by Дэн Симмонс
I am coming to Pacem, to the Vatican.
Aenea.
I look up at my Secretary of State. “Can you stop the fleet, Simon Augustino?”
His jowls seem to quiver. “No, Your Holiness. They made the jump more than twenty-four hours ago. They should be almost finished with their accelerated resurrection schedule and commencing the attack within moments. We cannot outfit a drone and send it in time to recall them.”
I realize that my hand is shaking. I give the message back to Cardinal Lourdusamy.
“Call in Marusyn and the other fleet commanders,” I say. “Tell them to bring every remaining capital fighting ship back to Pacem System. Immediately.”
“But Your Holiness,” says Lourdusamy, his voice urgent, “there are so many important task force missions under way at the present…”
“Immediately!” I snap.
Lourdusamy bows. “Immediately, Your Holiness.”
As I turn away, the pain in my chest and the shortness in my breath are like warnings from God that time is short.
“Aenea! The Pope…”
“Easy, my love. I’m here.”
“I was with the Pope… Lenar Hoyt… but he’s not dead, is he?”
“You are also learning the language of the living, Raul. Incredible that your first contact with another living person’s memories is with him. I think…”
“No time, Aenea! No time. His cardinal… Lourdusamy… brought your message. The Pope tried to recall the fleet, but Lourdusamy said that it was too late… that they jumped twenty-four hours ago and would be attacking any moment. That could be here, Aenea. It could be the fleet massing at Lacaille 9352…”
“No!” Aenea’s cry brings me out of the cacophony of images and voices, memories and sense overlays, not banishing them completely, but making them recede to something not unlike loud music in an adjoining room.
Aenea has summoned a comlog unit from the cubby shelf and is calling both our ship and Navson Hamnim at the same time.
I try to focus on my friend and the moment, pulling clothes on as I do so, but like a person emerging from a vivid dream, the murmur of voices and other memories is still with me.
Father Captain Federico de Soya kneeling in prayer in his private cubby pod on the treeship Yggdrasill, only de Soya no longer thinks of himself as “Father-Captain,” but simply as “Father.” And he is unsure of even this title as he kneels and prays, prays as he has for hours this night, and longer hours in the days and nights since the cruciform was removed from his chest and body by the communion with Aenea’s blood. Father de Soya prays for forgiveness of which—he knows beyond doubt—he is unworthy. He prays for forgiveness for his years as a Pax Fleet captain, his many battles, the lives he has taken, the beautiful works of man and God he has destroyed. Father Federico de Soya kneels in the one-sixth-g silence of his cubby and asks his Lord and Savior… the God of Mercy in which he had learned to believe and which he now doubts… to forgive him, not for his own sake, but so that his thoughts and actions in the months and years to come, or hours if his life is to be that short, might better serve his Lord… I pull away from this contact with the sudden revulsion of someone realizing that he is becoming a voyeur. I understand immediately that if Aenea has known this “language of the living” for years, for her entire life, that she has almost certainly spent more energy denying it—avoiding these unsolicited entries into other people’s lives—than mastering it.
Aenea has irised an opening in the pod wall and taken the comlog out to the organic tuft of balcony there. I float through and join her, floating down to the balcony’s surface under the gentle one-tenth-g pull of the containment field there. There are several faces floating above the diskey of the comlog—Het Masteen’s, Ket Rosteen’s, and Navson Hamnim’s—but all are looking away from the visual pickups, as is Aenea.
It takes me a second to look up at what she is seeing.
Blazing streaks are cutting through the Startree past beautiful rosettes of orange and red flame. For an instant I think that it is just leafturn sunrise along the inner curve of the Biosphere, squids and angels and watering comets catching the light the way Aenea and I had hours earlier when riding the heliosphere matrix, but then I realize what I am seeing.
Pax ships cutting through the Startree in a hundred places, their fusion tails slicing away branches and trunk like cold, bright knives.
Explosions of leaves and debris hundreds of thousands of kilometers away sending earthquake tremors through the branch and pod and balcony on which we stand.
Bright confusion. Energy lances leaping through space, visible because of the billions of particles of escaping atmosphere, pulverized organic matter, burning leaves, and Ouster and Templar blood. Lances cutting and burning everything they touch.
More explosions blossom outward within a few kilometers. The containment field still holds and sound pounds us back against the pod wall that ripples like the flesh of an injured beast.
Aenea’s comlog goes off at the same instant the Startree curve above us bursts into flame and explodes into silent space. There are shouts and screams and roars audible, but I know that within seconds the containment field must fail and Aenea and I will be sucked out into space with the other tons of debris flying past us.
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 Startree 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 fac
es 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 alt—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 burning 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 Dondrub, 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—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 cannonballs 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 AU’s. Millions of space-adapted Ousters threw themselves at the attackers, but they died like moths in a flame-thrower.
