Endymion

55

It had been a long, boring afternoon for Nemes. She had napped away a few hours, awakening when she felt the displacement disruption as the farcaster portal was activated some fifteen klicks upriver. She had moved up the rock a few meters, hiding herself behind deadfall, and waited for the next act. The next act, she thought, had been a farce. She had watched the flailing around in the river, the awkward rescue of the artificial man—artificial man minus one artificial arm, she amended—and then, with some interest, the odd appearance of the Shrike. She had known the Shrike was around, of course, since the displacement tremors of its movement through the continuum were not that different from the portal’s opening. She had even shifted to fast time to watch it wade into the river and play bogeyman for the humans. It bemused her: what was the obsolete creature doing? Keeping the humans out of her earwig trap or just herding them back toward her, like a good little sheepdog? Nemes knew that the answer depended upon which powers had sent the bladed monstrosity on this mission in the first place.

It was largely irrelevant. It was thought in the Core that the Shrike had been created and sent back in time by an early iteration of the UI. It was known that the Shrike had failed and that it would be defeated again in the far-future struggles between the fledgling human UI and the maturing Machine God. Whichever the case, the Shrike was a failure and a footnote to this journey. Nemes’s only interest in the thing was her fading hope that it might provide a moment’s excitement as an adversary.

Now, watching the exhausted humans and comatose android sprawl on the grass, she grows bored of being passive. Tucking the specimen bag more firmly in her belt and slipping the Sphinx-trap card into the sticktight band at her wrist, she walks down the rock and onto the grassy shelf.

The young man, Raul, is on one knee adjusting a low-power laser. Nemes cannot help but smile. “You wouldn’t use that on me, would you?” she says.

The man does not answer. He lifts the laser. Nemes thinks that if he uses it on her, in an attempt to blind her, no doubt, she will phase-shift and ram it all the way up past his colon into his lower intestine—without turning the beam off.

Aenea looks at her for the first time. Nemes can see why the Core is nervous about the young human’s potential—access elements of the Void Which Binds shimmer around the girl like static electricity—but Nemes also sees that the girl is years away from using any potential she has in that area. All this Sturm und Drang and galloping urgency has been for nothing. The human girl is not just immature in her powers, she is innocent of their true meaning.

Nemes realizes that she has harbored some small anxiety that the child herself would pose a problem in the final seconds, somehow tapping into a Void interface and creating difficulties. Nemes realizes that she was mistaken to have worried. Oddly enough, it is a disappointment. “Somehow I expected something more interesting,” she says aloud, and takes another step closer.

“What do you want?” demands young Raul, struggling to his feet. Nemes sees that the man has become exhausted just pulling his friends from the river.

“I want nothing from you,” she says easily. “Nor from your dying blue friend. From Aenea, I need just a few seconds of conversation.” Nemes nods toward the nearby trees where the claymores are seeded. “Why don’t you take your golem into the trees and wait for the girl to join you? We’ll just have a word in private, and then she’s yours.” She takes another step closer.

“Stay back,” says Raul, and lifts the little flashlight laser.

Nemes holds up her hands as if frightened. “Hey, don’t shoot, pardner,” she says. If the laser carried ten thousand times the amperage it did, Nemes would not be worried.

“Just back away,” says Raul. His thumb is on the trigger button. The toy laser is aimed at Nemes’s eyes.

“All right, all right,” says Nemes. She takes a step back. And phase-shifts into a gleaming chrome figure only sketchily human.

“Raul!” cries Aenea.

Nemes is bored. She shifts into fast time. The tableau in front of her is frozen. Aenea’s mouth is open, still speaking, but the vibrations in the air do not move. The rushing river is frozen, as if in a photograph with an impossibly high shutter speed. Droplets of spray hang in the air. Another droplet of water hangs suspended a millimeter beneath Raul’s dripping chin.

Nemes strides over and takes the flashlight laser from Raul’s hand. She is tempted to act on her earlier impulse right now and then drop to slow time to watch everyone’s reaction, but she sees Aenea out of the corner of her eye—the girl’s little hand is still molded into a fist—and Nemes realizes that she has work to do before having fun.

She drops her phase-shifted morphic layer long enough to retrieve the specimen bag from her belt and then shifts again. She walks over to the crouching girl, holds the open bag like a waiting basket beneath the child’s chin with her left hand, and rigidifies the edge of her phase-shifted right hand and all of her forearm into a cutting blade not much duller than the monofilament wire still hanging over the river.

Nemes smiles behind her chrome mask. “So long… kiddo,” she says. She had eavesdropped on their conversation when the trio had been kilometers upriver.

She brings her blade-sharp forearm down in a killing arc.

“What the hell’s going on?” Shouts Corporal Kee. “I can’t see.”

“Quiet,” orders de Soya. Both men are in their command chairs, leaning over the telescope monitors.

“Nemes turned… I don’t know… metallic,” says Kee, playing the video again in an insert box while watching the milling tableau below, “and then she disappeared.”

“Radar doesn’t show her,” says de Soya, keying through different sensor modes. “No IR… although the ambient temperature’s risen almost ten degrees centigrade in the immediate region. Heavy ionization.”

“Local storm cell?” says Kee, bewildered. Before de Soya can answer, Kee points to the monitor. “Now what? The girl’s down. Something’s happening with the guy…”

“Raul Endymion,” says de Soya, trying to improve the image quality on the monitor. The rising heat and atmospheric turbulence makes the image ripple and blur in spite of the computer’s best efforts to stabilize it. Raphael is holding its place only 280 klicks above hypothetical sea level on God’s Grove, far too low for an easy geosynchronous orbit and low enough that the ship is paranoid about expansion of the atmosphere adding to the already molecular heating the ship is encountering.

Father Captain de Soya has seen enough to make a decision. “Divert all power from ship functions and drop life support to minimal levels,” his voice orders. “Bring the fusion core to one hundred fifteen percent and kill forward deflection shields. Shift power for tactical use.”

“That would not be advisable—” begins the ship’s voice.

“Override all voice response and safety protocols,” snaps de Soya. “Priority code delta-nine-nine-two-zero. Papal diskey override… now. Readout confirmation.”

The monitors fill with data columns superimposed over the shifting image on the ground. Kee is watching wide-eyed. “Dear sweet Jesus,” whispers the corporal. “My God.”

“Yes,” whispers de Soya, watching the power to all systems except visual monitoring and tactical fall beneath red lines.

The explosions on the surface begin then.

At this point I had precisely enough time to have a retinal echo of the woman becoming silver blur, I blinked, and the flashlight laser was gone from my fingers. The air was becoming superheated. On either side of Aenea the air suddenly misted and seemed filled with a struggling chrome figure—six arms, four legs, flailing blades—and then I was leaping at the girl, knowing that nothing I could do would be in time, but—amazingly—reaching her in time to pull her down and roll aside from the blast of hot air and blurred motion.

The medkit warning alarm went off like fingers on slate—a sound impossible to ignore. We were losing A. Bettik. I covered Aenea with my body and pulled her toward A. Bettik’s body. Then the explosions began in the woods behind us.

Nemes swings her arm, expecting to feel nothing as the edge slices through muscle and vertebrae, and is shocked by the violent contact.

She looks down. The sharpened edge of her phase-shifted hand is in the grip of two sets of fingerblades. Her forearm is gripped by two other scalpel-sharp hands. The bulk of the Shrike presses close, the blades on the lower body almost in the frozen girl’s face. The creature’s eyes are bright red.

Nemes is momentarily startled and seriously irritated, but not alarmed. She rips her hand away and jumps back.

The tableau is exactly as it had been a second before—river in freeze time, Raul Endymion’s empty hand outstretched as if pressing the firing stud on the little laser, the android dying on the ground with medpak lights frozen in midblink—only the girl is now overshadowed by the huge bulk of the Shrike.

Nemes smiles beneath her chrome mask. She had been concentrating on the girl’s neck and not noticed the clumsy thing coming up on her in fast time. That is a mistake she will not make again.

“You want her?” says Nemes. “Have you also been sent to kill her? Be my guest… as long as I get the head.”

The Shrike pulls its arms back and steps around the child, its thorns and knee blades missing her eyes by less than a centimeter. Legs apart, the Shrike stands between Nemes and Aenea.

“Oh,” says Nemes, “you don’t want her? Then I’ll have to take her back.” Nemes moves faster than fast time, feinting left, circling right, and swinging down. If the space around her had not been warped by displacement, sonic booms would have shattered everything within kilometers.

The Shrike blocks the blow. Sparks leap from chrome, and lightning discharges into the ground. The creature slashes the air where Nemes had been a nanosecond before. She comes around from the rear, kicking at the child’s back with a blow that will drive the girl’s spine and heart out through her chest.

The Shrike deflects the kick and sends Nemes flying. The chromed woman shape is hurled thirty meters into the trees, smashing branches and trunks, which hang in midair after she has passed. The Shrike hurtles through fast time after her.

Nemes strikes a boulder and is embedded five centimeters in solid rock. She senses the Shrike shifting down to slow time as it flies toward her, and she follows the displacement back into noise and motion. The trees snap, break, and burst into flame. The miniclaymores sense no heartbeat or respiration, but they feel the pressure and leap toward it, hundreds exploding in a chain reaction of shaped charges that drive Aenea and the Shrike together like halves of an old imploding uranium bomb.

The Shrike has a long curved blade on its chest. Nemes has heard all the stories about the victims the creature has impaled and dragged off to stick on the longer thorns of its Tree of Pain. She is not impressed. As the two are driven together by the shaped charges exploding all around them, Nemes’s displacement field bends the Shrike’s chest thorn back on itself. The creature opens steam-shovel jaws and roars in the ultrasonic. Nemes swings a bladed forearm into its neck and sends it fifteen meters into the river.

She ignores the Shrike and turns toward Aenea and the others. Raul has thrown himself across the girl. How touching, thinks Nemes, and shifts up into fast time, freezing even the billowing clouds of orange flame that spread from where she stands in the heart of the explosion’s flowering.

She jogs out through the semisolid wall of the shock wave and breaks into a run toward the girl and her friend. She will sever both their heads, keeping the man’s as a memento after delivering the girl’s.

Nemes is within a meter of the brat when the Shrike emerges from the cloud of steam that had been the river and blindsides her from the left. Her swinging arm misses the two human heads by centimeters as she and the Shrike roll away from the river, slicing up turf to bedrock and snapping off trees until they slam into another rock wall. The Shrike’s carapace throws sparks as the huge jaws open, teeth closing on Nemes’s throat.

“You’ve… got… to be… rucking… kidding,” she gasps behind the displacement mask. Being chewed to death by an obsolete time-shifter is not on her itinerary for today. Nemes makes a blade of her hand and drives it deep into the Shrike’s thorax as the rows of teeth throw sparks and lightning from her shielded throat. Nemes grins as she feels the four fingers of her hand penetrate armor and carapace. She grabs a fistful of innards and jerks them out, hoping to remove whatever foul organs keep the beast alive but coming away with only a handful of razor-wire tendons and shards of carapace. But the Shrike staggers backward, four arms swinging like scythes. Its massive jaws are still working as if the creature cannot believe it is not chewing bits of its victim.

“Come on!” says Nemes, stepping toward the thing. “Come on!” She wants to destroy it—her blood is up, as the humans used to say—but she is still calm enough to know that this is not her purpose. She has only to distract it or disable it to the point that she can decapitate the human child. Then the Shrike will be irrelevant forever. Perhaps Nemes and her kind will keep it in a zoo to hunt it when they are bored. “Come on,” she taunts, taking another step forward.

The creature is hurt enough to drop out of fast time without dropping the displacement fields around it. Nemes could have destroyed it at her leisure except for the displacement field; if she walks around it now, it can shift up to fast time behind her. She follows it down to slow time, pleased to conserve energy.

“Jesus!” I cried, looking up from where I had thrown myself across Aenea. She was watching from the protective circle of my arm.

It was all happening at once. A. Bettik’s medkit alarm was screeching, the air was as hot as a breath from a blast furnace, the forest behind us exploded in flame and noise, splinters from trees exploded by superheated steam filled the air above us, the river erupted in a geyser of steam, and suddenly the Shrike and a chromed human shape were feinting and slashing not three meters from us.

Aenea ignored the carnage and crawled out from the shelter of my body, scrabbling across the muddy ground to get to A. Bettik. I slid along behind her, watching the chrome blurs surging and smashing into each other. Static electricity whipped from the two forms and leaped to the rocks and savaged ground.

“CPR!” cried the girl, and began administering to A. Bettik. I jumped to the other side and read the medkit telltales. He was not breathing. His heart had stopped half a minute before. Too much blood loss.

Something silver and sharp hurtled toward Aenea’s back. I moved to pull her down, but before I could reach her, another metallic shape intercepted the first one and the air exploded with the sound of metal striking metal. “Let me!” I shouted, pulling her around the android’s body, trying to keep her behind me while picking up the rhythm of resuscitation. The medkit lights showed that blood was being pumped to A. Bettik’s brain by our efforts. His lungs were receiving and expelling air, although not without our help. I continued the motion, watching over my shoulder as two figures crashed, rolled, and collided with near-supersonic speed. The air stank of ozone. Embers from the burning forest drifted around us and steam clouds billowed and hissed.

“Next… year…” shouted Aenea above the din, her teeth chattering despite the sweat-dripping heat, “we… take… our vacation… somewhere else.”

I lifted my head to stare, thinking that she had gone insane. Her eyes were bright but not totally crazy. That was my diagnosis. The medkit chirped alarm, and I continued my ministrations.

Behind us there was a sudden implosion, quite audible over the crackling of flames, hissing of steam, and clashing of metal surfaces. I turned to look over my shoulder, never ceasing the CPR motions on A. Bettik.

The air shimmered, and a single chrome figure stood where the two forms had been warring. Then the metallic surface rippled and disappeared. The woman from the rock was standing there. Her hair was not mussed and she showed no signs of exertion.

“Now,” said the woman, “where were we?” She came forward at an easy walk.

In those last seconds of the battle, it was not easy getting the Sphinx trap in place. Nemes is using all her energy fighting off the Shrike’s whirring blades. It is like fighting several spinning propellers at once, she thinks. She has been on worlds with propeller-driven aircraft. Two centuries earlier she had killed the Hegemony Consul on such a world.

Now she bats away whirling arms, never removing her gaze from the glaring red eyes. Your time has passed, she thinks at the Shrike as their displacement-shrouded arms and legs slash and counterslash like invisible scythes. Reaching through the thing’s less-focused field, she seizes a joint on its upper arm and rips thorns and blades away. That arm falls away, but five scalpels on the lower hand dig at her abdomen, trying to disembowel her through the field.

“Uh-uh,” she says, kicking the thing’s right leg out from under it for a split second. “Not so fast.”

The Shrike staggers, and in that instant of vulnerability she slips the Sphinx card from her wristband, slides it through a five-nanosecond gap in her displacement field squarely into the palm of her hand, and slaps it onto a spike rising from the Shrike’s banded neck.

“That’s all,” cries Nemes as she jumps back, shifts to fast time to bat away the Shrike’s attempt to remove the card, and activates it by thinking of a red circle.

She leaps back farther as the hyperentropic field hums into existence, propelling the flailing monster five minutes into the future. It has no way back while the field exists.

Rhadamanth Nemes shifts down from fast time and drops the field. The breeze—superheated and ember laden as it is—feels delightfully cool to her. “Now,” she says, enjoying the look in the two pairs of human eyes, “where were we?”

“Do it!” shouts Corporal Kee.

“I can’t,” says de Soya at the controls. His finger is in the tactical omnigrip. “Groundwater. Steam explosion. It would kill them all.” Raphael’s boards show every erg of energy diverted, but it does no good.

Kee flips down his microphone bead, throws the switch to all channels, and begins broadcasting on tightbeam, making sure that the reticule is on the man and girl, not on the advancing woman.

“That won’t do any good,” says de Soya. He has never been so frustrated in his life.

“Rocks,” Kee is shouting into his bead mike. “Rocks!”

I was standing, pushing Aenea behind and wishing that I had the pistol, the flashlight laser, anything, as the woman approached. The plasma rifle was still in the watertight shoulder bag near the riverbank just two meters away. All I had to do was jump, unseal the bag, lever off the safety, snap open the folding stock, aim, and fire. I did not think that the smiling woman would give me the time. Nor did I believe that Aenea would be alive when I turned to fire.

At that moment the idiot comlog bracelet on my wrist started vibrating its inner lining against my skin like one of those antique soundless alarm watches. I ignored it. The comlog began pricking tiny needles into my wrist. I raised the stupid thing to my ear. It whispered at me, “Get to the rocks. Take the girl and get to the lava rocks.”

Nothing made sense. I looked down at A. Bettik, the telltales shifting from green through amber as I watched, and began backing away from the smiling woman, keeping my body between her and Aenea as we stumbled backward.

“Now, now,” said the woman. “That’s not very nice. Aenea, if you come here, your boyfriend can live. Your phony blue man can live also, if your boyfriend can keep him alive.”

I glanced down to see Aenea’s face, afraid that she would accept the offer. She clung to my arm. Her eyes showed a terrible intensity, but still no fear. “It’ll be all right, kiddo,” I whispered, still moving to our left. Behind us was the river. Five meters to our left and the lava rocks began.

The woman moved right, blocking our movement. “This is taking too long,” she said softly. “I only have another four minutes. Oodles and oodles of time. An eternity of time.”

“Come on.” I grabbed Aenea’s wrist and ran for the rocks. I had no plan. I had only the nonsensical words whispered in a voice that was not the comlog’s.

We never reached the lava rocks. There was a blast of heated air and the chrome shape of the woman was ahead of us, standing three meters above us on the black rock face. “Bye, bye, Raul Endymion,” the chrome mask said. The shimmering metal arm rose.

The blast of heat burned off my eyebrows, set fire to my shirt, and threw the girl and me backward through the air. We hit hard and rolled away from the unspeakable heat. Aenea’s hair was smoldering, and I batted my forearms against her, trying to keep her hair from bursting into flame. A. Bettik’s medkit was screeching again, but the avalanche roar of superheated air behind us drowned the noise. I saw that my shirtsleeve was smoking, and I ripped it away before it ignited. Aenea and I turned our backs to the heat and crawled and scrabbled away as quickly as we could. It was like being on the lip of a volcano.

We grabbed A. Bettik’s body and pulled him to the riverbank, not hesitating a second before sliding into the steaming current. I struggled to keep the unconscious android’s head above water while Aenea fought to keep both of us from sliding away on the current. Just above the surface of the water, where our faces were pressed against the wet mud of the riverbank, the air was almost cool enough to breathe.

Feeling the blisters forming on my forehead, not yet knowing that my eyebrows and swaths of hair were missing, I raised my head to the edge of the riverbank and peered over.

The chromed figure stood in the center of a three-meter circle of orange light that stretched up to the heavens and disappeared only when it narrowed to an infinite point hundreds of kilometers above. The air rippled and roiled where the beam of almost solid energy ripped through the atmosphere.

The metallic woman-shape tried to move toward us, but the high-energy lance seemed to exert too much pressure. Still, she stood, the chrome field around her turning red, then green, then a blinding white. But still she stood, her fist raised and shaking at the sky. Beneath her feet the lava rock boiled, turned red, and ran downhill in great molten rivers. Some ran into the river not ten meters downstream from us, and the steam clouds billowed up with a loud hissing. At that moment I admit that I considered becoming religious for the first time in my life.

The chrome shape seemed to see the danger seconds before it was too late. It disappeared, reappeared as a blur—fist shaking toward the sky—disappeared again, reappeared a final time, and then sank into the lava under its feet where solid rock had been an instant earlier.

The beam stayed on for another full minute. I could not look directly at it any longer, and the heat was burning away the skin of my cheeks. I pressed my face against the cool mud again and held A. Bettik and the girl against the bank even as the current tried to pull us downstream into the steam and lava and microfilament wires.

I looked up one final time, saw the chromed fist sinking beneath the surface of the lava, and then the field seemed to shift down in colors for a moment before it winked off. The lava began to cool at once. By the time I had pulled Aenea and A. Bettik out of the water and we had begun CPR again, the rock was solidifying with only rivulets and pseudo-pods of lava still flowing. Bits of cooling rock flaked off and rose in the heated air, joining the embers from the forest fire still raging behind us. There was no sign of the chrome woman.

Amazingly, the medkit was still functioning. Lights went from red to amber as we kept blood moving to A. Bettik’s brain and limbs and breathed life back into him. The tourniquet sleeve was tight. When he seemed to be holding his own, I looked up at the girl crouched across from me. “What next?” I said.

There was a soft implosion of air behind us, and I turned in time to see the Shrike flash into existence.

“Jesus wept,” I said softly.

Aenea was shaking her head. I could see the heat blisters on her lips and forehead. Strands of her hair had burned away, and her shirt was a sooty mess. Other than that, she seemed all right. “No,” she said. “It’s all right.”

I had stood and was fumbling in the shoulder bag for the plasma rifle. No use. It had been too close to the beam of energy. The trigger guard was half-melted and plastic elements in the folded stock had fused with the metal barrel. It was a miracle that the plasma cartridges had not gone off and blasted us to vapor. I dropped the bag and faced the Shrike with my fists balled. Let it come through me, goddamn it.

“It’s all right,” Aenea said again, pulling me back. “It won’t do anything. It’s all right.”

We crouched next to A. Bettik. The android’s eyelashes were fluttering. “Did I miss anything?” he whispered hoarsely.

We did not laugh. Aenea touched the blue man’s cheek and looked at me. The Shrike stayed where it had first appeared, burning embers drifting by its red eyes and soot settling on its carapace.

A. Bettik closed his eyes and the telltales began to blink again. “We need to get him serious help,” I whispered to Aenea, “or we’re going to lose him.”

She nodded. I thought she had whispered something back, but it was not her voice speaking.

I lifted my left arm, ignoring the tattered shirt and rising red welts there. All the hair had been burned off my forearm.

We both listened. The comlog was speaking in a familiar man’s voice.