Endymion

49

Father Captain de Soya awakens in the familiar warmth of Raphael’s créche. After the first few moments of inevitable confusion and disorientation, he pulls himself from the enclosed couch and drifts, naked, to the command console.

Things are as they should be: in orbit around Sol Draconi Septem—the world a blinding white sphere just beyond the command console’s windows, the braking burn optimum, the other three créches close to reawakening their valuable human cargo, the internal field set to zero-g until they all reacquire strength, internal temperature and atmosphere optimum for reawakening, the ship in proper geosynchronous orbit. The priest-captain gives his first command of this new life—he orders the ship to begin brewing coffee for all of them in the wardroom cubby. Usually his first thought upon resurrection is of his coffee bulb, tucked in the plotting table/wardroom table niche, filling with the hot black drink.

Then de Soya notices the ship’s computer flashing a priority-message light. No message had arrived while he was conscious in Pacem System, and it seems unlikely that one has found them here in this remote ex-colony system. There is no Pax presence in Sol Draconi System—at most, transiting torchships use the three gas giants in the system for refueling their hydrogen tanks—and a brief query of the ship’s computer confirms that no other ship was contacted during the three days of braking and orbit insertion. The same query brings forth the fact that there is no Church mission on the planet below them, the last missionary contact lost more than fifty standard years ago.

De Soya plays the message. Papal authority routed through Pax Fleet. According to the display codes, the message arrived mere hundredths of a second before Raphael had gone quantum in Pacem space. It is a text-only message and brief—HIS HOLINESS COUNTERMANDS MISSION TO SOL DRACONI SEPTEM. NEW AREA OF ACQUISITION: GOD’s GROVE. PROCEED THERE IMMEDIATELY. AUTHORIZATION LOURDUSAMY AND MARUSYN. MESSAGE ENDS.

De Soya sighs. This trip, these deaths and resurrections, have been for nothing. For a moment the priest-captain does not move but sits naked in the command couch, pondering the glaring white limb of the ice planet that fills the curved window above him. Then he sighs again and moves off to shower, stopping by the wardroom cubby to take his first sip of coffee. He reaches out automatically for the bulb while he taps commands into the shower-cubby console-needle spray, as hot as he can stand it. He makes a note to find some bathrobes somewhere. This is no longer an all-male locker room.

Suddenly de Soya freezes in irritation. His questing hand has not closed on the handle of his coffee bulb. Someone has shifted the bulb in its niche.

Their new recruit, Corporal Rhadamanth Nemes, is the last to leave her créche. All three of the men avert their eyes as she leaves her créche and kicks off for the shower/wardrobe cubby, but there are enough reflective surfaces in Raphael’s crowded command bubble for each of them to catch a glimpse of the small woman’s firm body, her pale skin, and the livid cruciform between her small breasts.

Corporal Nemes joins them in taking Communion and seems disoriented and vulnerable as they sip their coffee and allow the internal fields to build to one-sixth-g.

“Your first resurrection?” de Soya asks gently.

The corporal nods. Her hair is very black and cut short, the bangs hanging limply on the pale forehead.

“I’d like to say that you get used to it,” says the priest-captain, “but the truth is, every awakening is like the first one… difficult and exhilarating.”

Nemes sips her coffee bulb. She seems tentative in the microgravity. Her crimson-and-black uniform makes her skin seem all the more pale in contrast.

“Shouldn’t we be leaving immediately for the God’s Grove system?” she says tentatively.

“Soon enough,” says Father Captain de Soya. “I’ve instructed Raphael to break orbit here in fifteen minutes. We’ll accelerate out to the closest translation point at two-g’s so we can recover for a few hours before we have to go back to the couches and the créches.”

Corporal Nemes appears to shudder a bit at the thought of another resurrection. As if eager to change the subject, she glances at the blinding limb of the planet filling the windows and viewscreen. “How can anyone be traveling a river on all that ice?”

“Under it, I’d think,” says Sergeant Gregorius. The giant trooper has been watching Nemes carefully. “’Tis the atmosphere that’s frozen there again since the Fall. The Tethys must flow beneath it.”

Corporal Nemes raises a dark eyebrow in surprise. “And what is God’s Grove like?”

“Ye don’t know it?” asks Gregorius. “I thought everyone in the Pax’d heard of God’s Grove.”

Nemes shakes her head. “I grew up on Esperance. It’s a farming and fishing world, mostly. People there don’t pay too much interest in other places. Not other worlds of the Pax… not old stories of the Web. Most of us are too busy scraping a living from the land or sea.”

“God’s Grove is the old Templar world,” says Father Captain de Soya, setting his coffee bulb in its niche in the plotting table. “It was burned pretty badly during the Ouster invasion preceding the Fall. In its time it was beautiful.”

“Aye,” nods Sergeant Gregorius, “the Templar Brotherhood of the Muir was a sort of nature-worship cult. They turned God’s Grove into a world forest—trees taller and more beautiful than the redwoods and sequoias of Old Earth. The Templars lived there, all twenty-some million’ve ’em—in cities and platforms in those lovely trees. But they chose the wrong side in the war…”

Corporal Nemes looks up from sipping her coffee. “You mean they were on the Ousters’ side?” She sounds shocked at the idea.

“That they were, lass,” says Gregorius. “Perhaps it was because they had spacegoing trees in those days…”

Nemes laughs. It is a short, brittle sound.

“He’s serious,” says Corporal Kee. “The Templars used ergs—energy-binders from Aldebaren—to encapsulate the trees in a Class-nine containment field and provide a reaction drive in-system. They even had regular Hawking drives installed for interstellar flight.”

“Flying trees,” says Corporal Nemes, and laughs harshly again.

“Some o’ them flew off in such trees when the Ousters paid back their allegiance with a Swarm attack on God’s Grove,” continues Gregorius, “but most of them burned… just as most of the planet burned. For a century, they say, most of the world was ash. The clouds o’ smoke created a nuclear winter effect.”

“Nuclear winter?” says Nemes.

De Soya is watching the young woman carefully, wondering why one so naive has been chosen to carry the papal diskey under certain circumstances. Was the ingenuousness part of her strength as a killer, should the need arise?

“Corporal,” he says, speaking to the woman, “you say you grew up on Esperance… Did you join the Home Guard there?”

She shakes her head. “I went directly into the Pax army, Father Captain. There was a potato famine… the recruiters offered offworld travel… and, well…”

“Where did ye serve?” asks Gregorius.

“Just training on Freeholm,” says Nemes.

Gregorius leans on his elbows. The one-sixth g makes sitting easier. “Which brigade?”

“The Twenty-third,” says the woman. “Sixth Regiment.”

“The Screaming Eagles,” says Corporal Kee. “I had a female buddy who transferred there. Was Commander Coleman your CO?”

Nemes shakes her head again. “Commander Deering was in charge while I was there. I just spent ten local months… ah… about eight and a half standard, I guess. I was trained as a general combat specialist. Then they asked for volunteers for the First Legion…” She trails off as if this is classified material.

Gregorius scratches his chin. “It’s odd I haven’t heard of this outfit in the building. Nothing stays secret very long in the military. How long did ye say ye were training with this… legion?”

Nemes gives the big man a direct stare. “Two standard years, Sergeant. And it has been secret… until now. Most of our training was on Lee Three and the Lambert Ring Territories.”

“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 créches.

“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 créches. 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 créche—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 créche 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 créche 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/créche. 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 créche 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 Sant’ 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 créches 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 créche 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 créche 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 créche 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 créche 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.

The translation literally tears de Soya apart within the confines of his couch. He dies grinning fiercely.