The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (79 page)

“Are you all right, M. Severn?” asked Leigh Hunt, lifting my head and setting a membrane-thin oxygen mask over my mouth and nose.

“Hrrmmmggh,” I said. “Arret.” I swam to the surface of my own senses like a diver coming up too quickly from the deeps. My head
hurt. My ribs ached like hell. My eyes were not working perfectly yet, but through the tactical channel, I could see Leigh Hunt give the small twitch of thin lips that I knew passed for a smile from him.

“We’ll help you get dressed,” said Hunt. “Get you some coffee on the flight back. Then it’s back to Government House, M.Severn. You’re late for a meeting with the CEO.”

SEVEN

Space battles in movies and holies had always bored me, but watching the real thing held a certain fascination: rather like seeing live coverage of a series of traffic accidents. Actually, the production values for reality—as had doubtless been the case for centuries—were much lower than for even a moderate-budget holodrama. Even with the tremendous energies involved, the overwhelming reaction one had to an actual battle in space was that space was so
large
and humanity’s fleets and ships and dreadnoughts and whatnots were so
small
.

Or so I thought as I sat in the Tactical Information Center, the so-called War Room, with Gladstone and her military ganders, and watched the walls become twenty-meter holes into infinity as four massive holoframes surrounded us with in-depth imagery and the speakers filled the room with fatline transmissions: radio chatter between fighters, tactical command channels rattling away, ship-to-ship messages on wideband, lasered channels, and secure fatline, and all the shouts, screams, cries, and obscenities of battle which predate any media besides air and the human voice.

It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.

Gladstone and a handful of her people sat in the middle of all this noise and light, the War Room floating like a gray-carpeted rectangle amidst the stars and explosions, the limb of Hyperion a lapis lazuli brilliance filling half of the north holowall, the screams of dying men and women on every channel and in every ear. I was one of the handful of Gladstone’s people privileged and cursed to be there.

The CEO rotated in her high-backed chair, tapped her lower lip with steepled fingers, and turned toward her military group. “What do you think?”

The seven bemedaled men there looked at one another, and then six of them looked at General Morpurgo. He chewed on an unlighted cigar. “It’s not good,” he said. “We’re keeping them away from the farcaster site … our defenses are holding well there … but they’ve pushed far too far in-system.”

“Admiral?” asked Gladstone, inclining her head a fraction toward the tall, thin man in FORCE:space black.

Admiral Singh touched his closely trimmed beard. “General Morpurgo is correct. The campaign is not going as planned.” He nodded toward the fourth wall, where diagrams—mostly ellipsoids, ovals, and arcs—were superimposed upon a static shot of the Hyperion system. Some of the arcs grew as we watched. The bright blue lines stood for Hegemony trajectories. The red tracks were Ouster. There were far more red lines than blue.

“Both of the attack carriers assigned to Task Force 42 have been put out of action,” said Admiral Singh. “The
Olympus Shadow
was destroyed with all hands and the
Neptune Station
was seriously damaged but is returning to the cislunar docking area with five torchships for escort.”

CEO Gladstone nodded slowly, her lip coming down to touch the top of her steepled fingers. “How many were aboard the
Olympus Shadow
, Admiral?”

Singh’s brown eyes were as large as the CEO’s, but did not suggest the same depths of sadness. He held her gaze for several seconds. “Forty-two hundred,” he said. “Not counting the Marine detachment of six hundred. Some of those were off-loaded at Farcaster Station Hyperion, so we do not have accurate information on how many were with the ship.”

Gladstone nodded. She looked back at General Morpurgo. “Why the sudden difficulty, General?”

Morpurgo’s face was calm, but he had all but bitten through the cigar clamped between his teeth. “More fighting units than we expected, CEO,” he said. “Plus their lancers … five-person craft, miniature torchships, really, faster and more heavily armed than our long-range fighters … they’re deadly little hornets. We’ve been destroying them by the hundred, but if one gets through, it can make a dash inside fleet
defenses and wreak havoc.” Morpurgo shrugged. “More than one’s got through.”

Senator Kolchev sat across the table with eight of his colleagues. Kolchev swiveled until he could see the tactical map. “It looks like they’re almost to Hyperion,” he said. The famous voice was hoarse.

Singh spoke up. “Remember the scale, Senator. The truth is that we still hold most of the system. Everything within ten AU of Hyperion’s star is ours. The battle was out beyond the Oört cloud, and we’ve been regrouping.”

“And those red … blobs … above the plane of the ecliptic?” asked Senator Richeau. The senator wore red herself; it had been one of her trademarks in the Senate.

Singh nodded. “An interesting strategem,” he said. “The Swarm launched an attack of approximately three thousand lancers to complete a pincers movement against Task Force 87.2’s electronic perimeter. It was contained, but one has to admire the cleverness of—”

“Three thousand lancers?” Gladstone interrupted softly.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Gladstone smiled. I stopped sketching and thought to myself that I was glad that I had not been the beneficiary of that particular smile.

“Weren’t we told yesterday, in the briefing, that the Ousters would field six … seven hundred fighting units,
tops
?” The words had been Morpurgo’s. CEO Gladstone swiveled to face the General. Her right eyebrow arched.

General Morpurgo removed the cigar, frowned at it, and fished a smaller piece from behind his lower teeth. “That’s what our intelligence said. It was wrong.”

Gladstone nodded. “Was the AI Advisory Council involved in that intelligence assessment?”

All eyes turned toward Councilor Albedo. It was a perfect projection; he sat in his chair amongst the others, his hands curled on the armrests in a relaxed fashion; there was none of the haziness or see-through common to mobile projections. His face was long, with high cheekbones and a mobile mouth which suggested a hint of a sardonic smile even at the most serious of moments. This was a serious moment.

“No, CEO,” said Councilor Albedo, “the Advisory Group was not asked to assess Ouster strength.”

Gladstone nodded. “I assumed,” she said, still addressing Morpurgo,
“that when the FORCE intelligence estimates came in, they incorporated the Council’s projections.”

The FORCE:ground General glared at Albedo. “No ma’am,” he said. “Since the Core acknowledges no contact with the Ousters, we felt that their projections wouldn’t be any better than our own. We did use the OCS:HTN aggregate AI network to run our assessments.” He thrust the foreshortened cigar back into his mouth. His chin jutted. When he spoke, it was around the cigar. “Could the Council have done better?”

Gladstone looked at Albedo.

The Councilor made a small motion with the long fingers of his right hand. “Our estimates … for this Swarm … suggested four to six thousand fighting units.”

“You—” began Morpurgo, his face red.

“You did not mention this during the briefing,” said CEO Gladstone. “Nor during our earlier deliberations.”

Councilor Albedo shrugged. “The General is correct,” he said. “We have no contact with the Ousters. Our estimates are no more reliable than FORCE’S, merely … based upon different premises. The Olympus Command School Historical Tactical Network does excellent work. If the AIs there were one order of acuity higher on the Turing-Demmler scale, we would have to bring them into the Core.” He made the graceful gesture with his hand again. “As it is, the Council’s premises might be of use for future planning. We will, of course, turn over all projections to this group at any time.”

Gladstone nodded. “Do so immediately.”

She turned back to the screen, and the others did so also. Sensing the silence, the room monitors brought the speaker volume back up, and once again we could hear the cries of victory, screams for help, and calm recitation of positions, fire-control directions, and commands.

The closest wall was a real-time feed from the torchship HS
N’Djamena
as it searched for survivors among the tumbling remnants of Battle Group B.5. The damaged torchship it was approaching, magnified a thousand times, looked like a pomegranate burst from the inside, its seeds and red rind spilling in slow motion, tumbling into a cloud of particles, gases, frozen volatiles, a million microelectronics ripped from their cradles, food stores, tangled gear, and—recognizable now and then from their marionette tumble of arms or legs—many, many bodies. The
N’Djamena’s
searchlight, ten meters wide after its coherent leap of twenty thousand miles, played across the starlit frozen wreckage, bringing individual items, facets, and faces into focus. It was quite
beautiful in a terrible way. The reflected light made Gladstone’s face look much older.

“Admiral,” she said, “is it pertinent that the Swarm waited until Task Force 87.2 translated in-system?”

Singh touched his beard. “Are you asking if it was a trap, CEO?”

“Yes.”

The Admiral glanced at his colleagues and then at Gladstone. “I think not. We believe … I believe … that when the Ousters saw the intensity of our force commitment, they responded in kind. It does mean, however, that they are totally resolved to take Hyperion system.”

“Can they do it?” asked Gladstone, her eyes still on the tumbling wreckage above her. A young man’s body, half in a spacesuit and half out, tumbled toward the camera. The burst eyes and lungs were clearly visible.

“No,” said Admiral Singh. “They can bloody us. They can even drive us back to a totally defensive perimeter around Hyperion itself. But they cannot defeat us or drive us out.”

“Or destroy the farcaster?” Senator Richeau’s voice was taut.

“Nor destroy the farcaster,” said Singh.

“He’s right,” said General Morpurgo. “I’d stake my professional career on it.”

Gladstone smiled and stood. The others, including myself, rushed to stand also. “You have,” Gladstone said softly to Morpurgo. “You have.” She looked around. “We will meet here when events warrant it. M. Hunt will be my liaison with you. In the meantime, gentlemen and ladies, the work of government shall proceed. Good afternoon.”

As the others left, I took my seat again until I was the only one left in the room. The speakers came back up to volume. On one band, a man was crying. Manic laughter came through static. Above me, behind me, on both sides, the starfields moved slowly against blackness, and the starlight glinted coldly on wreckage and ruin.

Government House was constructed in the shape of a Star of David, and within the center of the star, shielded by low walls and strategically planted trees, there was a garden: smaller than the formal acres of flowers in Deer Park but no less beautiful. I was walking there as evening fell, the brilliant blue-white of Tau Ceti fading to golds, when Meina Gladstone approached.

For a while, we walked together in silence. I noticed that she had exchanged
her suit for a long robe of the kind worn by grand matrons on Patawpha; the robe was wide and billowing, inset with intricate dark blue and gold designs which almost matched the darkening sky. Gladstone’s hands were out of sight in hidden pockets, the wide sleeves stirred to a breeze; the hem dragged on the milk-white stones of the path.

“You let them interrogate me,” I said. “I’m curious as to why.”

Gladstone’s voice was tired. “They were not transmitting. There was no danger of the information being passed on.”

I smiled. “Nonetheless, you let them put me through that.”

“Security wished to know as much about them as they would divulge.”

“At the expense of any … inconvenience … on my part,” I said.