by Дэн Симмонс
I stagger back and she grins at me, sharpened teeth gleaming through the bubbling yellow bile that drips from her chin onto the already slippery boards of the platform.
She screams—steam hissing from a dying boiler—and rushes again, scythe arm slicing through the air in an invisible arc.
I leap back. Three meters to the rock wall or ledge where Aenea stands.
Nemes swings backarm, her forearm a propeller, a whizzing pendulum of steel. She can herd me anywhere she wants me now.
She wants me dead or out of the way. She wants Aenea.
I jump back again, the blade cutting through the fabric just above belt line this time. I have jumped left this time, more toward the rock wall than the ledge.
Aenea is unprotected for this second. I am no longer between her and the creature.
Nemes’s weakness. I am betting everything… Aenea… on this: she is a born predator. This close to a kill, she cannot resist finishing me.
Nemes swings to her right, keeping the option open of leaping toward Aenea, but also pursuing me toward the cliff face. The scythe swings backhand at my head for a clean decapitation.
I trip and roll farther to my left, away from Aenea. I am on the boards now, legs flailing.
Nemes straddles me, yellow fluid spattering my face and chest. She raises the scythe arm, screams, and brings the arm down.
“Ship! Land on this platform. Immediately. No discussion!”
I gasp this into the comthread pickup as I roll against Nemes’s legs. Her bladed forearm slams into the tough bonsai cedar where my head was a second before.
I am under her. The blade of her arm is sunk deep into the dense wood. For just a few seconds, she is bent over to claw at me and does not have the leverage to free the cutting edge.
A shadow falls over both of us.
The nails of her left hand slash the right side of my head—almost severing my ear, slicing along the jawbone, and just missing my jugular.
My right hand is palm up under her jaw, trying to keep those teeth from opening and closing on my neck or face. She is stronger than I am.
My life depends upon getting out from under her.
Her forearm is still stuck in the platform floor, but this serves her purpose, anchoring her to me.
The shadow deepens. Ten seconds. No more.
Nemes claws my restraining hands away and wrenches the blade from the wood, staggering to her feet. Her eyes move left to where Aenea stands unguarded.
I roll away from Nemes… and away from Aenea… leaving my friend undefended. Claw cold rock to get to my feet. My right hand is useless—some tendon slashed in these final seconds—so I raise my left hand, pull the safety line from my harness—I can only hope it is still intact—and clip the carabiner onto the piton bolt with a metallic slap, like handcuffs slamming home.
Nemes pivots to her left, dismissing me now, black marble eyes on Aenea. My friend stands her ground.
The ship lands on the platform, turning off its EM repellors as ordered, allowing its full weight to rest on the wood, crushing the pavilion of Right Meditation with a terrible splintering, the ship’s archaic fins filling most of the space, just missing Nemes and me.
The creature glances once over her shoulder at the huge black ship looming above her, obviously dismisses it, and crouches to leap at Aenea.
For a second I think that the bonsai cedar will hold… that the platform is even stronger than Aenea’s calculations and my experience suggest… but then there is one horrendous, tearing, splintering sound, and the entire top Right Meditation platform and much of the stairway down to the Right Mindfulness pavilion tear away from the mountain.
I see the people watching from the ship’s balcony thrown back into the interior of the ship as it falls.
“Ship!” I gasp into the comthread pickup. “Hover!” Then I turn my attention back to Nemes.
The platform falls away beneath her. She leaps toward Aenea. My friend does not step back.
Only the platform falling out from beneath her keeps Nemes from completing her leap. She falls just short, but her claws strike the stone ledge, throw sparks, find a hold.
The platform rips and tears away, disintegrating as it tumbles into the abyss, some parts striking the main platform below, tearing it away in places, piling debris at other places.
Nemes is dangling from the rock, scrambling with her claws and feet, just a meter below where Aenea stands.
I have eight meters of safety line. Using my workable left arm, my blood making the rope dangerously slippery, I let out several meters and kick away from the cliff where I dangle.
Nemes pulls herself up to where she can get her clawed fingers over the top of the ledge. She finds a ridge or fissure and pulls herself up and out, an expert climber overcoming an overhang. Her body is arched like a bow as her feet scramble on the stone, pulling her higher so that she can throw herself up and over the ledge at Aenea, who has not moved. I swing back away from Nemes, bouncing across the rock—feeling the slick stone against my lacerated bare sole where Nemes has torn away my boot—seeing that the rope I am depending upon has been frayed in the struggle, not knowing if it will hold for another few seconds.
I put more stress on it, swinging high away from Nemes in a pendulum arc.
Nemes pulls herself up onto Aenea’s ledge, to her knees, getting to her feet a meter from my darling.
I swing high, rocks scraping my right shoulder, thinking for one sickening second that I do not have enough speed and line, but then feeling that I do—just enough—just barely enough—Nemes swivels just as I swing up behind her, my legs opening in embrace, then closing around her, ankles crossing.
She screams and raises her scythe arm.
My groin and belly are unprotected.
Ignoring that—ignoring the unraveling line and the pain everywhere—I cling tight as gravity and momentum swing us back—she is heavier than I—for another terrible second I hang connected and she does not budge—but she has not found her balance yet—she teeters on the edge—I arc backward, trying to move my center of gravity toward my bleeding shoulders—and Nemes comes off the ledge.
I open my legs immediately, releasing her.
She swings her scythe arm, missing my belly by millimeters as I swing back and out, but the motion sends her hurtling forward, farther away from the ledge and rock wall, out over the hole where the platform had been. I scrape out and back along the cliff wall, trying to arrest my momentum. The safety line breaks.
I spread-eagle across the rockface, begin sliding down. My right hand is useless. My left fingers find a narrow hold… lose it… I am sliding faster… my left foot finds a ledge a centimeter wide. That and friction hold me against the rock long enough for me to look over my left shoulder.
Nemes is twisting as she falls, trying to change her trajectory enough to sink claws or scythe into the remaining edges of the lowest platform.
She misses by four or five centimeters.
A hundred meters farther down, she strikes a rock outcropping and is propelled farther out above the clouds. Steps, posts, beams, and platform pillars are falling into cloud a kilometer below her.
Nemes screams—a shattered calliope scream of pure rage and frustration—and the echo bounces from rock to rock around me.
I can no longer hold on. I’ve lost too much blood and had too many muscles torn away. I feel the rock sliding away under my chest, cheek, palm, and straining left foot.
I look to my left to say goodbye to Aenea, if only with a gaze.
Her arm catches me as I begin to slide away. She has free-climbed out above me along the sheer face as I watched Nemes fall.
My heart pounds with the terror that my weight will pull both of us off. I feel myself slipping… feel Aenea’s strong hands slipping… I am covered in blood. She does not let go. “Raul,” she says and her voice is shaking, but with emotion, not fatigue or terror. With her foot on the ledge the only thing holding us against the cliff, she releases her
left hand, sweeps it up, and clamps her safety line on to my dangling carabiner still attached to the piton.
We both slide off and away, scraping skin.
Aenea instantly hugs me with both arms, wraps both legs around me. It is a repeat of my tight embrace of Nemes, but fueled by love and the passion to survive this time, not hate and the urge to destroy. We fall eight meters to the end of her safety line. I think that my extra weight will pull the piton out or snap the line. We rebound, bounce three times, and hang above nothing. The piton holds. The safety line holds. Aenea’s grip holds. “Raul,” she says again. “My God, my God.” I think that she is patting my head, but realize that she is trying to pull my torn scalp back into place, trying to keep my torn ear from coming off.
“It’s all right,” I try to say, but find that my lips are bleeding and swollen. I can’t enunciate the words I need to say to the ship.
Aenea understands. She leans forward and whispers into the comthread pickup on my cowl. “Ship—hover and pick us up. Quickly.”
The shadow descends, moving in as if to crush us. The crowd is on the balcony again, eyes wide, as the giant ship floats to within three meters—gray cliffs on either side of us now—and extrudes a plank from the balcony. Friendly hands pull us in to safety.
Aenea does not release her grip with arms or legs until we are carried in off the balcony, into the carpeted interior, away from the drop.
I dimly hear the ship’s voice. “There are warships hurrying in-system toward us. Another is just above the atmosphere ten thousand kilometers to the west and closing…”
“Get us out of here,” orders Aenea.
“Straight up and out. I’ll give you the in-system coordinates in a minute. Go!” I feel dizzy and close my eyes to the sound of the fusion engines roaring. I have a faint impression of Aenea kissing me, holding me, kissing my eyelids and bloody forehead and cheek. My friend is crying.
“Rachel,” comes Aenea’s voice from a distance, “can you diagnose him?”
Fingers other than my beloved’s touch me briefly. There are stabs of pain, but these are increasingly remote. A coldness is descending.
I try to open my eyes but find both of them sealed shut by blood or swelling or both.
“What looks worse is the least threatening,” I hear Rachel say in her soft but no-nonsense voice. “The scalp wound, ear, broken leg, and so forth. But I think that there are internal injuries… not just the ribs, but internal bleeding. And the claw wounds on his back go to the spinal cord.”
Aenea is still crying, but her tone is still in command. “Some of you… Lhomo… A. Bettik… help me get him to the doc-in-the-box.”
“I’m sorry,” comes the ship’s voice, just at the edge of my consciousness, “but all three receptacles in the autosurgeon are in use. Sergeant Gregorius collapsed from his internal injuries and was brought to the third niche. All three patients are currently on full life support.”
“Damn,” I hear Aenea say under her breath. “Raul? My dear, can you hear me?”
I start to reply, to say that I’m fine, don’t worry about me, but all I hear from my own swollen lips and dislocated jaw is a garbled moan.
“Raul,” continues Aenea, “we’ve got to get away from these Pax ships. We’re going to carry you down to one of the cryogenic fugue cubbies, my dear. We’re going to let you sleep awhile until there’s a slot free in the doc-in-the-box. Can you hear me, Raul?”
I decide against speaking and manage to nod.
I feel something loose hanging down on my forehead, like a wet, displaced cap. My scalp.
“All right,” says Aenea. She leans close and whispers in my remaining ear. “I love you, my dear friend. You’re going to be all right. I know that.”
Hands lift me, carry me, eventually lay me on something hard and cool. The pain rages, but it is a distant thing and does not concern me.
Before they slide the lid closed on the cryogenic fugue cubby, I can distinctly hear the ship’s voice saying calmly, “Four Pax warships hailing us. They say that if we do not cut power in ten minutes, they will destroy us.
May I point out that we are at least eleven hours from any translation point? And all four Pax warships are within firing distance.”
I hear Aenea’s tired voice. “Continue on this heading toward the coordinates I gave you, Ship. No reply to Pax warships.”
I try to smile. We have done this before—trying to outrun Pax ships against great odds. But there is one thing that I am learning that I would love to explain to Aenea, if my mouth worked and if my mind would clear a bit—it’s just that however long one beats those odds, they catch up to you eventually. I consider this a minor revelation, overdue satori.
But now the cold is creeping over me, into me, through me—chilling my heart and mind and bones and belly. I can only hope that it is the cryogenic fugue coils cycling faster than I remember from my last trip. If it is death, then… well, it’s death. But I want to see Aenea again.
This is my last thought.
24
Falling! Heart pounding wildly, I awoke in what seemed to be a different universe.
I was floating, not falling. At first I thought that I was in an ocean, a salt ocean with positive buoyancy, floating like a fetus in a sepia-tinged salt sea, but then I realized that there was no gravity at all, no waves or currents, and that the medium was not water but thick sepia light. The ship? No, I was in a large, empty, darkened but light-circled space—an empty ovoid some fifteen meters or more across, with parchment walls through which I could see both the filtered light of a blazing sun and something more complicated, a vast organic structure curving away on all sides. I weakly moved my hands from their floating position to touch my face, head, body, and arms…
I was floating, tethered by only the lightest harness straps to some sort of sticktite strip on the curved inner wall. I was barefoot and wearing only a soft cotton tunic that I did not recognize—pajamas? hospital gown? My face was tender and I could feel new ridges that might be scars. My hair was gone, the flesh above my skull was raw and definitely scarred, and my ear was there but very tender. My arms had several faint scars that I could see in the dim light. I pulled up my trouser leg and looked at what had been a badly broken lower leg. Healed and firm. I felt my ribs—tender but intact. I had made it to the doc-in-the-box after all. I must have spoken aloud, for a dark figure floating nearby said, “Eventually you did, Raul Endymion. But some of the surgery was done the old-fashioned way… and by me.” I started—floating up against the sticktite strips. It had not been Aenea’s voice.
The dark form floated closer and I recognized the shape, the hair, and—finally—the voice. “Rachel,” I said. My tongue was dry, my lips cracked. I croaked the word rather than spoke it.
Rachel came closer and offered me a squeeze bottle. The first few drops came out as tumbling spheres—most of which splashed me on the face—but I soon got the knack of it and squeezed drops into my open mouth. The water tasted cool and wonderful.
“You’ve been getting liquids and sustenance via IV for two weeks,” said Rachel, “but it’s better if you drink directly.”
“Two weeks!” I said. I looked around. “Aenea? Is she… are they…”
“Everyone’s all right,” said Rachel.
“Aenea’s busy. She’s spent much of the last couple of weeks in here with you… watching over you… but when she had to go out with Minmun and the others, she had me stay with you.”
“Minmun?” I said. I peered through the translucent wall. One bright star—smaller than Hyperion’s sun. The incredible geometries of the structure spreading away, curving out, from this ovoid room.
“Where am I?” I said. “How did we get here?”
Rachel chuckled. “I’ll answer the second question first, let you see the answer to the first yourself in a few minutes. Aenea had the ship jump to this place. Father Captain de Soya, his Sergeant Gregorius, and the officer, Carel Shan, knew the coordinates for this star syste
m. They were all unconscious, but the other survivor—their former prisoner, Hoag Liebler—knew where this place was hiding.”
I looked through the wall again. The structure seemed huge—a light and shadow latticework stretching out in all directions from this pod. How could they hide anything this large? And who hid it? “How did we get to a translation point in time?” I croaked, taking a few more globules of water. “I thought the Pax warships were closing in.”
“They were,” said Rachel. “They did. We could never have gotten to a Hawking-drive translation point before they destroyed us. Here—you don’t need to be stuck to the wall any longer.” She ripped off the sticktite strips and I floated free. Even in zero-g, I felt very weak.
Orienting myself so that I could still see Rachel’s face in the dim sepia light, I said, “So how did we do it?”
“We didn’t translate,” said the young woman. “Aenea directed the ship to a point in space where we farcasted directly to this system.”
“Farcast? There was an active space farcast portal? Like one of the kinds that the Hegemony FORCE ships used to transit? I didn’t think that any of those had survived the Fall.”
Rachel was shaking her head. “There was no farcaster portal. Nothing. Just an arbitrary point a few hundred thousand klicks from the second moon. It was quite a chase… the Pax ships kept hailing us and threatening to fire. Finally they did… lance beams leaping toward us from a dozen sources—we wouldn’t even have been a debris field, just gas on a widening trajectory—but then we reached the point Aenea had pointed us toward and suddenly we were… here.”
I did not say Where is here? again, but I floated to the curved wall and tried to peer through it.
The wall felt warm, spongy, organic, and it was filtering most of the sunlight. The resulting interior light was soft and beautiful, but it made it difficult to see out—just the one blazing star was visible and the hint of that incredible geometric structure beyond our pod.
