by Dan Simmons
Nemes could see Briareus’s contemptuous smile reflected on the Colonel’s polished visor. It was like looking at a reflection of herself with slightly stronger bone structure.
“And you allow this … Mayor … to dictate to you?” said Briareus.
Colonel Vinara raised a gauntleted hand. “The Pax recognizes the indigenous authorities until they have become … part of the Pax Protectorate.”
Scylla said, “You said that Dr. Molina left a Pax trooper as guard …”
Vinara nodded. His breathing was amplified through the morphic, amber helmet. “There is no sign of that trooper. We have attempted to establish communication since we left Bombasino.”
“Doesn’t this trooper have a trace chip surgically implanted?” said Scylla.
“No, it is woven into his impact armor.”
“And?”
“We found the armor in a well several streets over,” said Colonel Vinara.
Scylla’s voice remained level. “I presume the trooper was not in the armor.”
“No,” said the Colonel, “just the armor and helmet. There was no body in the well.”
“Pity,” said Scylla. She started to turn away but then looked back at the Pax Colonel. “Just armor, you say. No weapon?”
“No.” Vinara’s voice was gloomy. “I’ve ordered a search of the streets and we will question the citizens until someone volunteers the location of the house where the missing spacer was put under arrest by Dr. Molina. Then we will surround it and demand the surrender of all inside. I have … ah … requested the civil courts in Bombasino consider our request for a search warrant.”
Briareus said, “Good plan, Colonel. If the glaciers don’t arrive first and cover the village before the warrant is issued.”
“Glaciers?” said Colonel Vinara.
“Never mind,” said Scylla. “If it is acceptable to you, we shall help you search the adjoining streets and await proper authorization for a house-to-house search.” To Nemes, she broadcast on the internal band, Now what?
Stay with him and do just what you offered, sent Nemes. Be courteous and law-abiding. We don’t want to find Endymion or the girl with these idiots around. Gyges and I will go to fast time.
Good hunting, sent Briareus.
Gyges was already waiting at the dropship lock. Nemes said, “I’ll take the town, you move downriver to the farcaster arch and make sure that nothing gets through—going upriver or down—without your checking it out. Phase down to send a squirt message and I’ll shift periodically to check the band. If you find him or the girl, ping me.” It was possible to communicate via common band while phase-shifted, but the energy expenditure was so horribly high—above and beyond the unimaginable energy needed just for the phase-shift—that it was infinitely more economical to shift down at intervals to check the common band. Even a ping alarm would use the equivalent of this world’s entire energy budget for a year.
Gyges nodded and the two phase-shifted in unison, becoming chrome sculptures of a naked male and female. Outside the lock, the air seemed to thicken and the light deepen. Sound ceased. Movement stopped. Human figures became slightly out-of-focus statues with their wind-rippled robes stiff and frozen like the trappings on bronze sculptures.
Nemes did not understand the physics of phase shifting. She did not have to understand it in order to use it. She knew that it was neither the antientropic nor hyperentropic manipulation of time—although the future UI had both of those seemingly magical technologies at its command—nor some sort of “speeding up” that would have had sonic booms crashing and the air temperature boiling in their wake, but that phase shifting was a sort of sidestepping into the hollowed-out boundaries of space/time. “You will become—in the nicest sense—rats scurrying in the walls of the rooms of time,” had said the Core entity most responsible for her creation.
Nemes was not offended by the comparison. She knew the unimaginable amounts of energy that had to be transferred from the Core via the Void Which Binds to her or her siblings when they phase-shifted. The Elements had to respect even their own instruments to divert so much energy in their direction.
The two reflective figures jogged down the ramp and went opposite directions—Gyges south toward the farcaster, Nemes past her frozen siblings and the sculptures of Pax troopers and Spectrum citizens, into the adobe city.
It took her literally no time at all to find the house with the handcuffed Pax trooper asleep in the corner bedroom facing the canal. She rummaged through the downloaded Pax Base Bombasino files to identify the sleeping trooper—a Lusian named Gerrin Pawtz, thirty-eight standard years old, a lazy, initiative-free alcohol addict, two years away from retirement, six demotions and three sentences to brigtime in his file, assignments relegated to garrison duty and the most mundane base tasks—and then she deleted the file. The trooper was of no interest to her.
Checking once to make sure that the house was empty, Rhadamanth Nemes dropped out of phase shift and stood a moment in the bedroom. Sound and movement returned: the snoring of the handcuffed trooper, movement of pedestrians along the canal walk, a soft breeze stirring white curtains, the rumble of distant traffic, and even the samurai-armor rustles of the Pax troopers jogging through adjoining streets and alleys in their useless search.
Standing over the Pax trooper, Nemes extended her hand and first finger as if pointing at the man’s neck. A needle emerged from under her fingernail and extended the ten centimeters to the sleeping man’s neck, sliding under the skin and flesh with only the slightest speck of blood to show the intrusion. The trooper did not wake.
Nemes withdrew the needle and examined the blood within: dangerous levels of C27H45OH—Lusians frequently were at risk from high cholesterol—as well as a low platelet count suggesting the presence of incipient immune thrombocytopenic purpura, probably brought about by the trooper’s early years in hard-radiation environments on any of several garrison worlds, a blood alcohol level of 122 mg/100 ml—the trooper was drunk, although his alcoholic past probably allowed him to hide most of the effects—and—voilà!—the presence of the artificial opiate called ultramorph mixed with heightened levels of caffeine. Nemes smiled. Someone had drugged the trooper with sleep-inducing amounts of ultramorph mixed with tea or coffee—but had done so while taking care to keep the levels below a dangerous overdose.
She sniffed the air. Nemes’s ability to detect and identify distinct airborne organic molecules—that is, her sense of smell—was about three times more sensitive than a typical gas Chromatograph mass spectrometer’s: in other words, somewhere above that of the Old Earth canine called a bloodhound. The room was filled with the distinctive scents of many people. Some of the smells were old; a few were very recent. She identified the Lusian trooper’s alcoholic stink, several subtle, musky female scents, the molecular imprint of at least two children—one deeply into puberty and the other younger but afflicted with some cancer requiring chemotherapy—and two adult males, one bearing the distinct sweat impressions of the diet of this planet, the other being at once familiar and alien. Alien because the man still carried the scent of a world Nemes had never visited, familiar because it was the distinctive human smell she had filed away: Raul Endymion still carrying the scent of Old Earth with him.
Nemes walked from room to room, but there was no hint of the peculiar scent she had encountered four years earlier of the girl named Aenea, nor the antiseptic android smell of the servant called A. Bettik. Only Raul Endymion had been here. But he had been here only moments before.
Nemes followed the scent trail to the trapdoor beneath the hall flooring. Ripping the door open despite its multiple locks, she paused before descending the ladder. She squirted the information on the common band, not receiving a responding ping from Gyges, who was probably phase-shifted. It had been only ninety seconds since they had left the ship. Nemes smiled. She could ping Gyges, and he would be here before Raul Endymion and the others in the tunnel below had taken another ten heartbeats.
; But Rhadamanth Nemes would like to settle this score alone. Still smiling, she jumped into the hole and dropped eight meters to the tunnel floor below.
The tunnel was lighted. Nemes sniffed the cool air, separating the adrenaline-rich scent of Raul Endymion from the other human odors. The Hyperion-born fugitive was nervous. And he had been ill or injured—Nemes picked up the underlying smell of sweat tinged with ultramorph. Endymion had certainly been the offworlder treated by Dr. Molina and someone had used painkillers prescribed for him on the hapless Lusian trooper.
Nemes phase-shifted and began jogging down a tunnel now filled with thickened light. No matter how much of a head start Endymion and his allies had on her, she would catch them now. It would have pleased Nemes to slice the troublemaker’s head off while she was still phase-shifted—the decapitation seeming supernatural to the real-time onlookers, performed by an invisible executioner—but she needed information from Raul Endymion. She did not need him conscious, however. The simplest plan would be to pluck him away from his Spectrum Helix friends, surrounding him with the same phased field that protected Nemes, drive a needle into his brain to immobilize him, return him to the dropship, stow him in the resurrection crèche there, and then go through the charade of thanking Colonel Vinara and Commander Solznykov for their help. They could “interrogate” Raul Endymion once their ship had left orbit: Nemes would run microfibers into the man’s brain, extracting RNA and memories at will. Endymion would never regain consciousness: when she and her siblings had learned what they needed from his memories, she would terminate him and dump the body into space. The goal was to find the child named Aenea.
Suddenly the lights went out.
While I am phase-shifted thought Nemes. Impossible. Nothing could happen that quickly.
She skidded to a halt. There was no light at all in the tunnel, nothing she could amplify. She switched to infrared, scanning the passageway ahead and behind her. Empty. She opened her mouth and emitted a sonar scream, turning quickly to do the same behind her. Emptiness, the ultrasound shriek echoing back off the ends of the tunnel. She modified the field around her to blast a deep radar pulse in both directions. The tunnel was empty, but the deep radar recorded mazes of similar tunnels for kilometers in all directions. Thirty meters ahead, beyond a thick metal door, there was an underground garage with an assortment of vehicles and human forms in it.
Still suspicious, Nemes dropped out of phase shift for an instant to see how the lights could have gone out in a microsecond.
The form was directly in front of her. Nemes had less than a ten thousandth of a second to phase-shift again as four bladed fists struck her with the force of a hundred thousand pile drivers. She was driven back the length of the tunnel, through the splintering ladder, through the tunnel wall of solid rock, and deep into the stone itself.
The lights stayed out.
In the twenty standard days during which the Grand Inquisitor stayed on Mars, he learned to hate it far more than he thought he could ever hate Hell itself.
The simoom planetary dust storm blew every day he was there. Despite the fact that he and his twenty-one-person team had taken over the Governor’s Palace on the outskirts of the city of St. Malachy, and despite the fact that the palace was theoretically as hermetically sealed as a Pax spaceship, its air filtered and boosted and refiltered, its windows consisting of fifty-two layers of high-impact plastic, its entrances more air-lock seals than doors, the Martian dust got in.
When John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa took his needle shower in the morning, the dust he had accumulated in the night ran in red rivulets of mud into the shower drain. When the Grand Inquisitor’s valet helped him pull on his cassock and robes in the morning—all of the clothing fresh-cleaned during the night—there were already traces of red grit in the silken folds. As Mustafa ate breakfast—alone in the Governor’s dining room—grit ground between his molars. During the Holy Office interviews and interrogations held in the echoing great ballroom of the palace, the Grand Inquisitor could feel the dust building up in his ankle hose and collar and hair and under his perfectly manicured fingernails.
Outside, it was ridiculous. Skimmers and Scorpions were grounded. The spaceport operated only a few hours of the day, during the rare lulls in the simoom. Parked ground vehicles soon became humps and drifts of red sand, and even Pax-quality filters could not keep the red particles out of the engines and motors and solid-state modules. A few ancient crawlers and rovers and fusion rocket shuttles kept food and information flowing to and from the capital, but to all intents and purposes, the Pax government and military on Mars had come to a standstill.
It was on the fifth day of the simoom that reports came in of Palestinian attacks on Pax bases on the Tharsis Plateau. Major Piet, the Governor’s laconic groundforce commander, took a company of mixed Pax and Home Guard troopers and set out in crawlers and tracked APCs. They were ambushed a hundred klicks short of the plateau approach and only Piet and half his command returned to St. Malachy.
By the second week, reports came in of Palestinian attacks on a dozen garrison posts in both hemispheres. All contact was lost with the Hellas contingent and the south polar station radioed the Jibril that it was preparing to surrender to the attacking forces.
Governor Clare Palo—working out of a small office that had belonged to one of her aides—conferred with Archbishop Robeson and the Grand Inquisitor and released tactical fusion and plasma weapons to the beleaguered garrisons. Cardinal Mustafa agreed to the use of the Jibril as a weapons’ platform in the struggle against the Palestinians, and South Polar One was slagged from orbit. The Home Guard, Pax, Fleet Marines, Swiss Guard, and Holy Office commands concentrated on making sure that the capital of St. Malachy, its cathedral, and the Governor’s Palace were secure from attack. In the relentless dust storm, any indigenie that approached within eight klicks of the city perimeter and who was not wearing a Pax-issued transponder was lanced and the bodies recovered later. A few were Palestinian guerrillas.
“The simoom can’t last forever,” grumbled Commander Browning, the head of the Holy Office security forces.
“It can last another three to four standard months,” said Major Piet, his upper torso bulky in a burncast. “Perhaps longer.”
The work of the Holy Office Inquisition was going nowhere: the milita troopers who had first discovered the massacre in Arafat-kaffiyeh were interviewed again under Truthtell and neuroprobe, but their stories remained the same; the Holy Office forensic experts worked with the coroners at St. Malachy’s Infirmary only to confirm that none of the 362 corpses could be resurrected—the Shrike had ripped out every node and millifiber of their cruciforms; queries were sent back to Pacem via instantaneous-drive drone regarding the identities of the victims and—more importantly—the nature of the Opus Dei operations on Mars and the reasons for the advanced spaceport, but when a drone returned after fourteen local days, it brought only the IDs of the murdered and no explanation of their connection to Opus Dei or the motives for that organization’s efforts on Mars.
After fifteen days of dust storm, more reports of continued Palestinian attacks on convoys and garrisons, and long days of interrogation and evidence sifting that led nowhere, the Grand Inquisitor was happy to hear Captain Wolmak call on secure tightbeam from the Jibril to announce that there was an emergency that would require the Grand Inquisitor and his entourage to return to orbit as soon as possible.
The Jibril was one of the newest Archangel-class starships, and it looked functional and deadly to Cardinal Mustafa as their dropships closed the last few kilometers to rendezvous. The Grand Inquisitor knew little about Pax warships, but even he could see that Captain Wolmak had morphed the starship to battle readiness: the various booms and sensor arrays had been drawn in beneath the starship’s skin, the bulge of the Gideon drive had sprouted laser-reflective armor, and the various weapons’ portals were cleared for action. Behind the archangel, Mars turned—a dust-shrouded disc the color of dried blood. Cardinal Mustafa
hoped that this would be his last view of the place.
Father Farrell pointed out that all eight of the Mars System Task Force’s torchships were within five hundred klicks of the Jibril—a tight, defensive grouping by space-going standards—and the Grand Inquisitor realized that something serious was in the offing.
Mustafa’s dropship was the first to dock and Wolmak met them in the air-lock antechamber. The interior containment field gave them gravity.
“My apologies for interrupting your Inquisition, Your Excellency …” began the captain.
“Never mind that,” said Cardinal Mustafa, shaking sand from the folds of his robe. “What is so important, Captain?”
Wolmak blinked at the entourage emerging from the air lock behind the Grand Inquisitor: Father Farrell, of course, followed by Security Commander Browning, three Holy Office aides, Marine Sergeant Nell Kasner, the resurrection chaplain Bishop Erdle, and Major Piet, the former groundforce commander whom Cardinal Mustafa had liberated from Governor Palo’s service.
The Grand Inquisitor saw the captain’s hesitation. “You can speak freely, Captain. All in this group have been cleared by the Holy Office.”
Wolmak nodded. “Your Excellency, we have found the ship.”
Cardinal Mustafa must have stared his incomprehension.
“The heavy-duty freighter that must have left Mars orbit the day of the massacre, Your Excellency,” continued the captain. “We knew that their dropships had rendezvoused with some ship that day.”
“Yes,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “but we assumed that it would be long gone—translated to whatever star system it was bound for.”
“Yes, sir,” said Wolmak, “but on the off chance that the ship had never spun up to C-plus, I had the dropships do an insystem search. We found the freighter in the system’s asteroid belt.”
“Was that its destination?” asked Mustafa.
