The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle

by Dan Simmons

  It was precisely in the Palestinian capital of Arafat-kaffiyeh that the Shrike had appeared and slaughtered hundreds … perhaps thousands … of people.

  The Grand Inquisitor conferred with his aides, met with Pax Fleet commanders in orbit, and landed in force. The main spaceport in the capital of St. Malachy was shut down to all but military traffic—no great loss, since no merchant or passenger dropships were scheduled in for a Martian week. Six assault boats preceded the Grand Inquisitor’s dropship, and by the time Cardinal Mustafa set foot to Martian soil—or Pax tarmac, to be precise—a hundred Swiss Guard and Holy Office commandos had ringed the spaceport. The official Martian welcoming delegation, including Archbishop Robeson and Governor Clare Palo, were searched and sonic-probed before being allowed clearance.

  From the spaceport, the Holy Office group was whisked via groundcar shuttles through decaying streets to the new Pax-built Governor’s Palace on the outskirts of St. Malachy. Security was heavy. Besides the Grand Inquisitor’s personal security force, the Pax Fleet Marines, the Governor’s troopers, and the Archbishop’s contingent of Swiss Guards, there was a battle regiment of Home Guard armored infantry encamped around the palace. There the Grand Inquisitor was shown evidence of the Shrike’s presence two standard weeks earlier on the Tharsis Plateau.

  “This is absurd,” said the Grand Inquisitor on the night before flying to the scene of the Shrike attack. “All these holos and vid images are two standard weeks old or taken from high altitude. I see these few holos of what must be the Shrike and some blurred scenes of carnage. I see photos of the Pax bodies the militia men found when first entering the town. But where are the local people? Where are the eyewitnesses? Where are the twenty-seven hundred citizens of Arafat-kaffiyeh?”

  “We don’t know,” said Governor Clare Palo.

  “We reported to the Vatican via archangel drone and when the drone returned, we were told not to tamper with the evidence,” said Archbishop. Robeson. “We were told to await your arrival.”

  The Grand Inquisitor shook his head and held up a flat photo image. “And what is this?” he said. “A Pax Fleet base on the outskirts of Arafat-kaffiyeh? This spaceport is newer than St. Malachy’s.”

  “It is not Pax Fleet,” said Captain Wolmak, captain of the Jibril and new commander of the Old Earth System task force. “Although we estimate that thirty to fifty dropships a day were using this facility during the week previous to the Shrike’s appearance.”

  “Thirty to fifty dropships a day,” repeated the Grand Inquisitor. “And not Pax Fleet. Who then?” He scowled at Archbishop Robeson and the Governor.

  “Mercantilus?” pressed the Grand Inquisitor when no one spoke.

  “No,” said the Archbishop after another moment. “Not Mercantilus.”

  The Grand Inquisitor folded his arms and waited.

  “The dropships were chartered by Opus Dei,” said Governor Palo in a tiny voice.

  “For what purpose?” demanded the Grand Inquisitor. Only Holy Office guards were allowed in this suite of the palace, and they stood at six-meter intervals along the stone wall.

  The Governor opened her hands. “We do not know, Your Excellency.”

  “Domenico,” said the Archbishop, his voice quavering slightly, “we were told not to inquire.”

  The Grand Inquisitor took an angry step forward. “Told not to … by whom? Who has the authority to order the presiding Archbishop and the Pax Governor of a world ‘not to interfere’?” His anger boiled through. “In the name of Christ! Who has such power?”

  The Archbishop raised pained but defiant eyes toward Cardinal Mustafa. “In the name of Christ … precisely, Your Excellency. Those representing Opus Dei held official diskeys from the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace,” he said. “We were told that it was a security matter in Arafat-kaffiyeh. We were told that it was not our business. We were told not to interfere.”

  The Grand Inquisitor felt his face flushing with barely subdued rage. “Security matters on Mars or anywhere else in the Pax are the responsibility of the Holy Office!” he said flatly. “The Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace has no charter here! Where are the representatives of the Commission? Why aren’t they here for this meeting?”

  Governor Clare Palo raised a thin hand and pointed at the flat photo in the Grand Inquisitor’s hand. “There, Your Excellency. There are the Commission authorities.”

  Cardinal Mustafa looked down at the glossy photograph. Forms of white-clad bodies could be seen in the dusty red streets of Arafat-kaffiyeh. Even through the grain of the images, it was obvious that the bodies were mauled into grotesque forms and swollen from decomposition. The Grand Inquisitor spoke softly, fighting the urge to scream and then order these imbeciles tortured and shot. “Why,” he asked softly, “haven’t these people been resurrected and questioned?”

  Archbishop Robeson actually attempted a smile. “You will see that tomorrow, Your Excellency. It will be abundantly clear tomorrow.”

  EMVs were useless on Mars. They used armored Pax Security skimmers for their flight to Tharsis Plateau. Torchships and the Jibril monitored their progress. Scorpion fighters flew space/air combat patrol. Two hundred klicks from the plateau, five squads of Marines dropped from the skimmers and flew ahead at low altitude, raking the area with acoustic probes and setting up firing positions.

  Nothing but the shifting sand moved in Arafat-kaffiyeh.

  The Holy Office security skimmers set down first, their landing legs settling into sand where grass had once grown on the oval city commons, the outer ships establishing and linking a class-six containment field that made the buildings around the plaza seem to shimmer in heat haze. The Marines had dropped into a defensive circle with the commons as their locus. Now the Governor’s Pax and Home Guard troops moved out to establish a second perimeter in the streets and alleys around the plaza. The Archbishop’s eight Swiss Guardsmen secured the circle just outside the containment field. Finally the Grand Inquisitor’s Holy Office security force exploded down the skimmer ramps and established the inner perimeter of kneeling figures in black combat armor.

  “Clear,” came the leading Marine sergeant’s voice on the tactical channel.

  “Nothing moving or alive within a kilometer of Site One,” rasped the lieutenant of the Home Guard. “Bodies in the street.”

  “Clear here,” said the captain of the Swiss Guard.

  “Confirm nothing moving in Arafat-kaffiyeh except your people,” came the voice of the captain of the Jibril.

  “Affirmative,” said Holy Office Security Commander Browning.

  Feeling foolish and disgruntled, the Grand Inquisitor swept down the ramp and across the sandy commons. His mood was not lifted by the silly osmosis mask he had to wear, its circular boostirator slung over his shoulder like a loose medallion.

  Father Farrell, Archbishop Robeson, Governor Palo, and a host of functionaries ran to keep up as Cardinal Mustafa strode by the kneeling security forms and, with an imperious wave of his hand, ordered a portal cut in the containment field. He passed through over the protests of Commander Browning and the other forms in black armor who were scuttling to catch up.

  “Where is the first of …” began the Grand Inquisitor as he bounced down the narrow alley opposite the commons. He still was not used to the light gravity here.

  “Right around this corner …” panted the Archbishop.

  “We should really wait for the outer fields to be …” said Governor Palo.

  “Here,” said Father Farrell, pointing down the street onto which they had emerged.

  The group of fifteen stopped so quickly that those aides and security people in the rear had to catch themselves before bumping into the VIPs in front.

  “Dear Lord,” whispered Archbishop Robeson and crossed himself. Through the clear osmosis mask, his face was visibly white.

  “Christ!” muttered Governor Clare Palo. “I’ve seen the holos and photos for two weeks, but … Christ.”

 
; “Ann,” said Father Farrell, taking a step closer to the first body.

  The Grand Inquisitor joined him. He went to one knee in the red sand. The contorted form in the dirt looked as if someone had fashioned an abstract sculpture out of flesh, bone, and gristle. It would not have been recognizably human had it not been for the teeth gleaming in the wide-stretched mouth and one hand lying nearby in the shifting Martian dust.

  After a moment the Grand Inquisitor said, “Did scavengers do some or most of this? Carrion birds, perhaps? Rats?”

  “Negative,” said Major Piet, the Governor’s Pax Fleet groundforce commander. “No birds on the Tharsis Plateau since the atmosphere started thinning two centuries ago. No rats … or any other moving thing … have been picked up by motion detectors since this happened.”

  “The Shrike did this,” said the Grand Inquisitor. He did not sound convinced. He stood and moved to the second body. It might have been a woman. It looked as if it had been turned inside out and shredded. “And this?”

  “We think so,” said Governor Palo. “The militia that found all this brought out the security camera which had that thirty-eight-second holo we’ve shown you.”

  “That looked like a dozen Shrikes killing a dozen people,” said Father Farrell. “It was hazy.”

  “There was a sandstorm,” said Major Piet. “And there was only one Shrike … we’ve studied the individual images. It simply moved through the crowd so quickly that it appeared to be multiple creatures.”

  “Moved through the crowd,” murmured the Grand Inquisitor. He stepped over a third body that might have been a child or small female. “Doing this.”

  “Doing this,” said Governor Palo. She glanced at Archbishop Robeson, who had moved to a wall for support.

  There were twenty to thirty bodies in this section of the street.

  Father Farrell knelt and ran his gloved hand across the chest and into the chest cavity of the first cadaver. The flesh was frozen, as was the blood that fell in a black icefall. “And there was no sign of the cruciform?” he said softly.

  Governor Palo shook her head. “Not in the two bodies the militia returned for resurrection. No sign of the cruciform whatsoever. If there had been any remnant at all … even a millimeter of node or bit of fiber in the brain stem or …”

  “We know that,” snapped the Grand Inquisitor, ending the explanation.

  “Very strange,” said Bishop Erdle, the Holy Office’s expert on resurrection technique. “To my knowledge there has never been an instance where the body was left so intact where we could not find remnant of the cruciform in the corpse. Governor Palo is correct, of course. Even the slightest bit of cruciform is all that is necessary for the Sacrament of Resurrection.”

  The Grand Inquisitor stopped to inspect a body that had been thrown against an iron railing hard enough to impale it at a dozen points. “It looks as if the Shrike was after the cruciforms. It tore every shred of them out of the bodies.”

  “Not possible,” said Bishop Erdle. “Simply not possible. There are over five hundred meters of microfiber in the cellular node extensions of …”

  “Not possible,” agreed the Grand Inquisitor. “But when we ship these bodies back, I’ll wager that none are recoverable. The Shrike may have torn their hearts and lungs and throats out, but it was after their cruciforms.”

  Security Commander Browning came around the corner with five troopers in black armor. “Your Excellency,” he said on the tactical channel only the Grand Inquisitor could hear. “The worst is a block over … this way.”

  The entourage followed the man in black armor, but slowly, reluctantly.

  They catalogued 362 bodies. Many were in the streets, but the majority were in buildings in the city or inside the sheds, hangars, and spacecraft at the new spaceport on the edge of Arafat-kaffiyeh. Holos were taken and the Holy Office forensic teams took over, recording each site before taking the bodies back to the Pax base morgue outside of St. Malachy. It was determined that all of the bodies were offworlders—i.e., there were no local Palestinians or native Martians among them.

  The spaceport intrigued the Pax Fleet experts the most.

  “Eight dropships serving the field itself,” said Major Piet. “That’s a serious number. St. Malachy’s spaceport uses only two.” He glanced up at the purple Martian sky. “Assuming that the ships they were shuttling to and from had their own drop-ships—at least two each, if they were freighters—then we’re talking about serious logistics here.”

  The Grand Inquisitor looked at Mars’s archbishop, but Robeson merely held his hands up. “We knew nothing of these operations,” said the little man. “As I explained before, it was an Opus Dei project.”

  “Well,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “as far as we can tell, all of the Opus Dei personnel are dead … truly, irrecoverably dead … so now it’s a responsibility of the Holy Office. You don’t have any idea what they built this port for? Heavy metals, perhaps? Some sort of mineral mining operation?”

  Governor Palo shook her head. “This world has been mined for over a thousand years. There are no heavy metals left worth shipping. No minerals worth a local salvage operation’s time, much less Opus Dei’s.”

  Major Piet slipped his visor up and rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Something was being shipped in quantity here, Your Excellencies. Eight dropships … a sophisticated grid system … automated security.”

  “If the Shrike … or whatever it was … had not destroyed the computers and record systems …” began Commander Browning.

  Major Piet shook his head. “It wasn’t the Shrike. The computers had already been destroyed by shaped charges and tailored DNA viruses.” He looked around the empty administrative building. Red sand had already found its way in through portals and seams. “It’s my guess that these people destroyed their own records before the Shrike arrived. I think they were on the verge of clearing out. That’s why the dropships were all in pre-launch mode … their onboard computers set to go.”

  Father Farrell nodded. “But all we have are the orbital coordinates. No records of who or what they were going to rendezvous with there.”

  Major Piet looked out the window at the dust storm blowing there. “There are twenty groundcar buses in that lot,” he murmured as if speaking to himself. “Each one can transport up to eighty people. A bit of logistical overkill if the Opus Dei contingent here amounted to just the three hundred sixty-some people whose bodies we’ve found.”

  Governor Palo frowned and crossed her arms. “We don’t know how many Opus Dei personnel were here, Major. As you pointed out, the records were destroyed. Perhaps there were thousands …”

  Commander Browning stepped into the circle of VIPs. “Begging your pardon, Governor, but the barracks within the field perimeter here could house about four hundred people. I think that the Major may be right … all of the Opus Dei personnel may be accounted for in the bodies we’ve found.”

  “You can’t be sure of that, Commander,” said Governor Palo, her voice sounding displeased.

  “No, ma’am.”

  She gestured toward the dust storm that had all but obscured the parked buses. “And we have evidence that they needed transport for many more people.”

  “Perhaps they were an advance contingent,” said Commander Browning. “Preparing the way for a much larger population.”

  “Then why destroy the records and limited AIs?” said Major Piet. “Why does it look like they were preparing to move out for good?”

  The Grand Inquisitor stepped into the circle and held up one black-gloved hand. “We’ll end the speculation for now. The Holy Office will begin taking depositions and carrying out interrogations tomorrow. Governor, may we use your office at the palace?”

  “Of course, Your Excellency.” Palo lowered her face, either to show deference or to hide her eyes, or both.

  “Very good,” said the Grand Inquisitor. “Commander, Major, call the skimmers. We’ll leave the forensic teams and the morgue workers out
here.” Cardinal Mustafa peered out at the worsening storm. Its howl could be heard through the ten layers of window plastic now. “What’s the local word for this dust storm?”

  “Simoom,” said Governor Palo. “The storms used to cover the entire world. They’re growing in intensity every Martian year.”

  “The locals say that it’s the old Martian gods,” whispered Archbishop Robeson. “They’re reclaiming their own.”

  Less than fourteen light-years out from Old Earth System, above the world called Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, a starship that had once been named Raphael but which now held no name, finished its braking run into geosynchronous orbit. The four living things on board floated in zero-g, their gazes fixed on the image of the desert world on the plotboard.

  “How reliable is our reading on pertubations in the farcaster field these days?” said the female called Scylla.

  “More reliable than most other clues,” said her seeming twin, Rhadamanth Nemes. “We’ll check it out.”

  “Shall we start with one of the Pax bases?” said the male named Gyges.

  “The largest,” said Nemes.

  “That would be Pax Base Bombasino,” said Briareus, checking the code on the plotboard. “Northern hemisphere. Along the central canal route. Population of …”

  “It doesn’t matter what the population is,” interrupted Rhadamanth Nemes. “It just matters whether the child Aenea and the android and that bastard Endymion have come that way.”

  “Dropship’s prepped,” said Scylla.

  They screeched into atmosphere, extended wings just as they crossed the terminator, used the Vatican diskey code via transponder to clear the way for their landing, and set down amid Scorpions, troopship skimmers, and armored EMVs. A flustered lieutenant greeted them and escorted them to the Base Commander’s office.

  “You say that you’re members of the Noble Guard?” said Commander Solznykov, studying their faces and the readout on the diskey interphase at the same time.

  “We have said it,” Rhadamanth Nemes replied tonelessly. “Our papers, order chips, and diskey have said it. How many repetitions do you require, Commander?”