Endymion

57

It took us more than two hours to go the kilometer and a half. The lava hills were very rough. It would have been easy to break an ankle on those rills and fissures without the added weight of A. Bettik on my back. It was very dark—clouds had moved in to occlude the stars—and I don’t think we would have made it at all that night if Aenea hadn’t found the flashlight laser lying in the grass when we were packing up to move out. “How the hell did that get there?” I said. The last I remembered of the little laser, I had been ready to trigger it at the hell-woman’s eyes. Then it had been gone. Well, I thought, to hell with it. It had been a day for mysteries. We left with one last mystery behind us—the silent form of the Shrike, still frozen where it had reappeared. It did not attempt to follow us.

With Aenea leading the way with the flashlight set at widebeam, we struggled and scrabbled our way across the black rock and shifting ash back into the hills. We would have made it in half the time if A. Bettik had not required constant treatment. The medkit had used up its modest share of antibiotics, stimulants, painkillers, plasma, and IV drip. A. Bettik was alive because of the kit’s work, but it was still a close thing. He had simply lost too much blood in the river; the tourniquet had made a difference, but the belt had not been tight enough to staunch all the bleeding. We administered CPR when we had to, just to keep the blood flowing to his brain if nothing else, and stopped when the medkit alarms started squawking. The comlog kept us on track in the Pax corporal’s voice, and I decided that even if this was all a trick to capture Aenea, we owed those two men up there a hell of a debt of gratitude. And all the time we were scrambling through the darkness, Aenea’s flashlight beam playing over black lava and the skeletons of dead trees, I expected that hell-woman’s chromed hand to slash up through the rock and grab me by the ankle.

We found the dropship right where they said it would be. Aenea started up the metal ladder, but I grabbed her tattered pant leg and made her come down.

“I don’t want you in the ship, kiddo,” I said. “We only have their word that they can’t fly it by remote. If you get in and they can fly it from up there, they’ve got you.”

She sagged against the ladder. I had never seen her look so exhausted. “I trust them,” she said. “They said—”

“Yeah, but they can’t grab you if you’re not in there. You stay here while I carry A. Bettik up and see if there’s an autosurgeon.”

As I went up the ladder, I had a stomach-twisting thought. What if the metal door above me was locked and the keys were in the hell-woman’s jumper pocket?

There was a lighted diskey pad. “Six-nine-nine-two,” said Corporal Kee’s voice from the comlog.

I tapped it in and the outer air-lock door slid open. The autosurgeon was in there and it came alive with a touch. I gently lowered my blue friend into the cushioned enclosure—taking great pains not to hit the raw stump of his arm—made sure that the diagnostic patches and pressure cuffs were placing themselves properly, and then closed the lid. It felt too much like closing a coffin.

The readouts were not promising, but the surgeon went to work. I watched the monitor for a moment until I realized that my eyes were blurring and that I was dozing on my feet. Rubbing my cheeks, I went back to the open air lock.

“You can stand on the ladder, kiddo. If the ship starts to take off, jump.”

Aenea stepped up onto the ladder and winked off the flashlight laser. Our light came from the glowing autosurgeon and from some of the console lights. “Then what?” said Aenea. “I jump off and the ship takes off with you and A. Bettik. Then what do I do?”

“Head for the next farcaster portal,” I said.

The comlog said, “We don’t blame you for being suspicious.” It spoke in Father Captain de Soya’s voice.

Sitting in the open hatch, listening to the breeze rustle the broken branches tossed atop the aircraft-sized lifting body, I said, “Why this change of heart and program, Father Captain? You came to get Aenea. Why the turnabout?” I remembered the chase through Parvati System, his order to fire on us at Renaissance Vector.

Instead of answering, the priest-captain’s voice said, “I have your hawking mat, Raul Endymion.”

“Yeah?” I said tiredly. I tried to remember where I had seen it last. Flying toward the platform station on Mare Infinitus. “Small universe,” I said as if it did not matter. Inwardly, I would have given anything to have that little flying carpet right now. Aenea clung to the ladder and listened. From time to time, we both glanced over to make sure the autosurgeon had not given up.

“Yes,” said the voice of Father Captain de Soya, “and I have begun to understand a little of how you think, my friends. Perhaps someday you will understand how I think.”

“Perhaps,” I said. I did not know it then, but that would be literally true someday.

His voice became businesslike, almost brusque. “We believe that Corporal Nemes defeated the remote autopilot with some program override, but we won’t try to convince you of that. Feel free to use the dropship to continue your voyage without fear of our trying to capture Aenea.”

“How do we do that?” I said. The burns were beginning to hurt. In a minute I would find the energy to go through the bins above the autosurgeon and find out if the ship had its own medkit. I was sure it would.

“We will leave the system,” said Father Captain de Soya.

I perked up. “How can we be sure of that?”

The comlog chuckled. “A ship climbing out of a planet’s gravity well on fusion power is rather obvious,” he said. “Our telescope shows that you have only scattered clouds above you at the moment. You will see us.”

“See you leaving near orbit,” I said. “How can we know you’ve translated out of system?”

Aenea pulled my wrist down and spoke into the comlog. “Father? Where are you going?”

There was a hiss of silence. “Back to Pacem,” de Soya said eventually. “We have one of the three fastest ships in the universe, and my corporal friend and I have each silently considered heading… elsewhere… but when it comes down to it, we are both soldiers. In the Pax Fleet and in the Army of Christ. We will return to Pacem and answer questions… face whatever we must face.”

Even on Hyperion the Holy Office of the Inquisition had cast its cold shadow. I shivered, and it was not just the cold wind from the ash heap of the Worldtree that made me cold.

“Besides,” continued de Soya, “we have a third comrade here who did not come through resurrection successfully. We must return to Pacem for medical care.”

I looked at the humming autosurgeon and—for the first time that endless day—believed that the priest above us was not an enemy.

“Father de Soya,” said Aenea, still holding my hand so that the comlog was near her, “what will they do to you? To all of you?”

Again came the sound of a chuckle above the static. “If we’re lucky, they will execute us and then excommunicate us. If unlucky, they will reverse the order of those two events.”

I could see that Aenea was not amused. “Father Captain de Soya… Corporal Kee… come down and join us. Send the ship back with your friend, and join us to go through the next portal.”

This time the silence stretched long enough that I feared the tightbeam connection had broken. Then came de Soya’s soft voice. “I am tempted, my young friend. Both of us are tempted. I would love to travel by farcaster someday, and even more, I would love to get to know you. But we are faithful servants of the Church, my dear, and our duties are clear. It is my hope that this… aberration… that was Corporal Nemes was a mistake. We must return if we are ever to know.”

Suddenly there was a burst of light. I leaned out of the air lock, and we both watched the blue-white fusion tail cross between the scattered clouds.

“Besides that,” came de Soya’s voice, strained now as if under a g-load, “we really do not have any way down to you without the dropship. The Nemes thing slashed the troopers’ combat suits, so even that desperate attempt is not an option.”

Aenea and I were both sitting on the edge of the open air lock now, watching the fusion tail grow longer and brighter. It seemed a lifetime since we had flown in our own ship. A thought struck me like a blow to the stomach, and I lifted the comlog. “Father Captain, is this… Nemes… dead? I mean, we saw her buried in molten lava… but could she be burrowing out even as we speak?”

“We have no idea,” said Father Captain de Soya over the tightbeam hiss. “My recommendation would be to get out of there as soon as possible. The dropship is our parting gift to you. Use it in good health.”

I looked out at the black lava landscape for a minute. Every time the wind rustled dead branches or scraped ash on ash, I was sure it was the hell-woman gliding toward us.

“Aenea,” came the priest-captain’s voice.

“Yes, Father Captain?”

“We’re going to shut off the tightbeam in a second… we’ll be passing out of line-of-sight anyway… but I have to tell you one thing.”

“What’s that, Father?”

“My child, if they order me back to find you… not to hurt you, but to find you… well, I am an obedient servant of the Church and a Pax Fleet officer…”

“I understand, Father,” said Aenea. Her eyes were still on the sky where the fusion tail was fading near the eastern horizon. “Good-bye, Father. Good-bye, Corporal Kee. Thank you.”

“Good-bye, my daughter,” said Father Captain de Soya. “God bless you.” We could both hear the sound of a benediction. Then the tightbeam snapped off and there was only silence.

“Come on in,” I said to Aenea. “We’re leaving. Now.”

Closing the inner and outer air-lock doors was a simple enough task. We checked on the autosurgeon a final time—all of the lights were amber but steady—and then strapped ourselves into the heavy acceleration couches. There were shields to cover the windscreen, but they were raised, and we could see across the dark lava fields. A few stars were visible in the east.

“Okay,” I said, looking at the myriad switches, diskeys, touchplates, holopads, monitors, flatscreens, buttons, and gewgaws. There was a low console between us and two omnicontrollers there, each with finger insets and more diskey patterns. I could see half a dozen places where one could jack in directly. “Okay,” I said again, looking at the pale girl dwarfed by her padded chair, “any ideas?”

“Get out and walk?” she said.

I sighed. “That might be the best plan except for—” I jerked my thumb back toward the humming autosurgeon.

“I know,” said Aenea. She sagged in the heavy straps. “I was joking.”

I touched her hand on the console. As always, there was a jolt of electricity there—a sort of physical deja vu. Pulling my hand away, I said, “Goddammit, the more advanced a technology’s supposed to be, the simpler it’s supposed to be. This looks like something out of an eighteenth-century Old Earth fighter-plane cockpit.”

“It’s built for professionals to fly,” said Aenea. “We just need a professional pilot.”

“You have one,” chirped the comlog. It was speaking in its own voice.

“You know how to fly a ship?” I said suspiciously.

“In essence, I am a ship,” the comlog said primly. The clasp panel clicked open. “Please connect the red filament jack to any red interface port.”

I connected it to the console. Immediately the panel came alive, monitors glowed, instruments checked in, the dropship’s ventilators hummed, and the omnicontroller twitched. A flat-screen monitor in the center of the dash glowed yellow, and the comlog’s voice said, “Where do you wish to go, M. Endymion? M. Aenea?”

The girl spoke first. “The next farcaster,” she said softly. “The last farcaster.”