marusyn.

  Father Captain de Soya did little during the meeting except salute, stand at ease, and listen. Admiral Marusyn explained that a review of the Father Captain de Soya’s court-martial of four years earlier had shown several irregularities and inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case. Further review of the situation had warranted a reversal of the court-martial board’s decision: Father Captain de Soya was to be reinstated immediately at his former rank of captain in Pax Fleet. Arrangements were being made to find him a ship for combat duty.

  “Your old torchship the Balthasar is in dry dock for a year,” said Admiral Marusyn. “A complete refitting—being brought up to archangel-escort standards. Your replacement, Mother Captain Stone, did an excellent job as skipper.”

  “Yes, sir,” said de Soya. “Stone was an excellent exec. I’m sure she’s been a good boss.”

  Admiral Marusyn nodded absently as he thumbed through vellum sheets in his notebook. “Yes, yes,” he said. “So good, in fact, that we’ve recommended her as skipper for one of the new planet-class archangels. We have an archangel in mind for you as well, Father Captain.”

  De Soya blinked and tried not to react. “The Raphael, sir?”

  The Admiral looked up, his tanned and creased face set in a slight smile. “Yes, the Raphael, but not the one you skippered before. We’ve retired that prototype to courier duty and renamed her. The new archangel Raphael is … well, you’ve heard about the planet-class archangels, Father Captain?”

  “No, sir. Not really.” He had heard rumors on his desert world when boxite miners had talked loudly in the one cantina in town.

  “Four standard years,” muttered the Admiral, shaking his head. His white hair was combed back behind his ears. “Bring Federico up to speed here, Admiral.”

  Marget Wu nodded and touched the diskey on a standard tactical console set into Admiral Marusyn’s wall. A holo of a starship came into existence between her and de Soya. The father-captain could see at once that this ship was larger, sleeker, more refined, and deadlier than his old Raphael.

  “His Holiness has asked each industrial world in the Pax to build—or at least to bankroll—one of these planet-class archangel battlecruisers, Father Captain,” said Admiral Wu in her briefing voice. “In the past four years, twenty-one of them have been completed and have entered active service. Another sixty are nearing completion.” The holo began to rotate and enlarge until suddenly the main deck was shown in cutaway. It was as if a laser lance had sliced the ship in half.

  “As you see,” continued Wu, “the living areas, command decks, and C-three tactical centers are much roomier than on the earlier Raphael … roomier even than your old torchship. The drives—both the classified C-plus instantaneous Gideon drive and the in-system fusion plant—have been reduced in size by one-third while gaining in efficiency and ease of maintenance. The new Raphael carries three atmospheric dropships and a high-speed scout. There are automated resurrection crèches aboard to serve a crew of twenty-eight and up to twenty-two Marines or passengers.”

  “Defenses?” asked Father Captain de Soya, still standing at-ease, his hands clasped behind him.

  “Class-ten containment fields,” said Wu crisply. “The newest stealth technology. Omega-class ECM and jamming ability. As well as the usual assortment of close-in hyperkinetic and energy defenses.”

  “Attack capabilities?” said de Soya. He could tell from the apertures and arrays visible on the holo, but he wanted to hear it.

  Admiral Marusyn answered with a tone of pride, as if showing off a new grandchild. “The whole nine meters,” he said. “CPBs, of course, but feeding off the C-plus drive core rather than the fusion drive. Slag anything within half an AU. New Hawking hyperkinetic missiles—miniaturized—about half the mass and size of the ones you carried on Balthasar. Plasma needles with almost twice the yield of the warheads of five years ago. Deathbeams …”

  Father Captain de Soya
tried not to react. Deathbeams had been prohibited in Pax Fleet.

  Marusyn saw something in the other man’s face. “Things have changed, Federico. This fight is to the finish. The Ousters are breeding like fruit flies out there in the dark, and unless we stop them, they’ll be slagging Pacem in a year or two.”

  Father Captain de Soya nodded. “Do you mind if I ask which world paid for the building of this new Raphael, sir?”

  Marusyn smiled and gestured toward the holo. The hull of the ship seemed to hurtle toward de Soya as the magnification increased. The view cut through the hull and closed on the tactical bridge, moving to the edge of the tactical center holopit until the father-captain could make out a small bronze plaque with the name—H.H.S. RAPHAEL—and beneath that, in smaller script: BUILT AND COMMISSIONED BY THE PEOPLE OF HEAVEN’S GATE FOR THE DEFENSE OF ALL HUMANITY.

  “Why are you smiling, Father Captain?” asked Admiral Marusyn.

  “Well, sir, it’s just … well, I’ve been to the world of Heaven’s Gate, sir. It was, of course, more than four standard years ago, but the planet was empty except for a dozen or so prospectors and a Pax garrison in orbit. There’s been no real population there since the Ouster invasion three hundred years ago, sir. I just couldn’t imagine that world financing one of these ships. It seems to me that it would take a planetary GNP of a society like Renaissance Vector’s to pay for a single archangel.”

  Marusyri’s smile had not faltered. “Precisely, Father Captain. Heaven’s Gate is a hellhole—poison atmosphere, acid rain, endless mud, and sulfur flats—it’s never recovered from the Ouster attack. But His Holiness thought that the Pax’s stewardship of that world might be better transferred to private enterprise. The planet still holds a fortune in heavy metals and chemicals. So we have sold it.”

  This time de Soya blinked. “Sold it, sir? An entire world?”

  While Marusyn openly grinned, Admiral Wu said, “To the Opus Dei, Father Captain.”