Endymion

14

I hadn’t known that I was claustrophobic until this trip. The flying at high speeds through pitch-black catacombs, the encircling containment field blocking even the wind of my passage, the sense of stone and darkness all around—twenty minutes into the wild flight I disengaged the autopilot program, landed the hawking mat on the labyrinth floor, collapsed the containment field, stepped away from the mat, and screamed.

I grabbed the flashlight laser and played it on the walls. A square corridor of stone. Here, outside the containment field, the heat struck me. The tunnel must be very deep. There were no stalactites, no stalagmites, no bats, no living things… only this square-hewn cavern stretching to infinity. I played the light over the hawking mat. It seemed dead, totally inert. In my haste I might have exited the program incorrectly, wiped it. If so, I was dead. We had jinked and banked on a score of branchings so far; there was no way I would ever find my own way out. I screamed again, although it was a bit more of a deliberate, tension-breaking shout than a scream this time. I fought the sense of walls and darkness closing in. I willed away the nausea. Three and a half hours left. Three and a half hours of this claustrophobic nightmare, barreling along through blackness, hanging on to a leaping flying carpet… and then what? I wished then that I had brought a weapon. It seemed absurd at the time; no handgun would have given me a chance against even a single Swiss Guard trooper—not even against a Home Guard irregular—but now I wished I had something. I removed the small hunting knife from its leather scabbard on my belt, saw the steel gleam in the flashlight beam, and started laughing.

This was absurd.

I set the knife back, dropped onto the mat, and tapped in the “resume” code. The hawking mat stiffened, rose, and lurched into violent motion. I was going somewhere fast.

Father Captain De Soya sees the huge shape for an instant before it is gone, and the screaming begins. Dr. Chatkra steps toward the retreating child, blocking de Soya’s view, there is a rush of air tangible even within the wind roar all around, and the doctor’s helmeted head is rolling and bouncing past de Soya’s boots.

“Mother of God,” he whispers into his open microphone. Dr. Chatkra’s body still stands. The girl—Aenea—screams then, the sound almost lost under the howling sandstorm, and as if the force of the scream has acted upon Chatkra’s body, the corpse falls to the stone. The medic, Caf, shouts something unintelligible and lunges for the girl. Again the dark blur, more sensed than seen, and Caf’s arm is separated from the medic’s body. Aenea runs toward the stairway. De Soya lunges at the child but collides with some sort of huge, metallic statue made of barbs and razor wire. Spikes puncture his combat armor—impossible!—but he feels the blood pouring from half a dozen minor wounds.

“No!” screams the girl again. “Stop! I command you!”

The three-meter metal statue turns in slow motion. De Soya has a confused impression of blazing red eyes staring down at the girl, and then the metal sculpture is gone. The father-captain takes a step toward the child, still wanting to reassure her as well as capture her, but his left leg goes out from under him, and he goes to his right knee on the broad stone step.

The girl comes to him, touches his shoulder, and whispers—somehow audibly above the wind howl and the worse howling of people in pain coming over his earphones—“It will be all right.”

Father Captain de Soya’s body is suffused with well-being, his mind is filled with joy. He weeps.

The girl is gone. A huge figure looms over him, and de Soya clenches his fists, tries to rise, knowing that it is futile—that the creature has returned to kill him.

“Easy!” shouts Sergeant Gregorius. The big man helps de Soya to his feet. The father-captain cannot stand—his left leg is bleeding and useless—so Gregorius holds him in one giant arm while he sweeps the area with his energy lance.

“Don’t shoot!” shouts de Soya. “The girl…”

“Gone,” says Sergeant Gregorius. He fires. A spike of pure energy lashes into the crackling swirl of sand. “Damn!” Gregorius lifts the father-captain over his armored shoulder. The screams on the net are growing wilder.

My chronometer and compass tell me that I am almost there. Nothing else suggests that. I am still flying blind, still hanging on to the lurching hawking mat as it selects which branch of the endless Labyrinth to hurtle down. I have had little sense of the tunnels climbing toward the surface, but, then, I have had little sense of anything except vertigo and claustrophobia.

For the last two hours I have worn my night-vision glasses and illuminated our flight path with the flashlight laser at its widest setting. At three hundred klicks per hour, the rock walls rush by with alarming rapidity. But rather that than darkness.

I am still wearing the goggles when the first light appears and blinds me. I sweep off the glasses, stow them in a vest pocket, and blink away afterimages. The hawking mat is hurtling me toward a rectangle of pure light.

I remember the old poet saying that the Third Cave Tomb had been closed for more than two and a half centuries. All of the Time Tombs on Hyperion had their portals sealed after the Fall, but the Third Cave Tomb actually had a wall of rock sealing it off from the Labyrinth behind the closed portal. For hours now I had half expected to barrel into that wall of rock at almost three hundred klicks per hour.

The square of light grows rapidly. I realize that the tunnel has been climbing for some time, rising to the surface here. I lie full-length on the hawking mat, feeling it slow as it reaches the end of its programmed flight plan. “Good work, old man,” I say aloud, hearing my voice for the first time since the shouting interlude three and a half hours ago.

I set my hand over the acceleration threads, afraid to let the mat slow to a walking pace here where I am bound to be a sitting duck. I had said that it would take a miracle to keep from being shot by the Swiss Guard; the poet had promised me one. It is time.

Sand swirls in the tomb opening, covering the doorway like a dry waterfall. Is this the miracle? I hope not. Troopers can see through a sandstorm easily enough. I brake the mat to a stop just within the doorway, pull a bandanna and sunglasses from my pack, tie the scarf over my nose and mouth, lie full-length on my belly again, set my fingers over the flight designs, and punch the acceleration threads.

The hawking mat flies through the doorway and into open air.

I jink hard right, rising and dropping the mat in a wild evasive pattern, knowing even as I do so that such efforts are useless against autotargeting. It does not matter—my urge to stay alive overrides my logic.

I cannot see. The storm is so wild that everything two meters beyond the leading edge of the mat is obscured. This is insane… the old poet and I never discussed the possibility of a sandstorm here. I can’t even tell my altitude.

Suddenly a razor-sharp flying buttress passes less than a meter beneath the hurtling carpet, immediately I fly under another barbed metal strut, and I realize that I have almost just collided with the Shrike Palace. I am headed precisely the wrong direction—south—when I need to be at the north end of the Valley. I look at my compass, confirm my folly, and swing the hawking mat around. From the glimpse I had of the Shrike Palace, the mat is about twenty meters above ground level. Stopping the carpet, feeling it rocked and buffeted by the wind, I lower it like an elevator until it touches windswept stone. Then I raise it three meters, lock in that altitude, and move due north at little more than a walking pace.

Where are the soldiers?

As if to answer my unspoken question, dark forms in battle armor hurtle by. I flinch as they fire their baroque energy lances and stubby flechette guns, but they are not firing at me. They are shooting over their shoulders. They are Swiss Guard and they are running. I had never heard of such a thing.

Suddenly I realize that beneath the wind howl, the Valley is alive with human screams. I don’t see how this is possible—troopers would keep their helmets fastened and visors down in such a storm. But the screams are there. I can hear them.

A jet or skimmer suddenly roars overhead, no more than ten meters above me, its autoguns firing to either side—I survive because I am directly beneath the thing—and I have to brake suddenly as the storm ahead of me is illuminated by a terrible blast of light and heat. The skimmer, jet, whatever, has flown—directly into one of the tombs ahead of me. I guess that it is the Crystal Monolith or the Jade Tomb.

More firing to my left. I fly right, then northwest again, trying to bypass the tombs. Suddenly there are screams to my right and directly ahead. Bolts of lancefire slash through the storm. This time someone is shooting at me. Shooting and missing? How can this be?

Not waiting for an answer, I drop the hawking mat like an express elevator. Slamming into the ground, I roll aside, bolts of energy ionizing the air not twenty centimeters above my head. The inertial compass, still on a lanyard around my neck, punches me in the face as I roll. There are no boulders to hide behind, no rocks; the sand is flat here. I try to dig a ditch with my fingers as the blue bolts crisscross the air over my head. Flechette clouds flash overhead with their characteristic ripping sound. If I had been airborne now, the hawking mat and I would be in small tatters.

Something huge is standing not three meters from me in the whipping sand. Its legs are planted wide. It looks like a giant in barbed combat armor—a giant with too many arms. A plasma bolt strikes it, outlining the spiked form for an instant. The thing does not melt or fall or fly apart.

Impossible. Fucking impossible. Part of my mind coolly notes that I am thinking in obscenities the way I always have in combat.

The huge shape is gone. There are more screams to my left, explosions straight ahead. How the hell am I supposed to find the kid in all this carnage? And if I do, how can I find my way to the Third Cave Tomb? The idea—the Plan—had been for me to swoop Aenea up in the miracle distraction the old poet had promised, make a dash for the Third Cave again, and then punch in the final bit of autopilot for the thirty-klick run for Chronos Keep on the edge of the Bridle Range, where A. Bettik and the spaceship would be waiting for me in… three minutes.

Even in all this confusion, whatever the hell it is, there is no way that the orbital torchships or ground-based AA batteries can miss something as big as the ship if it hangs around for more than the thirty seconds we’d allotted for it to be on the ground. This whole rescue mission is screwed.

The earth shakes and a boom fills the Valley. Either something huge has blown up—an ammo dump, at least—or something much larger than a skimmer has crashed. A wild red glow illuminates the entire northern part of the Valley, blossoms of flame visible even through the sandstorm. Against that glow I can see scores of armored figures running, firing, flying, falling. One form is smaller than the rest and is unarmored. The barbed giant is standing next to it. The smaller form, still silhouetted against the fiery glow of pure destruction, is attacking the giant, pounding small fists against barbs and spikes.

“Shit!” I crawl toward the hawking mat, cannot find it in the storm, rub sand out of my eyes, crawl in a circle, and feel cloth under my right palm. In the seconds I have been off the mat, it has become almost buried beneath the sand. Digging like a frenzied dog, I unearth the flight designs, activate the mat, and fly toward the fading glow. The two figures are no longer visible, but I have kept the presence of mind to take a compass reading. Two lance bolts scorch the air—one centimeters above my prone body, one millimeters under the mat.

“Shit! Goddamn!” I shout to no one in particular.

Father Captain De Soya is only semiconscious as he bounces along on Sergeant Gregorius’s armored shoulder. De Soya half senses other dark shapes running through the storm with them, occasionally firing plasma bolts at unseen targets, and he wonders if this is the rest of Gregorius’s squad. Fading in and out of awareness, he desperately wishes he could see the girl again, talk to her.

Gregorius almost runs into something, stops, orders his squad to close up. A scarab armored fighting vehicle has dropped its camouflage shield and is sitting askew on a boulder. The left track is missing, and the barrels of the rear miniguns have been melted like wax in a flame. The right eye blister is shattered and gaping.

“Here,” pants Gregorius, and carefully lowers Father Captain de Soya through the blister. A second later the sergeant pulls himself through, illuminating the interior of the scarab with the torch beam on his energy lance. The driver’s seat looks as if someone has spray-painted it red. The rear bulkheads seem to have been spattered with random colors, rather like some absurd pre-Hegira “abstract art” Father Captain de Soya once saw in a museum. Only this metal canvas has been daubed with human parts.

Sergeant Gregorius pulls him deeper into the tilted scarab and leans the torchship captain against the lower bulkhead. Two other suited figures squeeze through the shattered blister.

De Soya rubs blood and sand out of his eyes and says, “I’m all right.” He had meant to say it in a command tone, but his voice is weak, almost childlike.

“Yessir,” growls Gregorius. The sergeant is pulling his medkit from his beltpak.

“I don’t need that,” de Soya says weakly. “The suit…” All combat suits have their own sealant and semi-intelligent doc liners. De Soya is sure that for such minor slash or puncture wounds, the suit has already dealt with it. But now he looks down.

His left leg has been all but severed. The impact-proof, energy-resistant, omnipolymer combat armor is hanging in shreds, like tattered rubber on a cheap tire. He can see the white of his femur. The suit has tightened into a crude tourniquet around his upper thigh, saving his life, but there are half a dozen serious puncture wounds in his chest armor, and the medlights on his chest display are blinking red.

“Ah, Jesus,” whispers Father Captain de Soya. It is a prayer.

“It’s all right,” says Sergeant Gregorius, tightening his own tourniquet around the thigh. “We’ll be getting you to a medic and then liftin’ you to the ship’s hospital in no time, sir.” He looks to the two suited figures crouched in exhaustion behind the front seats. “Kee? Rettig?”

“Yes, Sergeant?” The smaller of the two figures looks up.

“Mellick and Ott?”

“Dead, Sergeant. The thing got them at the Sphinx.”

“Stay on the net,” says Sergeant Gregorius, and turns back to de Soya. The noncom removes his gauntlet and touches huge fingers to one of the larger puncture wounds. “Does that hurt, sir?”

De Soya shakes his head. He cannot feel the touch.

“All right,” says the sergeant, but he looks displeased. He begins calling on the tactical net.

“The girl,” says Father Captain de Soya. “We have to find the girl.”

“Yes, sir,” says Gregorius, but continues calling on different channels. De Soya listens now and can hear the babble.

“Look out! Christ! It’s coming back…”

“St. Bonaventure! St. Bonaventure! You are venting into space! Say again, you are venting into…”

“Scorpion one-niner to any controller… Jesus… Scorpion one-niner, left engine out, any controller… can’t see the Valley… will divert…”

“Jamie! Jamie! Oh, God…”

“Get off the net! Crossdammit, maintain com discipline! Get off the fucking net!”

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”

“Watch the fucking… oh, shit… the fucking thing took a hit but… shit…”

“Multiple bogeys… say again… multiple bogeys… disregard fire control… there are multiple…” This is interrupted by screams.

“Command One, come in. Command One, come in.”

Feeling consciousness draining from him like the blood pooling under his ruined leg, de Soya flips down his visors. The tactical display is garbage. He keys the tightbeam com channel to Barnes-Avne’s command skimmer. “Commander, this is Father Captain de Soya. Commander?”

The line is no longer operative.

“The Commander is dead, sir,” says Gregorius, pressing an adrenaline ampule against de Soya’s bare arm. The father-captain has no memory of his gauntlet and combat armor being removed. “I saw her skimmer go in on tactical before it all went to hell,” continues the sergeant, wiring de Soya’s dangling leg to his upper thighbone like someone tying down loose cargo. “She’s dead, sir. Colonel Brideson’s not responding. Captain Ranier’s not answering from the torchship. The C-three ain’t answerin’.”

De Soya fights to stay conscious. “What’s happening, Sergeant?”

Gregorius leans closer. His visors are up, and de Soya sees for the first time that the giant is a black man. “We had a phrase for this in the Marines before I joined Swiss Guard, sir.”

“Charlie Fox,” says Father Captain de Soya, trying to smile.

“That’s what you polite navy types call it,” agrees Gregorius. He gestures the other two troopers toward the broken blister. They crawl out. Gregorius lifts de Soya and carries him out like a baby. “In the Marines, sir,” continues the sergeant, not even breathing heavily, “we called it a cluster fuck.”

De Soya feels himself fading. The sergeant sets him down on the sand.

“You stay with me, Captain! Goddammit, you hear me? You stay with me!” Gregorius is shouting.

“Watch your language, Sergeant,” says de Soya, feeling himself sliding into unconsciousness but unable and unwilling to do anything about it. “I’m a priest, remember… Taking the name of God in vain is a mortal sin.” The blackness is closing in, and Father Captain de Soya does not know if he has said the last sentence aloud or not.