by Dan Simmons
I try to pull her back into the pod, which is sealing itself in a vain attempt to survive.
“No, Raul, look!”
I look to where she points. Above us, then beneath us, around us, the Startree is burning and exploding, vines and branches snapping, Ouster angels consumed in flame, ten-klick worker squids imploding, treeships burning as they attempt to get under way.
“They’re killing the ergs!” shouts Aenea above the wind roar and explosions.
I pound on the pod wall, shouting commands. The door irises open for just a second, but long enough for me to pull my beloved inside.
There is no shelter here. The plasma blasts are visible through the polarized pod walls.
Aenea has pulled her pack out of the cubby and tugged it on. I grab mine, thrust my sheath knife in my belt as if it would help fight off the marauders.
“We have to get to the Yggdrasill!” cries Aenea.
We kick off to the stemway wall, but the pod will not let us out. There is a roaring through the pod hull.
“Stemway’s breached,” gasps Aenea. She still carries the comlog—I see that it is the ancient one from the Consul’s ship—and is calling up data from the Startree grid. “Bridges are out. We have to get to the treeship.”
I look through the wall. Orange blossoms of flame. The Yggdrasill is ten klicks up and inner surface-east of us. With the swaying bridges and stemways gone, it might as well be a thousand light-years away.
“Send the ship for us,” I say. “The Consul’s ship.”
Aenea shakes her head. “Het Masteen is getting the Yggdrasill under way now … no time to undock our ship. We have to be there in the next three or four minutes or … What about the Ouster skinsuits? We can fly over.”
It is my turn for headshaking. “They’re not here. When we got out of them at the landing platform, I had A. Bettik carry both of them to the treeship.”
The pod shakes wildly and Aenea turns away to look. The pod wall is a bright red, melting.
I pull, open my storage cubby, throw clothes and gear aside, and pull out the one extraneous artifact I own, tugging it out of its leather storage tube. Father Captain de Soya’s gift.
I tap the activator threads. The hawking mat stiffens and hovers in zero-g. The EM field around this section of the Star-tree is still intact.
“Come on,” I shout as the wall melts. I pull my beloved onto the hawking mat.
We are swept out through the fissure, into vacuum and madness.
28
The erg-folded magnetic fields were still standing but strangely scrambled. Instead of flying along and above the boulevard-wide swath of branch toward the Yggdrasill, the hawking mat wanted to align itself at right angles to the branch, so that our faces seemed to be pointing down as the mat rose like an elevator through shaking branches, dangling bridges, severed stemways, globes of flame, and hordes of Ousters leaping off into space to do battle and die. As long as we made progress toward the treeship, I let the hawking mat do what it wanted.
There were bubbles of containment-field atmosphere remaining, but most of the erg-fields had died along with the ergs who maintained them. Despite multiple redundancies, air was either leaking or explosively decompressing all along this region of the Startree. We had no suits. What I had remembered in the pod at the last moment was that the ancient hawking mat had its own low-level field for holding passengers or air in. It was never meant as a long-term pressurization device, but we had used it nine years ago on the unnamed jungle planet when we’d flown too high to breathe, and I hoped the systems were still working.
They still worked … at least after a fashion. As soon as we were out of the pod and rising like a parawing through the chaos, the hawking mat’s low-level field kicked in. I could almost feel the thin air leaking out, but I told myself that it should last us the length of time it would take to reach the Yggdrasill.
We almost did not reach the Yggdrasill.
It was not the first space battle I had witnessed—Aenea and I had sat on the high platform of the Temple Hanging in Air not that many standard days, eons, ago and watched the light show in cislunar space as the Pax task force had destroyed Father de Soya’s ship—but this was the first space battle I had seen where someone was trying to kill me.
Where there was air, the noise was deafening: explosions, implosions, shattering trunks and stemways, rupturing branches and dying squids, the howl of alarms and babble and squeal of comlogs and other communicators. Where there was vacuum, the silence was even more deafening: Ouster and Templar bodies being blown noiselessly into space—women and children, warriors unable to reach their weapons or battle stations, robed priests of the Muir tumbling toward the sun while wrapped in the ultimate indignity of violent death—flames with no crackling, screams with no sound, cyclones with no windrush warning.
Aenea was huddled over Siri’s ancient comlog as we rose through the maelstrom. I saw Systenj Coredwell shouting from the tiny holo display above the diskey, and then Kent Quinkent and Sian Quintana Ka’an speaking earnestly. I was too busy guiding the hawking mat to listen to their desperate conversations.
I could no longer see the fusion tails of the Pax Fleet archangels, only their lances cutting through gas clouds and debris fields, slicing the Startree like scalpels through living flesh. The great trunks and winding branches actually bled, their sap and other vital fluids mixing with the kilometers of fiber-optic vine and Ouster blood as they exploded into space or boiled away in vacuum. A ten-klick worker squid was sliced through and then sliced through again as I watched, its delicate tentacles spasming in a destructive dance as it died. Ouster angels took flight by the thousands and died by the thousands. A treeship tried to get under way and was lanced through in seconds, its rich oxygen atmosphere igniting within the containment field, its crew dying in the time it took for the energy globe to fill with swirling smoke.
“Not the Yggdrasill,” shouted Aenea.
I nodded. The dying treeship had been coming from sphere north, but the Yggdrasill should be close now, a klick or less above us along the vibrating, splintering branch.
Unless I had taken a wrong turn. Or unless it had already been destroyed. Or unless it had left without us.
“I talked to Het Masteen,” Aenea shouted. We were in a globe of escaping air now and the din was terrible. “Only about three hundred of the thousand are aboard.”
“All right,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. What thousand? No time to ask. I caught a glimpse of the deeper green of a treeship a klick or more above us and to the left—on another branch helix altogether—and swept the hawking mat in that direction. If it was not the Yggdrasill we would have to seek shelter there anyway. The Startree EM fields were failing, the hawking mat losing energy and inertia.
The EM field failed. The hawking mat surged a final time and then began tumbling in the blackness between shattered branches, a kilometer or more from the nearest burning stemways. Far below and behind us I could see the cluster of environment pods from which we had come: they were all shattered, leaking air and bodies, the podstems and connecting branches writhing in blind Newtonian response.
“That’s it,” I said, my voice low because there was no more air or noise outside our failing bubble of energy. The hawking mat had been designed seven centuries ago to seduce a teenage niece into loving an old man, not to keep its flyers alive in outer space. “We tried, kiddo.” I moved back from the flight threads and put my arm around Aenea.
“No,” said Aenea, rejecting not my hug but the death sentence. She gripped my arm so fiercely that her fingers sank into the flesh of my bicep. “No, no,” she said to herself and tapped the comlog diskey.
Het Masteen’s cowled face appeared against the tumbling starfield. “Yes,” he said. “I see you.”
The huge treeship now hung a thousand meters above us, a single great ceiling of branches and leaves green behind the flickering violet containment field, the bulk of it slowly separating from the b
urning Startree. There was a sudden, violent tug, and for a second I was sure that one of the archangel lances had found us.
“The ergs are pulling us in,” said Aenea, still grasping my arm.
“Ergs?” I said. “I thought a treeship only had one erg aboard to handle the drive and fields.”
“Usually they do,” said Aenea. “Sometimes two if it’s an extraordinary voyage … into the outer envelope of a star, for instance, or through the shock wave of a binary’s heliosphere.”
“So there are two aboard the Yggdrasill?” I said, watching the tree grow and fill the sky. Plasma explosions unfolded silently behind us.
“No,” said Aenea, “there are twenty-seven.”
The extended field pulled us in. Up rearranged itself and became down. We were lowered onto a high deck, just beneath the bridge platform near the crown of the treeship. Even before I tapped the flight threads to collapse our own puny containment field, Aenea was scooping up her comlog and backpack and was racing toward the stairway.
I rolled the hawking mat neatly, shoved it into its leather carrier, flung the tube on my back, and rushed to catch up.
Only the Templar treeship Captain Het Masteen and a few of his lieutenants were on the crown bridge, but the platforms and stairways beneath the bridge level were crowded with people I knew and did not know: Rachel, Theo, A. Bettik, Father de Soya, Sergeant Gregorius, Lhomo Don-drub, and the dozens of other familiar refugees from T’ien Shan, but there were also scores of other non-Ouster, non-Templar humans, men, women, and children whom I had not seen previously. “Refugees fleeing a hundred Pax worlds, picked up by Father Captain de Soya in the Raphael over the past few years,” said Aenea. “We’d expected hundreds more to arrive today before departure, but it’s too late now.”
I followed her up to the bridge level. Het Masteen stood at the locus of a circle of organic control diskeys—displays from the fiber-optic nerves running throughout the ship, holo displays from onboard, astern, and ahead of the treeship, a communicator nexus to put him in touch with the Templars standing duty with the ergs, in the singularity containment core, at the drive roots, and elsewhere, and the central holo-simulacrum of the treeship itself, which he could touch with his long fingers to call up interactives or change headings. The Templar looked up as Aenea walked quickly across the sacred bridge toward him. His countenance—shaped from Old Earth Asian stock—was calm beneath his cowl.
“I am pleased that you were not left behind, One Who Teaches,” he said dryly. “Where do you wish us to go?”
“Out-system,” said Aenea without hesitation.
Het Masteen nodded. “We will draw fire, of course. The Pax Fleet firepower is formidable.”
Aenea only nodded. I saw the treeship simulacrum turning slowly and looked up to see the starfield rotating above us. We had moved in-system only a few hundred kilometers and were now turning back toward the battered inner surface of the Biosphere Startree. Where our meeting and environment pods had been there was now a ragged hole in the braided branches. All across the thousands of square klicks of this region were gaping wounds and denuded branches. The Yggdrasill moved slowly through billions of tumbling leaves—those still in containment-field atmosphere burning brightly and painting the containment-field perimeter gray with ash—as the treeship returned to the sphere wall and carefully passed through.
Emerging from the far side and picking up speed as the erg-controlled fusion drive flared, we could see even more of the battle now. Space here was a myriad of winking pinpoints of light, fiery sparks appearing as defensive containment fields came alight under lance attack, countless thermonuclear and plasma explosions, the drive tails of missiles, hyperkinetic weapons, small attack craft, and archangels. The curving-away outer surface of the Startree looked like a fibrous volcano world erupting with flames and geysers of debris. Watering comets and shepherd asteroids, knocked from their perfect balancing act by Pax weapon blasts, tore through the Startree like cannon-balls through kindling. Het Masteen called up tactical holos and we stared at the image of the entire Biosphere, pocked now with ten thousand fires—many individual conflagrations as large as my homeworld of Hyperion—and a hundred thousand visible rents and tears in the sphere fabric that had taken almost a thousand years to weave. There were thousands of under-drive objects being plotted on the radar and deep distance sensors, but fewer each second as the powerful archangels picked off Ouster ramscouts, torchships, destroyers, and treeships with their lances at distances of several AUs. Millions of space-adapted Ousters threw themselves at the attackers, but they died like moths in a flamethrower.
Lhomo Dondrub strode onto the bridge. He was wearing an Ouster skinsuit and carrying a long, class-four assault weapon. “Aenea, where the goddamned hell are we going?”
“Away,” said my beloved. “We have to leave, Lhomo.”
The flyer shook his head. “No, we don’t. We have to stay and fight. We can’t just abandon our friends to these Pax carrion birds.”
“Lhomo,” said Aenea, “we can’t help the Startree. I have to leave here in order to fight the Pax.”
“Run again if you have to,” said Lhomo, his handsome features contorted by rage and frustration. He molded the silvery skinsuit cowl up over his head. “I am going to stay and fight.”
“They’ll kill you, my friend,” said Aenea. “You can’t fight archangel-class starships.”
“Watch me,” said Lhomo, the silvery suit covering everything but his face now. He shook my hand. “Good luck, Raul.”
“And to you,” I said, feeling my throat tighten and face flush as much from my own shame at fleeing as from bidding farewell to this brave man.
Aenea touched the powerful silver arm. “Lhomo, you can help the fight more if you come with us …”
Lhomo Dondrub shook his head and lowered the fluid cowl. The audio pickups sounded metallic as they spoke for him. “Good luck to you, Aenea. May God and the Buddha help you. May God and the Buddha help us all.” He stepped to the edge of the platform and looked back at Het Masteen. The Templar nodded, touched the control simulacrum near the crown of the tree, and whispered into one of the fiberthreads.
I felt gravity lessen. The outer field shimmered and shifted. Lhomo was lifted, turned, and catapulted out into space beyond our branches and air and lights. I saw his silver wings unfold, saw the light fill his wings, and watched him form up with a score of other Ouster angels carrying their puny weapons and riding sunlight toward the nearest archangel.
Others were coming onto the bridge now—Rachel, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, Father de Soya and his sergeant, A. Bettik, the Dalai Lama—but all held back, keeping a respectful distance from the busy Templar captain.
“They’ve acquired us,” said Het Masteen. “Firing.”
The containment field exploded red. I could hear the sizzling. It was as if we had fallen into the heart of a star.
Displays flickered. “Holding,” said the True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen. “Holding.”
He meant the defensive fields, but the Pax ships were also holding—maintaining their energy lance fire even as we accelerated out-system. Except for the display holos, there was no sign of our movement—no stars visible—only the crackling, hissing, boiling ovoid of destructive energy bubbling and slithering a few dozen meters above and around us.
“What is our course, please?” asked Het Masteen of Aenea.
My friend touched her forehead briefly as if tired or lost. “Just out where we can see the stars.”
“We will never reach a translation point while under this severity of attack,” said the Templar.
“I know,” said Aenea. “Just … out … where I can see the stars.”
Het Masteen looked up at the inferno above us. “We may never see the stars again.”
“We have to,” Aenea said simply.
There was a sudden flurry of shouts. I looked up at where the commotion was centered.
There were only a few small platforms above the control �
��bridge—tiny structures looking like crow’s nests on a holodrama pirate ship or like a treehouse I had seen once in the Hyperion fens—and it was on one of these that the figure stood. Crew clones were shouting and pointing. Het Masteen peered up toward the tiny platform fifteen meters above us and turned to Aenea. “The Lord of Pain rides with us.”
I could see the colors from the inferno beyond the containment field reflecting on the Shrike’s forehead and chest carapace.
“I thought it died on T’ien Shan,” I said.
Aenea looked more weary than I had ever seen her. “The thing moves through time more easily than we move through space, Raul. It may have died on T’ien Shan … it may die a thousand years hence in a battle with Colonel Kassad … it may not be capable of dying … we will never know.”
As if her use of his name had summoned him, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad came up the stairs to the bridge platform. The Colonel was in archaic Hegemony-era battle dress and was carrying the assault rifle I had once seen in the Consul’s ship armory. He stared at the Shrike like a man possessed.
“Can I get up there?” Kassad asked the Templar captain.
Still absorbed with issuing commands and monitoring displays, Het Masteen pointed to some ratlines and rope ladders that rose to the highest platform.
“No shooting on this treeship,” Het Masteen called after the Colonel. Kassad nodded and began climbing.
The rest of us turned our attention back to the simulacra displays. There were at least three archangels directing some of their fire at us from distances of less than a million klicks. They would take turns lancing us, each then directing some of its fire at other targets. But our odd refusal to die seemed to increase their anger at us and the lances would return, creeping across the four to ten light-seconds and exploding on the containment field above us. One of the ships was about to pass around the curve of the blazing Startree, but the two others were still decelerating in-system toward us with clear fields of fire.
