The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (236 page)

“Lambert,” muses the big sergeant. “So ye’ve had your share of low-g and zero-g training.”

“More than my share,” agrees Corporal Rhadamanth Nemes with a thin smile. “While in the Lambert Ring, we trained in the Peregrine Trojan Cluster for five months.”

Father Captain de Soya feels the conversation turning into an interrogation. He does not want their new crewmate to feel assaulted by their questions, but he is as curious as Kee and Gregorius. Besides that, he feels something … not right. “So the Legions’ job will be pretty much like the Marines?” he says. “Ship-to-ship fighting?”

Nemes shakes her head. “Uh-uh … Captain. Not just zero-g combat tactics for ship to ship. The Legions are being formed to take the war to the enemy.”

“What does that mean, Corporal?” asks the priest-captain softly. “In all my years in the Fleet, ninety percent of our battles were in Ouster territory.”

“Yes,” says Nemes, her small smile returning, “but you hit and run … Fleet actions. The Legions will
occupy
.”

“But most of the Ouster holdings are in vacuum!” says Kee. “Asteroids, orbital forests, deep space itself …”

“Exactly,” says Nemes, her smile remaining. “The Legions will fight them on their own ground … or vacuum, as the case may be.”

Gregorius catches de Soya’s glance saying,
No more questions
, but the sergeant shakes his head and says, “Well, I don’t see what these vaunted legions are learning that the Swiss Guard hasn’t done—and done well—for sixteen centuries.”

De Soya floats to his feet. “Acceleration in two minutes. Let’s get to our couches. We’ll talk more about God’s Grove and the mission there during our drive to the translation point.”

•     •     •

It had taken
Raphael
almost eleven hours of braking deceleration at two hundred gravities to kill its near light-speed upon entry into the system, but the computer has located an adequate translation point to God’s Grove only thirty-five million klicks out from Sol Draconi Septem. The ship could accelerate at a leisurely one-g and reach that point in around twenty-five hours, but de Soya has ordered it to lift out of the planet’s gravity well at a constant two-g’s for six hours before using more energy to bring on the internal fields during the last hour’s dash at one-hundred-g’s.

When the fields finally come up, the team goes through their final checklist for God’s Grove—three days to resurrect, then immediate dropship deployment with Sergeant Gregorius in charge of the ground party, surveillance of the fifty-eight-klick Tethys River segment between portals, and then final preparation for the capture of Aenea and her party.

“After all this, why does His Holiness start directing us in the search?” asks Corporal Kee as they move to their creches.

“Revelation,” says Father Captain de Soya. “Okay … everyone tuck in. I’ll watch the boards.”

For the last few minutes before translation, it has been their custom to close their creches. Only the captain stays on watch.

In the few minutes he has alone at the command board, de Soya quickly calls up the records of their abortive entry and escape from Hebron System. He had viewed these before their departure from Pacem System, but now he fast-forwards through the visual and data records again. It’s all there and it all seems correct: the shots from orbit around Hebron while he and his two troopers were still in creche—the burning cities, cratered landscape, and shattered villages of Hebron lifting smoke into the desert atmosphere, New Jerusalem in radioactive ruins—and then the radar acquisition by three Swarm cruisers.
Raphael
had aborted the resurrection cycles and made a run for it, lifting out of the system at the two hundred and eighty gravities her enhanced fusion drive could provide with her cargo of dead men. The Ousters, on the other hand, had to divert energy to their internal fields or die—no resurrection for heathens—and could never muster more than eighty-g’s during the stern chase.

The visuals were there, though—the long green tails of the Ouster fusion drives, their attempts to lance
Raphael
at a distance of almost a full AU, the ship’s record of the defense fields easily handling the lance energy at that distance, the final translation to Mare Infinitus System since that was the closest jump point …

It all made sense. The visuals were compelling. De Soya did not believe a bit of it.

The father-captain was not sure why he was so skeptical. The visual records meant nothing, of course; for more than a thousand years, since the beginning of the Digital Age, even the most compelling visual images could be faked by a child at a home computer. But ship’s records would require a gigantic effort—a technical conspiracy—to falsify. Why should he not trust
Raphael
’s memory now?

With only a few minutes before translation, de Soya calls up the records of their recent descent into Sol Draconi Septem’s system. He glances over his shoulder from the command couch—all three creche couches are sealed and silent, their telltales green. Gregorius, Kee, and Nemes are still awake, waiting for translation and death. De Soya knows that the sergeant prays during these last minutes. Kee usually reads a book from his creche monitor. De Soya has no idea what the woman is doing within her comfortable coffin.

He knows he is being paranoid.
My coffee bulb was moved out of place. The handle was shifted sideways
. During his hours awake de Soya has tried to remember whether someone might have been in the wardrobe cubby and jarred the bulb in Pacem System. No—they had not used the wardrobe cubby during the climb out of Pacem’s gravity well. The woman, Nemes, had been aboard before the others, but de Soya had used the coffee bulb and returned it to its place after she had gone to her couch/creche. He was sure of that. He had been the last to turn in, just as he always was. Acceleration or deceleration might smash bulbs not designed for terrible gravities, but the deceleration vector
Raphael
had been following was linear along the courier ship’s line of travel and would not have moved things laterally. The coffee-bulb niche was designed to hold things in place.

Father Captain de Soya is part of a millennia-long line of sailors, sea and space, who become fanatic about a place for everything and everything in its place. He is a spacer. Almost two decades of serving in frigates, destroyers, and torchships
have shown him that anything he leaves out of place will literally be in his face as soon as the ship goes to zero-g. More important, he has the age-old sailor’s need to be able to reach out and find anything without looking, in darkness or storm. Granted, he thinks, the alignment of the handle of his coffee bulb is not a major issue … except it is. Each man has learned to use one of the chair niches at the five-person plotting table that doubles for the mess table in the crowded command pod. When they are using the table to plot courses or view planetary maps, each of the men—Rettig included when he was alive—had sat or stood or floated at their usual places at the table. It was human nature. It was second nature to spacers to keep their habits neat and predictable.

Someone had tapped his coffee bulb handle out of alignment—perhaps with a knee nestled there in zero-g to hold him … 
her
 … in place. Paranoid. Definitely.

In addition, there had been the troubling news whispered to him by Sergeant Gregorius in the minutes between that man’s emergence from the resurrection creche and Corporal Nemes’s awakening.

“A friend of mine in the Swiss Guard in the Vatican, Captain. Had a drink with him the night before we left. He knew us all—Kee and Rettig—and he swore he saw Lancer Rettig bein’ carried unconscious on a litter to an ambulance outside the Vatican infirmary.”

“Impossible,” de Soya had said. “Lancer Rettig died of resurrection complications and was buried in space while in Mare Infinitus space.”

“Aye,” Gregorius had growled, “but my friend was sure … almost sure … that it was Rettig in the ambulance. Unconscious, life-support paks attached, oxygen mask an’ all, but Rettig.”

“That makes no sense,” de Soya had said. He had always been suspicious of conspiracy theories, knowing from personal experience that secrets shared by more than two people rarely stayed secrets for long. “Why would Pax Fleet and the Church lie to us about Rettig? And where is he if he was alive on Pacem?”

Gregorius had shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t him, Captain. That’s what I’ve been telling myself. But the ambulance—”

“What about it?” de Soya had snapped, more sharply than he had intended.

“It was headed for Castel San’Angelo, sir,” said Gregorius. “Headquarters for the Holy Office.”

Paranoia.

The records of the eleven hours of deceleration are normal—high-g braking, the usual three-day resurrection cycle ensuring the maximum chance for their safe recovery. De Soya glances at the orbital-insertion figures and runs the video of Sol Draconi Septem’s slow rotation. He always wonders at those lost days—
Raphael
carrying out her simple tasks while the creches revive him and the others—he wonders at the eery silence that must fill the ship.

“Three minutes until translation,” comes
Raphael
’s crude synthesized voice. “All personnel should be in creche couches.”

De Soya ignores the warning and calls up data files on the two and a half days the ship spent in orbit around Sol Draconi Septem before he and the others regained life. He is not sure what he was looking for … no record of dropship deployment … no sign of early life-support activation … all creche monitors reporting the regular cycle, the first quickenings of life in the last hours of the third day … all orbital ship records normal … 
wait!

“Two minutes until translation,” says the flat ship’s voice.

There on the first day, shortly after attaining standard geosynchronous orbit … and there again about four hours later. Everything normal except the dry details of four small reactor-thruster firings. To attain and hold a perfect geosynchronous orbit, a ship like
Raphael
will fire dozens of little thruster tweaks such as these. But most such fine-tunings, de Soya knows, involve the large reaction-thruster pods on the stern near the fusion drive, and on the command-pod boom at the bow of the awkwardly configured courier ship. These thruster burps were similar—first a double firing to stabilize the ship during a roll so the command pod was facing away from the planet—normal during rotisserie mode to spread the solar heating uniformly along the ship’s surface without using field coolant—but only eight minutes here—and here! And after the roll, those paired reaction tweaks. Two and two. Then the final paired burps, which might accompany the larger thruster firings that would roll the ship back with the command-pod cameras aimed down at the planet. Then, four hours and eight minutes later, the entire sequence again. There are thirty-eight other station-keeping
thruster sequences on the record, and none of the major thruster firings that would signify a roll of the entire ship stack, but these twin four-burp interludes stand out to de Soya’s trained eye.

“One minute until translation,” warns
Raphael
.

De Soya can hear the huge field generators beginning to whine in preparation for the shift to the modified Hawking system that will kill him in fifty-six seconds. He ignores it. His command chair will carry his dead body to the creche after translation if he does not move now. The ship is designed that way—messy, but necessary.

Father Captain Federico de Soya has been a torchship captain for many years. He has made more than a dozen archangel-courier jumps. He knows that double-burp, roll, double-burp signature on a reaction-thruster record. Even with the actual roll event deleted from the ship’s records, the fingerprints for the maneuver is there in outline. The roll is to orient the dropship, which is tied down on the opposite side of the command-pod cluster, to the planet’s atmosphere. The second double burp—the one still on record here—is to counteract the propellant squids separating the dropship from the center of
Raphael
’s mass. The final double firing is to stabilize the stack once the ship has returned to normal attitude, command-pod cameras trained on the planet below once again.

None of this is as obvious as it sounds, since the entire stack is slowly rotating in rotisserie mode during the entire time, occasional tweaks aligning the stack for better heating or cooling purposes. But to de Soya the signature is unmistakable. He taps directions to bring up the other records again. Negative sign of dropship deployment. Negative record of dropship deployment roll maneuver. Positive indicators of constant dropship attachment. Negative sign of life-support activation prior to everyone’s resurrection a few hours before. Negative images of the dropship moving toward atmosphere on video records. Constant image-record of dropship attached and empty.

The only anomaly is two eight-minute thruster-tweak sequences four hours apart. Eight minutes of roll away from the planet would allow a dropship to disappear into atmosphere without main-camera visual record. Or to reappear and rendezvous. Boom cameras and radar would have recorded the event unless commanded to ignore it prior to dropship separation.
That would have required less tampering with the record after the fact.

If someone had ordered the ship’s computer to delete all records of dropship deployment,
Raphael
’s limited AI might have altered the record in just such a way, not realizing that the small-thruster firings during rotisserie mode would leave any footprint. And for anyone less experienced than a twelve-year torchship captain, it would not have. If de Soya had an hour or so to call up all the hydrogen fuel data, cross-check against dropship refueling needs and system-entry requirements, then double-check with the Bussard hydrogen collector input during deceleration, he would have a better idea if the main stack-roll maneuvers and dropship deployment had occurred. If he had an hour or so to himself.

“Thirty seconds until translation.”

De Soya does not have time to reach his creche couch. He does have time to call up a special command sequence for ship operations, tap in his override code, confirm it, change monitor parameters, and do it twice more. He has just heard the confirmation acknowledgment on the third override when the quantum leap to archangel C-plus occurs.