by Дэн Симмонс
I glanced up at her again. “Why are you here? Where’s A. Bettik?”
“We rendezvoused above the clouds, didn’t see you, and I came down to find you,” Aenea said simply, her comthreaded voice soft in my ear.
I felt a surge of nausea—more from the thought of her risking everything to do that than from the violent aerobatics of a moment earlier. “I’m all right,” I said gruffly. “Just had to get the feel of the ridge lift.”
“Yeah,” said Aenea. “It’s tricky. Why don’t you follow me up?”
I did so, not allowing my pride to get in the way of survival. It was difficult to keep her yellow wing in sight with the shifting fog, but easier than flying blind near this cliff. She seemed to sense exactly where the rock wall was, cutting our circle within five meters of it—catching the strong center of the thermals there—but never coming too close or swinging too wide.
Within minutes we came out of the clouds. I admit that the experience took my breath away—first a slow brightening, then a rush of sunlight, then rising above the cloud level like a swimmer emerging from a white sea, then squinting into the bright light within the blinding freedom of blue sky and a seemingly infinite view on all sides. Only the highest peaks and ridgelines were visible above the ocean of clouds: T’ai Shan gleaming cold and icy white so far to our east, Heng Shan about equidistant to the north, our ridgeline from Jo-kung rising like a razor’s edge just above the tides of cloud running back to the west, K’un Lun Ridge a distant wall running northwest to southeast, and far, far away near the edge of the world, the brilliant summits of Chomo Lori, Mt. Parnassus, Kangchengjunga, Mt. Koya, Mt. Kalais, and others I could not identify from this angle. There was a glimmer of sunlight on something tall beyond distant Phari Ridge, and I thought this might be the Potala or the lesser Shivling. I quit gawking and turned my attention back to our attempt to gain altitude. A. Bettik circled close by and gave me a thumbs-up. I returned the signal and looked up to see Lhomo gesturing fifty meters above us: Close up. Keep your circles tight. Follow me. We did that, Aenea easily climbing to her wingman position behind Lhomo, A. Bettik’s blue kite circling across the climb circle from her, and me bringing up the rear fifteen meters below and fifty meters across the circle from the android.
Lhomo seemed to know exactly where the thermals were—sometimes we circled farther back west, caught the lift, and opened our circles to move east again. Sometimes we seemed to circle without gaining altitude, but then I would look north to Heng Shan and sense that we had covered another several hundred meters upward. Slowly we climbed and slowly we circled east, although T’ai Shan must still have been eighty or ninety klicks away. It grew colder and harder to breathe.
I sealed the last bit of osmosis mask and inhaled pure O to the 2nd power as we climbed. The skinsuit tightened around me, acting as a pressure suit and thermsuit all in one.
I could see Lhomo shivering in his zygoat chuba and heavy mittens. There was ice on A. Bettik’s bare forearm. And still we circled and rose. The sky darkened and the view grew more unbelievable—distant Nanda Devi in the southwest, Helgafell in the even more distant southeast, and Harney Peak far beyond the Shivling all coming into sight above the curve of the planet. Finally Lhomo had had enough. A moment earlier I had unsealed the clear osmosis mask on my hood to see how thick the air was, tried to inhale what felt like hard vacuum, and quickly resealed the membrane. I could not imagine how Lhomo managed to breathe, think, and function at this altitude. Now he signaled us to keep circling higher on the thermal he had been working, gave us the ancient “good luck” sign of the circled thumb and forefinger, and then spilled the thin air out of his delta kite to drop away like a hurtling Thomas hawk. Within seconds, the red delta was several thousand meters below us and swooping toward the ridgeline to the west.
We continued circling and climbing, occasionally losing the lift for a moment, but then finding it again.
We were being blown eastward by the lower edges of the jet stream, but we followed Lhomo’s final advice and resisted the temptation to turn toward our destination; we did not have enough altitude or tailwind yet to make the eighty-kilometer voyage. Encountering the jet stream was like suddenly entering a whitewater rapids in a kayak. Aenea’s kite found the edge of it first, and I watched the yellow fabric vibrate as if in a powerful gale, then the aluminum super-structure flex wildly. Then A. Bettik and I were into it and it was everything we could do to hold ourselves horizontal in the swinging harness behind the control bar and continue circling for altitude.
“It’s hard,” came Aenea’s voice in my ear. “It wants to tear loose and head east.”
“We can’t,” I gasped, pulling the parawing into the headwind again and being thrown higher in one great vertical lift ride.
“I know,” came Aenea’s strained voice. I was a hundred meters away and below her now, but I could see her small form wrestling with the control bar, her legs straight, her small feet pointed backward like a cliff diver’s.
I peered around. The brilliant sun was haloed by ice crystals. The ridgelines were almost invisible so far below, the summits of the highest peaks now klicks beneath us. “How is A. Bettik doing?” asked Aenea. I twisted and strained to see. The android was circling above me. His eyes appeared to be closed, but I could see him making adjustments to the control bar. His blue flesh gleamed with frost.
“All right, I think,” I said. “Aenea?”
“Yes?”
“Is there any chance of the Pax at Shivling or in orbit picking up our comthread broadcasts?”
The com unit-diskey journal was in my pocket, but we had decided never to use it until it was time to call the ship. It would be ironic if we were captured or killed because of using these skinsuit communicators.
“No chance,” gasped Aenea. Even with the osmosis masks and the rebreather matrix woven into the skinsuits, the air was thin and cold. “The comthreads are very short range. Half a klick at most.”
“Then stay close,” I said and concentrated on gaining a few hundred more meters before the almost silent hurricane that was buffeting me sent the kite screaming off to the east.
Another few minutes and we could no longer resist the powerful current in this river of air.
The thermal did not lessen, it just seemed to die away completely, and then we were at the mercy of the jet stream.
“Let’s go!” shouted Aenea, forgetting that her slightest whisper was audible in my hearpatch.
I could see A. Bettik open his eyes and give me a thumbs-up. At the same instant, my own parawing peeled off the thermal and was swept away to the east. Even with the diminished sound, we seemed to be roaring through the air at a speed so incredible that it was audible. Aenea’s yellow delta streaked east like a crossbow dart. A. Bettik’s blue followed. I wrestled with the controls, realized that I did not have the strength to change course one degree, and simply held on while we rifled east and down in the pounding, flowing river of air. T’ai Shan gleamed ahead of us, but we were losing altitude quickly now and the mountain was still very far away. Kilometers beneath us, beneath the monsoon sea of white cloudtops, the greenish phosgene clouds of the acid world ocean churned away unseen but waiting.
The Pax authorities in T’ien Shan System were confused. When Captain Wolmak in the Jibril received the strange pulsed alarm signal from the Pax Enclave at Shivling, he tried hailing Cardinal Mustafa and the others but received no answer. Within minutes he had dispatched a combat dropship with two dozen Pax Marines, including three medics.
The tightline report uplink was confusing. The conference room at their enclave gompa was a gory mess. Human blood and viscera were splashed everywhere, but the only body remaining was that of the Grand Inquisitor, who had been crippled and blinded. They DNA-typed the largest arterial spray and found it to be that of Father Farrell.
Other pools of blood reportedly belonged to Archbishop Breque and his aide, LeBlanc.
But no bodies. No cruciforms. The medics reported that Cardi
nal Mustafa was comatose, in deep shock, and near death; they stabilized him as best they could using only their fieldkits and asked for orders. Should they let the Grand Inquisitor die and be resurrected, or get him to the dropship doc-in-the-box and try to save him, knowing that it would be several days before he could regain consciousness and describe the attack? Or the medic could get him to life support, use drugs to bring the Cardinal out of the coma, and interrogate him within minutes—all the while with the patient under exquisite pain and on the verge of death.
Wolmak ordered them to wait and tightbeamed Admiral Lempriere, the task force commander. Out in the T’ien Shan System, many AU’s distant, the forty-some ships that had come through the battle with Raphael were rescuing survivors from the terminally damaged archangels and awaiting the arrival of the papal drone and the TechnoCore robot ship that would be putting the planet’s population in suspended animation. Neither had arrived. Lempriere was closer, four light-minutes away, and the tightbeam would take that long to reach him and bring him up to speed, but Wolmak felt he had no other choice. He waited while his message burned out-system. Aboard the flagship Raguel, Lempriere found himself in a ticklish situation, with only minutes to decide about Mustafa. If he allowed the Grand Inquisitor to die, it was likely that a two-day resurrection would be successful. The Cardinal would suffer little pain.
But the cause of the attack—Shrike, indigenies, the Aenea monster’s disciples, Ousters—might remain a mystery until then. Lempriere took ten seconds to decide, but it was a four-minute tightbeam delay out and back. “Have the medics stabilize him,” he tightbeamed Wolmak on the Jibril in orbit around the mountain planet. “Get him to dropship life support. Bring him out of it. Interrogate him. When we know enough, have the autosurgeon give a prognosis. If it’s faster to resurrect him, let him die.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Wolmak four minutes later, and passed word along to the Marines.
Meanwhile, the Marines were widening their search, using EMV reaction paks to search the vertical cliffsides around the Phallus of Shiva. They deep-radared Rhan Tso, the so-called Otter Lake, finding neither otters nor the bodies of the missing priests. There had been an honor guard of twelve Marines in the enclave with the Grand Inquisitor’s party—plus the pilot of the dropship—but these men and women were also missing.
Blood and viscera were found and DNA-typed—most of the missing thus accounted for—but their bodies were not found.
“Shall we spread the search to the Winter Palace?” questioned the Marine lieutenant in charge of the party. All of the Marines had specific orders not to disturb the locals—especially the Dalai Lama and his people—before the TechnoCore ship arrived to put the population asleep.
“Just a minute,” said Wolmak. He saw that Admiral Lempriere’s monitor telltale was on. The com diskey on his command web was also blinking. Jibril’s intelligence officer down in the sensor bubble. “Yes?”
“Captain, we’ve been visually monitoring the palace area. Something terrible has happened there.”
“What?” snapped Wolmak. It was not like any member of his crew to be so vague. “We missed it, sir,” said the Intel officer. She was a young woman, but smart, Lempriere knew. “We were using the optics to check the area around the Enclave. But look at this…”
Wolmak turned his head slightly to watch the holopit fill with an image, knowing that it was being tightbeamed out to the Admiral. The east side of the Winter Palace, Potala, as if seen from a few hundred meters above the Kyi Chu Bridge. The roadway of the bridge was gone, retracted. But on the steps and terraces between the palace and the bridge, and on some of the narrow ledges in the chasm between the palace and the Drepung Monastery on the east side, were scores of bodies—hundreds of bodies—bloodied and dismembered.
“Dear Lord,” said Captain Wolmak and crossed himself.
“We’ve identified the head of Regent Tokra Reting there among the body parts,” came the Intel officer’s calm voice.
“The head?” repeated Wolmak, realizing that his useless remark was being sent to the Admiral along with all the rest of this transmission. In four minutes, Admiral Lempriere would know that Wolmak made stupid comments. No matter.
“Anyone else important there?” he queried Intel.
“Negative, sir,” came the young officer’s voice. “But they’re broadcasting on various radio frequencies now.”
Wolmak raised an eyebrow. So far, the Winter Palace had maintained radio and tightbeam silence. “What are they saying?”
“It’s in Mandarin and post-Hegira Tibetan, sir,” said the officer. But then, quickly, “They’re in a panic, Captain. The Dalai Lama is missing. So is the head of the boy lama’s security team. General Surkhang Sewon Chempo, leader of the Palace Guard, is dead, sir… they’ve confirmed that his headless body was found there.”
Wolmak glanced at the clock. The tightbeam broadcast was halfway to the Admiral’s ship. “Who did this, Intel? The Shrike?”
“Don’t know, sir. As I said, the lenses and cameras were elsewhere. We’ll check the discs.”
“Do that,” said Wolmak. He could not wait any longer. He tightbeamed the Marine lieutenant. “Get to the palace, Lieutenant. See what the hell is going on. I’m sending down five more dropships, combat EMV’s, and a thopter gunship. Search for any sign of Archbishop Breque, Father Farrell, or Father LeBlanc. And the pilot and honor guard, of course.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The tightbeam link went green. The Admiral was receiving the latest transmission. Too late to wait for his command. Wolmak tightbeamed the two closest Pax ships—torchships just beyond the outer moon—and ordered them on battle alert and to drop into matching orbit with the Jibril. He might need the firepower. Wolmak had seen the Shrike’s work before, and the thought of that creature suddenly appearing on his ship made his skin go cold. He tightbeamed Captain Samuels on the torchship H.H.S. St. Bonaventure.
“Carol,” he said to the startled captain’s image, “go tactical space, please.”
Wolmak jacked in and was standing in place above the gleaming cloud planet of T’ien Shan. Samuels suddenly appeared next to him in the starry darkness.
“Carol,” said Wolmak, “something’s going on down there. I think the Shrike may be loose again. If you suddenly lose transmission data from the Jibril, or we start screaming gibberish…”
“I’ll launch three boats of Marines,” said Samuels.
“Negative,” said Wolmak. “Slag the Jibril. Immediately.”
Captain Samuels blinked. So did the floating telltale that showed that Admiral Lempriere’s flagship was tightbeaming. Wolmak jacked out of tactical. The message was short. “I’ve spun the Raguel up for a jump in-system to just beyond the critical gravity well around T’ien Shan,” said Admiral Lempriere, his thin face grave.
Wolmak opened his mouth to protest to his superior, realized that a tightbeamed protest would arrive almost three minutes after the Hawking-drive jump was executed, and shut his mouth. A jump in-system like this was sickeningly dangerous—one chance in four, at least, of a disaster that would claim all hands—but he understood the Admiral’s need to get to where the information was fresh and his commands could be executed immediately.
Dear Jesus, thought Wolmak, the Grand Inquisitor crippled, the Archbishop and the others missing, the sodding Dalai Lama’s palace looking like an anthill that’s been kicked over.
Goddamn that Shrike-thing. Where’s the papal courier probe with its command? Where’s that Core ship we were promised? How can things get worse than this?
“Captain?” It was the chief Marine medic on the expeditionary force, beaming from the dropship infirmary.
“Report.”
“Cardinal Mustafa is conscious, sir… still blind, of course… in terrible pain, but…”
“Put him on,” snapped Wolmak.
A terrible visage filled the holosphere.
Captain Wolmak sensed others on the bridge shrinking back. The Grand Inquisit
or’s face was still bloodied. His teeth were bright red as he screamed.
His eye sockets were ragged and void, except for tendrils of torn tissue and rivulets of blood.
At first, Captain Wolmak could not discern the word from the shriek. But then he realized what the Cardinal was screaming.
“Nemes! Nemes! Nemes!”
The constructs called Nemes, Scylla, and Briareus continue eastward. The three remain phase-shifted, oblivious to the staggering amounts of energy this consumes. The energy is sent from elsewhere. It is not their worry. All of their existence has led to this hour.
After the timeless interlude of slaughter under the Pargo Kaling Western Gate, Nemes leads the way up the tower and across the great metal cables holding the suspension bridge in place. The three jog through Drepung Marketplace, three motile figures moving through thickened, amber air, past human forms frozen in place. At Phari Marketplace, the thousands of shopping, browsing, laughing, arguing, jostling human statues make Nemes smile her thin-lipped smile.
She could decapitate all of them and they would have had no warning of their destruction. But she has an objective.
At the Phari Ridge cableway juncture, the three shift down—friction on the cable would be a problem otherwise.
Scylla, the northern High Way, Nemes sends on the common band. Briareus, the middle bridge. I will take the cableway.
Her siblings nod, shimmer, and are gone. The cablemaster steps forward to protest Nemes’s shoving in line ahead of scores of waiting cable passengers. It is a busy time of day.
Rhadamanth Nemes picks the cablemaster up and flings him off the platform. A dozen angry men and women shove toward her, shouting, bent on revenge.
Nemes leaps from the platform and grabs the cable. She has no pulley, no brakes, no climbing harness. She phase-shifts only the palms of her inhuman hands and hurtles down the cable toward K’un Lun Ridge. The angry mob behind her clip onto the cable and give chase—a dozen, two dozen, more. The cablemaster had been liked by many.
