The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (189 page)

“Doubtful,” says de Soya. “Ninety-nine percent of the world is empty—never settled, or gone back to sand dunes and lichen fields—with most of the people huddled around the big boxite mines near Gandhiji. But the orbital patrols would track her.”

“If she gets that far,” says Gregorius.

“Which she will not,” says Father Captain de Soya. He touches a tabletop monitor, which brings up the graphic he has prepared. “Here’s the intercept plan. We snooze until T-minus three days. Don’t worry—remember, fugue doesn’t have the hangover time of resurrection. Half an hour to shake the cobwebs out. Okay … so T-minus three days, the alarm goes off.
Raphael
’s been looping out to here—” He taps the diagram at a point two-thirds the way around the elipsoid trajectory. “We know their ship’s C-plus entry velocity, which means we
know their exit velocity … it will be about point-zero-three C, so if they’re decelerating toward Parvati at the same rate they left Hyperion …” The trajectory and timeline diagrams fill the screen. “This is hypothetical, but their translation point is not … it will be
here
.” He touches a stylus to a red point ten AUs from the planet. Their own trajectory elipsoid blinks its way to that point. “And
here
is where we intercept them, less than a minute from their translation point.”

Gregorius leans over his monitor. “We’ll all be going like a crossdamned bat out of hell, pardon the language, Father.”

De Soya smiles. “You are absolved, my son. Yes, velocities will be high, as will be our combined delta-v’s if their ship commences deceleration toward Parvati, but relative velocities for the two ships will be almost nill.”

“How close will we be, Captain?” says Kee. The man’s black hair glistens in the overhead spots.

“When they translate, we’ll be bearing down on them at a distance of six hundred klicks. Within three minutes we’ll be able to throw a rock at them.”

Kee frowns. “But what will they throw at us?”

“Unknown,” says de Soya. “But the
Raphael
is tough. I’m betting that her shields can take anything this unidentified ship throws at us.”

Lancer Rettig grunts. “Bad bet to lose.”

De Soya swivels his chair to look at the trooper. He had almost forgotten Rettig was there. “Yes,” he says, “but we have the advantage of being close. Whatever they throw at us, they’ll have a limited time to throw.”

“And what do we throw at them?” rumbles Gregorius.

De Soya pauses. “I’ve gone over
Raphael
’s armament with you,” he says at last. “If this were an Ouster warship, we could fry, bake, ram, or burn it. Or we could just make its crew die quietly.”
Raphael
carries deathbeam weaponry. At five hundred klicks, there would be no doubt of their effectiveness.

“But we’re not going to use any of that …,” continues the father-captain. “Unless we absolutely have to … to disable the ship.”

“Can you do that without danger of hurting the girl?” asks Kee.

“Not with a hundred percent assurance of not hurting her … and whoever else is aboard,” says de Soya. He pauses
again, takes a breath, and continues. “That’s why you’re going to board her.”

Gregorius grins. His teeth are very large and very white. “We grabbed space armor for all of us before leaving the
St. Thomas Akira
,” grumbles the giant happily. “But it’d be better if we practiced in it before the actual boarding.”

De Soya nods. “Three days enough?”

Gregorius is still grinning. “I’d rather have a week.”

“All right,” says the Father Captain. “We’ll wake up a week before intercept. Here’s a schematic of the unidentified ship.”

“I thought it was … unidentified,” says Kee, looking at the ship’s plans now filling the monitors. The spacecraft is a needle with fins at one end—a child’s caricature of a spaceship.

“We don’t know its specific identity or registration,” says de Soya, “but the
St. Anthony
tightbeamed video that it and the
Bonaventure
took of the ship before we translated. It’s not Ouster.”

“Not Ouster, not Pax, not Mercantilus, not a spinship or torchship …,” says Kee. “What the hell is it?”

De Soya advances the images to ship cross sections. “Private spacecraft, Hegemony era,” he says softly. “Only thirty or so ever made. At least four hundred years old, probably older.”

Corporal Kee whistles softly. Gregorius rubs his huge jaw. Even Rettig looks impressed behind his impassive mask. “I didn’t know there ever were private spacecraft,” says the corporal. “C-plus, I mean.”

“The Hegemony used to reward high-muck-a-mucks with them,” says de Soya. “Prime Minister Gladstone used to have one. So did General Horace Glennon-Height.…”

“The Hegemony didn’t reward
him
with one,” says Kee with a chuckle. Glennon-Height was the most infamous and legendary opponent the early Hegemony ever had—the Outback’s Hannibal to the WorldWeb’s Rome.

“No,” agrees Father Captain de Soya, “the general stole his from the planetary Governor of Sol Draconi Septem. Anyway, the computer says that all of these private ships were accounted for before the Fall—destroyed or reconfigured for FORCE use and then decommissioned—but the computer appears to be wrong.”

“Not the first time,” grumbles Gregorius. “Do these long-range images show any armament or defensive systems?”

“No, the original ships were civilian—no weapons—and the
St. Bonaventure
’s sensors didn’t pick up any acquisition radars or pulse readings before the Shrike killed the imaging team,” says de Soya, “but this ship’s been around for centuries, so we have to assume that it has been modified. But even if it has modern Ouster standoff weaponry,
Raphael
should be able to get in close, fast, while we hold off their lances. Once we’re alongside, they can’t use kinetic weapons. By the time we grapple, the energy weapons will be useless.”

“Hand to hand,” says Gregorius to himself. The sergeant is studying the schematic. “They’d be waiting at the air lock, so we’ll blow a new door here … and here …”

De Soya feels a prickling of alarm. “We can’t let the atmosphere out … the girl …”

Gregorius shows a shark’s grin. “Not to worry, sir. It takes less than a minute to rig a big catchbag on the hull … I brought several with the armor … and then we blow the hull section inward, scoot in …” He keys a closer image. “I’ll rig this for stimsim, so we can rehearse in three-D for a few days. I’d like another week for sim.” The black face turns toward de Soya. “We may not get any fugue beauty sleep after all, sir.”

Kee is tapping his lip with a finger. “Question, Captain.”

De Soya looks at him.

“I understand that under no circumstances can we harm the girl, but what about others that get in the way?”

De Soya sighs. He has been waiting for the question. “I’d prefer that no one else dies on this mission, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir,” says Kee, his eyes alert, “but what if they try to stop us?”

Father Captain de Soya blanks the monitor. The crowded cubby smells of oil and sweat and ozone. “My orders were that the child is not to be harmed,” he says slowly, carefully. “Nothing was said about anyone else. If there’s someone … or something … else on the ship and they try to get in the way, consider them expendable. Defend yourselves, even if you have to shoot before you’re certain you’re in danger.”

“Kill them all,” mutters Gregorius, “except the kid … and let God sort them out.”

De Soya has always hated that ancient mercenary joke.

“Do whatever you have to do without endangering the girl’s life or health,” he says.

“What if there’s only one other on board standing between
us and the girl?” says Rettig. The other three men look at the ’stroider. “But it’s the Shrike thing?” he finishes.

The cubby is silent except for the omnipresent ship sounds—expanding and contracting metal from the hull, the whisper of ventilators, the hum of equipment, the occasional burp of a thruster.

“If it’s the Shrike …,” begins Father Captain de Soya. He pauses.

“If it’s the wee Shrikee,” says Sergeant Gregorius, “I think we can bring a few surprises for it. This round may not go so easy for that spiked son of a bitch, pardon my language, Father.”

“As your priest,” says de Soya, “I will warn you again about the use of profanity. As your commanding officer, I order you to come up with as many surprises as you can to kill that spiked son of a bitch.”

They adjourn to eat their evening meal and plan their respective strategies.

Have you ever noticed how on a trip—even a very long one—it is often the first week or so that stands out most clearly in your memory? Perhaps it is the enhanced perception that voyages bring, or perhaps it is an effect of orientation response on the senses, or perhaps it is simply that even the charm of newness soon wears off, but it has been my experience that the first days in a new place, or seeing new people, often set the tone for the rest of the trip. Or in this case, the rest of my life.

We spent the first day of our magnificent adventure sleeping. The child was exhausted and—I had to admit after waking from sixteen hours of uninterrupted sleep—so was I. I can’t vouch for what A. Bettik did during this first somnambulant day of the voyage—at that point I had not learned that androids do sleep, but require only a fraction of the time we humans spend comatose—but he had set his small backpack of possessions in the engine room, rigging a hammock to sleep in, and he spent much of his time down there. I had planned to give the girl the “master bedroom” at the apex of the ship, she had showered there in the adjoining bathroom cubby that first morning, but she staked out one of the sleep couches on the fugue deck and that soon became her space. I enjoyed the size and softness of the large bed in the center of the circular top room, and—after a while—even overcame my agoraphobia and allowed the hull to go translucent
to watch the fractal light show in Hawking space outside. I never kept the hull transparent for long, however, for the pulsing geometries continued to disturb me in ways I could not describe.

The library level and the holopit level were, by unspoken agreement, common ground. The kitchen—A. Bettik called it the “galley”—was set into the wall on the holopit level, and we usually ate at the low table in the holopit or occasionally carried the food up to the round table near the navigation cubby. I admit that immediately after awakening and having “breakfast” (shiptime said that it was afternoon on Hyperion, but why abide by Hyperion time when I might never see that world again?), I headed for the library: the books were ancient, all published during the time of the Hegemony or earlier, and I was surprised to find a copy of an epic poem by Martin Silenus—
The Dying Earth
—as well as tomes by a dozen classical authors whom I had read as a boy, and often reread during my long days and nights at the fen cabin or while working on the river.

A. Bettik joined me that first day as I browsed, and pulled a small green volume from the shelves. “This might be of interest,” he said. The title was
A Traveler’s Guide to the WorldWeb: With Special Sections on the Grand Concourse and River Tethys
.

“It might be of great interest,” I said, opening the book with shaking fingers. The shaking, I believe, came from the reality that we were
going there
—actually
traveling to the former Web worlds
!

“These books are doubly interesting as artifacts,” said the android, “since they came from an age when all information was instantly available to anyone.”

I nodded. As a child, listening to Grandam’s tales of the old days, I had tried to imagine a world where everyone wore implants and could access the datasphere whenever they wanted. Of course, even then, Hyperion had no datasphere—and had never been part of the Web—but for most of the billions of members of the Hegemony, life must have been like an endless stimsim of visual, auditory, and printed information. No wonder a majority of humans had never learned to read during the old days. Literacy had been one of the first goals of the Church and its Pax administrators after interstellar society was stitched together long after the Fall.

That day, standing in the carpeted ship’s library, the polished
teak and cherrywood walls gleaming in the light, I remember taking half a dozen books from the shelves and carrying them to the table to read.

Aenea raided the library that afternoon as well—immediately pulling
The Dying Earth
from the shelves. “There were no copies in Jacktown, and Uncle Martin refused to let me read it when I visited him,” she said. “He did say that it was the only thing he’d ever written—other than the
Cantos
that he hadn’t finished—that was worth reading.”

“What’s it about?” I asked, not looking up from the Delmore Deland novel I was skimming. Both the girl and I were munching on apples as we read and talked. A. Bettik had gone back down the spiral stairs.

“The last days of Old Earth,” said Aenea. “It’s really about Martin’s pampered childhood on his family’s big estate on the North American Preserve.”

I set my book down. “What do you think happened to Old Earth?”

The girl stopped munching. “In my day everyone thought that the Big Mistake of aught-eight black hole had eaten it. That it was gone. Kaput.”

I chewed and nodded. “Most people still believe that, but the old poet’s
Cantos
insist that the TechnoCore stole Old Earth and sent it somewhere.…”

“The Hercules Cluster or the Magellanic Clouds,” said the girl, and took another bite of apple. “My mother discovered that when she and my father were investigating his murder.”

I leaned forward. “Do you mind talking about your father?”

Aenea smiled slightly. “No, why should I? I suppose I’m somewhat of a half-breed, the child of a Lusian woman and a cloned cybrid male, but that’s never bothered me.”

“You don’t look very Lusian,” I said. Residents of that high-g world were invariably short and very strong. Most were pale of skin and dark-haired; this child was small but of a height normal to one-g worlds, her brown hair was streaked with blond, and she was slender. Only her luminous brown eyes reminded me of the
Cantos
’ description of Brawne Lamia.