by Dan Simmons
Cardinal Lourdusamy’s jowls vibrated as the great head moved back and forth. “It is not on Hyperion that the demon has reappeared, Domenico.”
Mustafa registered appropriate shock. I know through the interrogation of Corporal Kee that the monster appeared on God’s Grove four standard years ago, apparently in an attempt to foil the murder of the child named Aenea. To get that, I had to arrange for the false death and kidnapping of Kee after his reassignment to Pax Fleet. Do they know? And why tell me now? The Grand Inquisitor was still waiting for the metaphorical blade to drop on his very real neck.
“Eight standard days ago,” continued Lourdusamy, “a monstrous creature which could only be the Shrike appeared on Mars. The death toll … true death, for the creature takes the cruciforms from its victims’ bodies … has been very high.”
“Mars,” Cardinal Mustafa repeated stupidly. He looked to the Holy Father for an explanation, guidance, even the condemnation he feared, but the Pontiff was examining buds on a rosebush. Behind him, Father Farrell took a step forward but the Grand inquisitor waved his aide back. “Mars?” he said again. He had not felt so stupid and ill-informed for decades, perhaps centuries.
Lourdusamy smiled. “Yes … one of the terraformed worlds in Old Earth’s system. FORCE used to have its command center there before the Fall, but the world is of little use or importance in the Pax. Too far away. There is no reason for you to know about it, Domenico.”
“I know where Mars is,” said the Grand Inquisitor, his tone more sharp than he had meant it to be. “I simply do not understand how the Shrike creature could be there.” And what in Dante’s hell does it have to do with me? he mentally added.
Lourdusamy was nodding. “It is true that to our knowledge, the Shrike demon has never left the world of Hyperion before this. But there can be no doubt. This terror on Mars …the Governor has declared a state of emergency and Archbishop Robeson has personally petitioned His Holiness for help.”
The Grand Inquisitor rubbed his cheek and nodded in concern. “Pax Fleet …”
“Elements of the Fleet already positioned in the Old Neighborhood have been dispatched, of course,” said the Secretary of State. The Supreme Pontiff was bent over a bonsai tree, his hand over the tiny, twisted branch as if he were bestowing a blessing. He seemed not to be listening.
“The ships will have a complement of Marines and Swiss Guard,” continued Lourdusamy. “We hope that they will subdue and/or destroy the creature …”
My mother taught me never to trust anyone who uses the expression “and/or,” thought Mustafa. “Of course,” he said aloud. “I shall say a Mass with that prayer in mind.”
Lourdusamy smiled. The Holy Father glanced up from where he was bent over the stunted little tree.
“Precisely,” said Lourdusamy, and in those three syllables, Mustafa heard the sound of the overfed cat pouncing on the hapless mouse of the Grand Inquisitor. “We agree that it is more a matter of faith than of the Fleet. The Shrike—as it was revealed to the Holy Father more than two centuries ago—is truly a demon, perhaps the principal agent of the Dark One.”
Mustafa could only nod.
“We feel that only the Holy Office is properly trained, equipped, and prepared—both spiritually and materially—to investigate this appearance properly … and to save the hapless men, women, and children of Mars.”
Well fuck me, thought John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa, Grand Inquisitor and Prefect for the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, otherwise known as the Supreme Congregation for the Holy Inquisition of Heretical Error. He automatically offered up a mental Act of Contrition for his obscenity.
“I see,” the Grand Inquisitor said aloud, not seeing at all but almost smiling at the ingenuity of his enemies. “I will immediately appoint a commission …”
“No, no, Domenico,” said His Holiness, moving close to touch the Grand Inquisitor’s arm. “You must go at once. This … materialization … of the demon threatens the entire Body of Christ.”
“Go …” said Mustafa stupidly.
“An archangel-class starship, one of our newest, has been requisitioned from Pax Fleet,” Lourdusamy said briskly. “It will have a crew of twenty-eight, but you may still bring up to twenty-one members of your own staff and security service … twenty-one and yourself, of course.”
“Of course,” said Cardinal Mustafa and he did smile. “Of course.”
“Pax Fleet is doing battle with the corporeal agents of Satan … the Ousters … even as we speak,” rumbled Lourdusamy. “But this demonic threat must be confronted—and defeated—by the sacred power of the Church itself.”
“Of course,” said the Grand inquisitor. Mars, he thought. The most distant pimple on the ass-end of the civilized universe. Three centuries ago, I could have called on the fatline, but now I will be out of touch as long as they keep me there. No intelligence. No way to direct my people. And the Shrike … if the monster is still controlled by the Core’s blasphemous Ultimate Intelligence, it may well be programmed to kill me as soon as I arrive. Brilliant. “Of course,” he said again. “Holy Father, when do I leave? If there could be a few days or weeks to set the current affairs of the Holy Office in proper …”
The Pope smiled and squeezed Mustafa’s upper arm. “The archangel is waiting to transport you and your chosen contingent within the day, Domenico. Six hours from now would be optimum, they tell us.”
“Of course,” said Cardinal Mustafa a final time. He went to one knee to kiss the papal ring.
“God go with you and protect you always,” said the Holy Father, touching the Cardinal’s bowed head as he pronounced the more formal benediction in Latin.
Kissing the ring, tasting the sour cold of stone and metal in his mouth, the Grand Inquisitor mentally smiled again at the cleverness of those whom he had thought to outsmart and out-maneuver.
FATHER CAPTAIN DE SOYA DID NOT GET A CHANCE to talk to Sergeant Gregorius until the last minutes of Raphael’s first beyond-the-Outback jump.
This first jump was a practice hop to an uncharted system twenty light-years beyond the Great Wall. Like Epsilon Eridani, the star in this system was a K-type sun; unlike the Eridani orange-dwarf, this K-type was an Arcturus-like giant.
Task Force GIDEON translated without incident, the new two-day automated resurrection crèches functioned without glitch, and the third day found the seven archangels decelerating into the giant’s system, playing tactical cat-and-mouse with the nine Hawking-class torchships that had preceded them after months of time-debt travel. The torchships had been ordered to hide within the system. The archangels’ task was to sniff them out and destroy them.
Three of the torchships were far out in the Oört cloud, floating amid the proto-comets there, their drives off, their corns silenced, their internal systems at lowest ebb. The Uriel picked them up at a distance of 0.86 light-years and launched three virtual Hawking hyperkinetics. De Soya stood with the other six captains in tactical space, the system’s sun at their belt level, the two-hundred-kilometer flame tails of seven archangel fusion drives like chest-high diamond scratches on black glass, and he watched as holos misted, formed, and dematerialized in the Oört cloud, tracking the theoretical hyperkinetic seeker missiles as they shifted out of Hawking space, sought out the dormant torchships, and registered two virtual kills and one “severe damage certain—high probability of a kill” on the tactical tote board.
This system had no planets as such, but four of the remaining torchships were found lurking in ambush within the planetary accretion disc along the plane of the ecliptic. The Remiel, the Gabriel, and the Raphael engaged at long distance and registered kills before the torchships’ sensors could register the presence of the archangel intruders.
The final two torchships were hiding in the heliosphere of the giant K-type star, shielding themselves with class-ten containment fields and venting heat via trailing monofilaments half a million kilometers long. Pax Fleet more than frowned on this sort of maneuver
during simulated engagements, but de Soya had to smile at the audacity of the two ship’s commanders: it was the sort of thing he might have done a standard decade earlier.
These final torchships came ripping out of the K-star at high boost, their fields venting heat on the visible spectrum, two blazing, white-hot proto-stars spit out from their massive parent, both ships trying to close on the task force that even now was ripping through the system at three-quarters light-speed. The closest archangel—Sariel—killed them both without diverting an erg of power from the class-thirty bussfield the archangel had to maintain a hundred klicks beyond its bow just to clear a path through the molecule-cluttered system. Such terrible velocities demanded a terrible price if the fields failed for an instant.
Then, with Admiral Aldikacti grumbling about the “probable” in the Oört cloud, the task force decelerated hard in one great arc around the K-type giant so that all of the commanders and execs could meet in tactical space to discuss the simulation before the GIDEON ships translated into Ouster space.
De Soya always found these conferences hubris-making: thirty-some men and women in Pax uniforms standing like giants—or in this case sitting like giants, since they used the plane of the ecliptic as a virtual tabletop—discussing kills and strategies and equipment failures and acquisition rates while the K-type sun burned brightly in the center of the space and the magnified ships moved in their slow, Newtonian ellipses like embers burning through black velvet.
During the three-hour conference, it was decided that the “probable kill” was unacceptable and that they should have fired a spread of at least five AI-piloted hyper-ks at such difficult targets, retrieving any unused missiles after all three kills were certain. There followed a discussion of expendables, fire-rates, and the kill/conserve/reserve equations on a mission such as this where there could be no resupply. A strategy was decided whereupon one of the archangels would enter each system thirty light-minutes ahead of the others, serving as “point” to draw all sensor and ECM queries, while another would trail half a light-hour behind, mopping up any “probables.”
After a twenty-two-hour day spent mostly at battle stations, and with all hands fighting post-resurrection emotional jags, jump coordinates for a system known to be Ouster-infested came over the tightbeam from the Uriel, the seven archangels accelerated toward their translation point, and Father Captain de Soya made the rounds to chat with his new crew and to “tuck everyone in.” He saved Sergeant Gregorius and his five Swiss Guard troopers for last.
ONCE, DURING THEIR LONG CHASE ACROSS THE SPIRAL arm after the girl-child named Aenea and after spending months together on the old Raphael, Father Captain de Soya had decided that he was tired of calling Sergeant Gregorius “Sergeant Gregorius” and called up the man’s records to discover his first name. To his surprise, de Soya discovered that the sergeant had no first name. The huge noncom had come of age on the northern continent of the swamp world of Patawpha in a warrior culture where everyone was born with eight names—seven of them “weakness names”—and where only survivors of the “seven trials” were privileged to discard the weakness names and be known by only their strength name. The ship’s AI had told the father-captain that only one warrior out of approximately three thousand attempting the “seven trials” survived and succeeded in discarding all weakness names. The computer had no information as to the nature of the trials. In addition, the records had shown, Gregorius had been the first Patawphan Scot-Maori to become a decorated Marine and then be chosen to join the elite Swiss Guard. De Soya had always meant to ask the sergeant what the “seven trials” were, but had never worked up the nerve.
This day, when de Soya kicked down the dropshaft in zero-g and passed through the irising wardroom soft spot, Sergeant Gregorius appeared so happy to see him that he looked as if he were about to give the father-captain a bear hug. Instead, the sergeant hooked his bare feet under a bar, snapped to attention, and shouted, “TEN-hut in the wardroom!” His five troopers dropped what they were doing—reading, cleaning, or field-stripping—and tried to put bulkhead under their toes. For a moment the wardroom was littered with floating ’scribers, magazines, pulse knives, impact armor, and stripped-down energy lances.
Father Captain de Soya nodded to the sergeant and inspected the five commandos—three men, two women, all terribly, terribly young. They were also lean, muscular, perfectly adapted to zero-g, and obviously honed for battle. All of them were combat veterans. Each of them had distinguished himself or herself adequately to be chosen for this mission. De Soya saw their eagerness for combat and was saddened by it.
After a few minutes of inspection, introductions, and commander-to-commando chatting, de Soya beckoned for Gregorius to follow and kicked off through the aft soft spot into the launch-tube room. When they were alone, Father Captain de Soya extended his hand. “Damned good to see you, Sergeant.”
Gregorius shook hands and grinned. The big man’s square, scarred face and short-cropped hair were the same, and his grin was as broad and bright as de Soya remembered. “Damned good t’ see you, Father Captain. And when did the priesty side o’ ya begin usin’ profanity, sir?”
“When I was promoted to commanding this ship, Sergeant,” said de Soya. “How have you been?”
“Fair, sir. Fair an’ better.”
“You saw action in the St. Anthony Incursion and the Sagittarius Salient,” said de Soya. “Were you with Corporal Kee before he died?”
Sergeant Gregorius rubbed his chin. “Negative, sir. I was at the Salient two years ago, but I never saw Kee. Heard about his transport bein’ slagged, but never saw him. Had a couple of other friends aboard it, too, sir.”
“I’m sorry,” said de Soya. The two were floating awkwardly near one of the hyper-k storage nacelles. The father-captain grabbed a holdtite and oriented himself so that he could look Gregorius in the eye. “Did you get through the interrogation all right, Sergeant?”
Gregorius shrugged. “They kept me on Pacem a few weeks, sir. Kept askin’ the same questions in different ways. Didn’t seem to believe me about what happened on God’s Grove—the woman devil, the Shrike-thingee. Eventually they seemed t’ get tired o’ askin’ me things and busted me back down to corporal and shipped me out.”
De Soya sighed. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. I had recommended you for a promotion and commendation.” He chuckled ruefully. “A lot of good that did you. We’re lucky we weren’t both excommunicated and then executed.”
“Aye, sir,” said Gregorius, glancing out the port at the shifting starfield. “They weren’t happy with us, that’s a’ sure.” He looked at de Soya. “And you, sir. I heard they took away your commission and all.”
Father Captain de Soya smiled. “Busted me back to parish priest.”
“On a dirty, desert, no-water world, I heard tell, sir. A place where piss sells for ten marks a bootful.”
“That was true,” said de Soya, still smiling. “MadredeDios. It was my homeworld.”
“Aw, shit, sir,” said Sergeant Gregorius, his huge hands clenching in embarrassment. “No disrespect meant, sir. I mean … I didn’t … I wouldn’t …”
De Soya touched the big man’s shoulder. “No disrespect taken, Sergeant. You’re right. Piss does sell there … only for fifteen marks a bootful, not ten.”
“Aye, sir,” said Gregorius, his dark skin darker with flush.
“And, Sergeant …”
“Aye, sir?”
“That will be fifteen Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers for the scatological outburst. I’m still your confessor, you know.”
“Aye, sir.”
De Soya’s implant tingled at the same instant chimes came over the ship’s communicators. “Thirty minutes until translation,” said the father-captain. “Get your chicks tucked in their crèches, Sergeant. This next jump is for real.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The sergeant kicked for the soft spot but stopped just as the circle irised open. “Father Captain?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”<
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“It’s just a feelin’, sir,” said the Swiss Guardsman, his brow furrowed. “But I’ve learned to trust my feelin’s, sir.”
“I’ve learned to trust your feelings as well, Sergeant. What is it?”
“Watch your back, sir,” said Gregorius. “I mean … nothin’ definite, sir. But watch your back.”
“Aye, aye,” said Father Captain de Soya. He waited until Gregorius was back in his wardroom and the soft spot sealed before he kicked off for the main dropshaft and his own death couch and resurrection crèche.
PACEM SYSTEM WAS CROWDED WITH MERCANTILUS traffic, Pax Fleet warships, large-array habitats such as the Torus Mercantilus, Pax military bases and listening posts, herded and terraformed asteroids such as Castel Gandolfo, low-rent orbital can cities for the millions eager to be close to humanity’s center of power but too poor to pay Pacem’s exorbitant rates, and the highest concentration of private in-system spacecraft in the known universe. Thus it was that when M. Kenzo Isozaki, CEO and Chairman of the Executive Council of the Pancapitalist League of Independent Catholic Transstellar Trade Organizations, wished to be absolutely alone, he had to commandeer a private ship and burn high-g for thirty-two hours into the outer ring of darkness far from Pacem’s star.
Even choosing a ship had been a problem. The Pax Mercantilus maintained a small fleet of expensive in-system executive shuttles, but Isozaki had to assume that despite their best attempts to debug the ships, they were all compromised. For this rendezvous, he had considered rerouting one of the Mercantilus freighters that plied the trade lanes between orbital clusters, but he did not put it past his enemies—the Vatican, the Holy Office, Pax Fleet Intelligence Services, Opus Dei, rivals within the Mercantilus, countless others—to bug every ship in the Mercantilus’s vast trade fleet.
In the end, Kenzo Isozaki had disguised himself, gone to the Torus public docks, bought an ancient asteroid hopper on the spot, and ordered his illegal comlog AI to pilot the thing out beyond the campfire zone of the ecliptic. On the trip out, his ship was challenged six times by Pax security patrols and stations, but the hopper was licensed, there were rocks where he was headed—mined and remined, to be sure, but still legitimate destinations for a desperate prospector—and he was passed on without personal interrogation.
