Endymion

53

Father Captain de Soya awakes to screaming. It is several minutes before he realizes it is his voice doing the screaming.

Thumbing open the coffin-lid catch, he pulls himself to a sitting position within the créche. Lights are blinking red and amber on the monitor panel, although all of the essential guidelines are green. Moaning in pain and confusion, de Soya starts to pull himself out. His body floats above the open créche, his flailing hands can get no grip. He notices that his hands and arms are glistening red and pink, as if all his skin has been burned off.

“Dear Mother of Mary… where am I?” He is weeping. The tears hang in front of his eyes in tumbling beads. “Zero-g… where am I? The Balthazar! What’s… happened? Space battle? Burns?”

No. He is aboard the Raphael. Slowly the outraged dendrites in his brain begin to work. He is floating in instrument-lighted darkness. The Raphael. It should be in orbit around God’s Grove. He had set the créche cycles for Gregorius, Kee, and him for a dangerous six hours rather than the usual three days. Playing God with the troopers’ lives, he remembers thinking. The chances for unsuccessful resurrection are very high at this hurried pace. De Soya remembers the second courier who had brought orders to him on the Balthazar, Father Gawronski—it seems like decades ago to him—he had not achieved successful resurrection… the resurrection chaplain on Balthazar… what was that old bastard’s name? Father Sapieha… had said that it would take weeks or months for Father Gawronski to be resurrected after that initial failure… a slow, painful process, the resurrection chaplain had said accusingly…

Father Captain de Soya’s mind is clearing as he floats above the créche. Still in free fall as he had programmed. He remembers thinking that he might not be in shape to walk in one-g. He is not.

Kicking off to the wardrobe cubby, de Soya checks himself in the mirror there—his body glistens redly, he does look like a burn victim, and the cruciform is a livid welt in all that pink, raw flesh.

De Soya closes his eyes and pulls on his underclothes and cassock. The cotton hurts his raw skin, but he ignores the pain. The coffee has percolated as programmed. He lifts his bulb from the plotting table and kicks back into the common room.

Corporal Kee’s créche glows green in the last seconds of revival. Gregorius’s créche has flashing warning lights. De Soya curses softly and pulls himself down to the sergeant’s créche panel. The resurrection cycle has been aborted. The hurried revival has failed.

“Goddammit,” whispers de Soya, and then offers an Act of Contrition for taking the Lord’s name in vain. He needed Gregorius.

Kee revives safely, however, although the corporal is confused and in pain. De Soya lifts him out, kicks off with him to the wardroom cubby to sponge-bathe the other man’s burning skin and to offer him a drink of orange juice. Within minutes Kee can understand.

“Something was wrong,” de Soya explains. “I had to take this risk to see what Corporal Nemes was up to.”

Kee nods his understanding. Even though dressed with the cabin temperature set high, the corporal is shivering violently.

De Soya leads the way back to the command core. Sergeant Gregorius’s créche is all amber lights now as the cycle surrenders the big man to death again. Corporal Rhadamanth Nemes’s créche shows green lights for the normal three-day resurrection. Monitor displays show that she is inside, lifeless, and receiving the secret sacramental ministrations of resurrection. De Soya taps the release code.

Warning lights blink. “Créche release not allowed during resurrection cycle,” comes Raphael’s emotionless voice. “Any attempt to open the créche now could result in true death.”

De Soya ignores the lights and warning buzzers and tugs at the lid. It stays locked. “Give me that pry bar,” he says to Kee.

The corporal tosses the iron bar across the weightless space. De Soya finds a niche for the head of the bar, says a silent prayer that he is not wrong and paranoid, and pries up the lid. Alarm bells fill the ship.

The créche is empty.

“Where is Corporal Nemes?” de Soya asks the ship.

“All instruments and sensors show her in her créche,” says the ship’s computer.

“Yeah,” says de Soya, tossing the bar aside. It tumbles into a corner in zero-g slow motion. “Come on,” he says to the corporal, and the two kick back to the wardroom cubby. The shower stall is empty. There is no place to hide in the common area. De Soya kicks forward to his command chair while Kee heads for the connecting tube.

Status lights show geosynchronous orbit at thirty thousand kilometers. De Soya looks out the window and sees a world of swirling cloud banks except for a wide band at the equator, where slash marks cut across green and brown terrain. Instruments show the dropship attached and powered down. Voice queries have the ship confirm that the dropship is where it should be, its air lock undisturbed since translation. “Corporal Kee?” de Soya says on the intercom. He must concentrate to keep his teeth from chattering. The pain is very real; it is as if his skin is on fire. He has a tremendous urge to close his eyes and sleep. “Report,” commands de Soya.

“The dropship’s gone, Captain,” says Kee from the access tunnel. “All the connector lights are green, but if I cycled the air lock, I’d be breathing vacuum. I can see out the port here that the dropship’s gone.”

“Merde,” whispers de Soya. “All right, come on back here.” He studies the other instruments while he waits. The telltale double burps are there on the thruster record… about three hours ago. Calling up the map of the equatorial region of God’s Grove, de Soya keys in a telescope and deep-radar search of the stretch of river around the stump of the Worldtree. “Find the first farcaster portal and show me every stretch of the river in between. Report on location of dropship transponder.”

“Instruments show dropship attached to the command-core boom,” says the ship. “Transponder confirms this.”

“Okay,” says de Soya, imagining himself punching out silicon chips like teeth, “ignore the dropship beacon. Just begin telescope and deep-radar searches of this region. Report any life-forms or artifacts. All data on main screens.”

“Affirmative,” says the computer. De Soya sees the screen lurch forward as telescopic magnification begins. He is looking down on a farcaster portal now from only a few hundred meters above it. “Pan downriver,” he says.

“Affirmative.”

Corporal Kee slides into the copilot’s seat and straps himself in. “With the dropship gone,” he says, “there’s no way we can get down there.”

“Combat suits,” says de Soya through the ripples of pain that shake him. “They have an ablative shield… hundreds of microlayers of colored ablative in case of a coherent light firefight, right?”

“Correct,” says Corporal Kee, “but—”

“My plan was for you and Sergeant Gregorius to use the ablative for reentry,” continues de Soya. “I could get Raphael in as low an orbit as possible. You use an auxiliary reaction pak for retro thrust. The suits should survive reentry, shouldn’t they?”

“Possibly,” says Kee, “but—”

“Then you go to EM repulsors and find this… woman,” says de Soya. “Find her and stop her. Afterward, you use the dropship to get back.”

Corporal Kee rubs his eyes. “Yes, sir. But I checked the suits. All of them have integrity breaches…”

“Integrity…” repeats de Soya stupidly.

“Someone slashed the ablative armor,” says Kee. “Not noticeable to the eye, but I ran a class-three integrity diagnostic. We’d be dead before ionization blackout.”

“All the suits?” says de Soya weakly.

“All of them, sir.”

The priest-captain overcomes the urge to curse again. “I’m going to bring the ship lower anyway, Corporal.”

“Why, sir?” says Kee. “Anything that happens down there is still going to be several hundred klicks away, and we can’t do a damn thing about it.”

De Soya nods but taps in the parameters he wants to the guidance core. His befuddled brain makes several mistakes—at least one of which would burn them up in the atmosphere of God’s Grove—but the ship catches them. De Soya resets the parameters.

“I advise against such a low orbit,” says the sexless ship’s voice. “God’s Grove has a volatile upper atmosphere, and three hundred kilometers does not satisfy safety-margin requirements as listed in the—”

“Shut up and do it,” says Father Captain de Soya.

He closes his eyes as the main thrusters fire. The return of weight makes the pain in his flesh and body all the more fierce. De Soya hears Kee groan in the copilot’s couch.

“Internal containment-field activation will alleviate the discomfort of four-g deceleration,” says the ship.

“No,” says de Soya. He is going to save power.

The noise, vibration, and pain continue. The limb of God’s Grove grows in the windscreen until it fills the view.

What if that… traitor… has programmed the ship to drive us into atmosphere if we awake and try any maneuver? de Soya suddenly thinks. He grins despite the punishing g-pull. Then she doesn’t go home either.

The punishment continues.