The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (219 page)

Out of the shade of the buildings, Hebron’s sun was even fiercer. I pulled on my old tricorn cap for a bit of shade as I stood by the steering oar with A. Bettik.

“I imagine you’re on her side,” I said at last as we moved into the open desert and the river narrowed to a canal once again.

“I am quite neutral, M. Endymion,” said the blue-skinned man.

“Hah!” I said. “You voted to stay with the raft.”

“It has served us well so far, sir,” said the android, stepping back as I hobbled closer and took the steering oar in my hands.

I looked at the new crates of provisions stacked neatly in the shade of the tent, at the stone hearth with its heating cube and pots and pans, at the shotgun and plasma rifle—freshly oiled and laid under canvas covers—and at our packs, sleeping bags, medkits, and other stuff. The forward “mast” had been raised while I was gone, and now one of A. Bettik’s extra white shirts flew from it like a flapping pennant.

“Well,” I said at last, “screw it.”

“Precisely, sir,” said the android.

The next portal was only five klicks out of town. I squinted up at Hebron’s blazing sun as we passed through the arch’s thin shadow, then into the line of the portal itself. With the other farcaster portals, there had been a moment when the air within shimmered and changed, giving us a glance at what lay ahead.

Here there was only absolute blackness. And the blackness did not change as we continued on. The temperature dropped at least seventy degrees centigrade. At the same instant, the gravity changed—it suddenly felt as if I were carrying someone my own mass on my back.

“The lamps!” I called, still holding the steering oar against a suddenly strong current. I was struggling to stay on my feet against the terrible drag of increased gravity there. The combination of chilling cold, absolute blackness, and oppressive weight was terrifying.

The two had loaded lanterns they had found in New Jerusalem, but it was the old handlamp that Aenea flicked on first. Its beam cut through icy vapor, across black water, and lifted to illuminate a roof of solid ice some fifteen meters above us. Stalactites of patterned ice hung down almost to the water. Daggers of ice protruded from the black current on either side and ahead of us. Far ahead, about where the beam began to dim at a hundred meters or so, there seemed to be a solid wall of icy blocks running right down to the water’s surface. We were in an ice cave … and one with no visible way out. The cold burned at my exposed hands, arms, and face. The gravity lay on my neck like so many iron collars.

“Damn,” I said. I locked the steering oar in place and hobbled toward the packs. It was hard to stay upright with a bad leg and eighty kilos on my back. A. Bettik and the girl were already there, digging for our insulated clothing.

Suddenly there was a loud crack. I looked up, expecting to see a stalactite falling on us, or the roof caving in under this terrible weight, but it was only our mast snapping where it had struck a low-hanging shelf of ice. The mast fell much faster than it would have in Hyperion gravity—rushing to the raft as if someone had fast-forwarded a holo. Wood chips flew as it hit. A. Bettik’s shirt struck the raft with an audible crash. It was frozen solid and covered with a thin coat of hoar frost.

“Damn,” I said again, my teeth chattering, and dug for my woolen undies.

Father Captain de Soya uses the power of the papal diskey in ways he has never before attempted.

Mare Infinitus Station Three-twenty-six Mid-littoral, where the hawking mat was discovered, is declared a crime zone and put under martial law. De Soya brings in Pax troops and ships from the floating city of St. Thérèse and places all of the former Pax garrison and the fishing guests under house arrest. When St. Thérèse’s governing prelate, Bishop Melandriano, protests this highhandedness and argues the limits of the papal diskey, de Soya goes to the planetary Governor, Archbishop Jane Kelley. The archbishop bows to the papal diskey and silences Melandriano under threat of excommunication.

Appointing young Lieutenant Sproul as his adjutant and liaison during the investigation, de Soya brings in Pax forensic experts and top investigators from St. Thérèse and the other large city platforms to carry out the crime-scene studies. Truthtell and other drugs are administered to Captain C. Dobbs Powl—who is being held under arrest in the station’s brig—the other members of the former Pax garrison there, and all the fishermen who had been present.

Within a few days it becomes obvious that Captain Powl, the late Lieutenant Belius, and many of the other officers and men of this remote platform had been conspiring with area poachers
to allow illegal catches of local game fish, to steal Pax equipment—including one submersible that had been reported as sunk by rebel fire—and to extort money from fishing guests. None of this interests Father Captain de Soya. He wants to know precisely what happened on that evening two standard months earlier.

Forensic evidence mounts. The blood and tissue on the hawking mat are DNA tested and transmitted back to the Pax records section in St. Thérèse and at the orbital Pax base. Two distinct strains of blood are found: the majority is positively identified as the DNA pattern of Lieutenant Belius; the second is unidentified in Mare Infinitus Pax records, despite the fact that every Pax citizen on the sea world has been typed and recorded.

“So how did Belius’s blood end up on the flying carpet?” asks Sergeant Gregorius. “According to everyone’s testimony under Truthtell, Belius was knocked in the drink long before the fellow they captured tried to escape on the mat.”

De Soya nods and steeples his fingers. He has turned the former director’s office into his command center, and the platform is very crowded with three times its former population now aboard. Three large Pax Sea Navy frigates are at sea anchor off the platform, and two of them are combat submersibles. The former skimmer deck is full of Pax aircraft, and engineers have been brought in to repair and extend the thopter deck. Just this morning de Soya has ordered another three ships to the area. Bishop Melandriano transmits his written protests at the mounting costs at least twice a day; Father Captain de Soya ignores them.

“I think our unknown stopped to pull the lieutenant out of the … how did you call it, Sergeant?… out of the drink. They struggled. The unknown was injured or killed. Belius tried to make it back to the station. Powl and the others killed him by mistake.”

“Aye,” says Gregorius, “that’s the best scenario I’ve heard.” In the hours since the DNA results were transmitted back from St. Thérèse, they had woven many others—plots with poachers, conspiracies between the unknown and Lieutenant Belius, Captain Powl murdering former coconspirators. This theory is the simplest.

“It means that our unknown is one of those traveling with
the girl,” says de Soya. “And he has a merciful—if stupid—side to him.”

“Or he could have been a poacher,” says Gregorius. “We’ll never know.”

De Soya taps his fingertips together and looks up. “Why not, Sergeant?”

“Well, Captain, the evidence is all down there, ain’t it, sir?” he says, jerking a thumb toward the surging violet sea outside the windows. “The navy boys here say its ten thousand fathoms deep or more—that’s almost twenty thousand meters of water, sir. Any bodies there have been eaten by the fishes, sir. And if he was a poacher who got away … well, we’ll never know. And if he was an offworlder … well, there aren’t any central Pax DNA records.… We’d have to search the files on several hundred worlds. We’ll never find him.”

Father Captain de Soya drops his hands and smiles thinly. “This is one of those rare times where you are wrong, Sergeant. Watch.”

In the next week de Soya has every poacher within a thousand-kilometer radius rounded up and questioned under Truthtell. The rounding up involves two dozen sea-naval ships and over eight thousand Pax personnel. The cost is enormous. Bishop Melandriano becomes apoplectic and flies to Station Three-twenty-six Mid-littoral to stop the madness. Father Captain de Soya places the cleric under arrest and has him flown to a remote monastery nine thousand kilometers away, near the polar ice caps.

De Soya also decides to search the ocean bottom.

“You won’t find anything, sir,” says Lieutenant Sproul. “There are so many predators down there that nothing organic makes it a hundred fathoms deep, much less to the bottom … and according to our soundings this week, that’s twelve thousand fathoms. Besides, there are only two submersibles on Mare Infinitus that can operate at that depth.”

“I know,” says de Soya. “I’ve ordered them here. They will arrive tomorrow with the frigate
Passion of Christ
.”

For once Lieutenant Sproul is speechless.

De Soya smiles. “You’re aware, aren’t you, son, that Lieutenant Belius was a born-again Christian? And his cruciform was not recovered?”

Sproul’s mouth hangs open for a moment. “Yessir … I
mean … yes, but … sir, to be resurrected, I mean … don’t they need to find the body intact, sir?”

“Not at all, Lieutenant,” says Father Captain de Soya. “Merely a good-sized segment of the cross we all bear. Many a good Catholic has been resurrected from a few centimeters of intact cruciform and a bit of flesh that can be DNA typed and grown to order.”

Sproul shakes his head. “But, sir … it’s been over nine Big Tides, sir. There’s not a square millimeter of Lieutenant Belius or his cruciform left, sir. That’s a giant feeding tank out there, sir.”

De Soya walks to the window. “Perhaps, Lieutenant. Perhaps. But we owe it to our fellow Christian to make every attempt, do we not? Besides, if Lieutenant Belius
were
to be granted the miracle of resurrection, he has to stand charges for theft, treason, and attempted murder, doesn’t he?”

Using the most advanced techniques available to them, the local forensic experts are available to lift unidentified fingerprints from a mess-hall coffee cup in spite of the many washings the cup has undergone over the past two months. Of the thousands of latent prints, all are laboriously identified as belonging to garrison troops or visiting fisherman except for this one reconstructed print. It is set aside with unidentified DNA evidence.

“During the Web days,” says Dr. Holmer Ryum, the chief forensic effort, “the megadatasphere would have put us in touch with central Hegemony files within seconds via the fatline. We could get a match almost instantly.”

“If we had some cheese, we could have a ham-and-cheese sandwich,” replies Father Captain de Soya, “if we had some ham.”

“What?” says Dr. Ryum.

“Never mind,” says de Soya. “I expect to have a match within days.”

Dr. Ryum is puzzled. “How, Father Captain? We’ve checked the planetary data banks. Run checks against every poacher you’ve captured … and I have to say, there’s never been a mass arrest like this on Mare Infinitus before. You’re upsetting
a delicate balance of corruption that has existed here for centuries.”

De Soya rubs the bridge of his nose. He has not slept much in the past weeks. “I am not interested in delicate balances of corruption, Doctor.”

“I understand,” says Ryum. “But I fail to understand how you can expect a match within days. Neither the Church nor Pax Central has files of all the citizens on various Pax worlds, much less of the Outback and Ouster areas.…”

“All Pax worlds keep their own records,” de Soya says quietly. “Of baptisms and cross sacraments. Of marriages and deaths. Military and police records.”

Dr. Ryum opens his hands in helplessness. “But where would you start?”

“Where the odds are the best in finding him,” answers Father Captain de Soya.

Meanwhile, nothing is found of the hapless Lieutenant Belius within the six-hundred-fathom depths to which the two deep-sea submersibles agree to descend. Hundreds of rainbow sharks are stunned to the surface and the contents of their stomachs analyzed. Still no Belius, neither remnants of him nor of his cruciform. Thousands of other sea scavengers are harvested within a two-hundred-klick radius, and bits of two poachers are identified in gullets, but no sign of Belius or the stranger. A funeral mass is held on Station Three-twenty-six Mid-littoral for the lieutenant, who is said to have died the true death and found true immortality.

De Soya orders the deep-sea submersible captains to go deeper, looking for artifacts. The captains refuse.

“Why?” demands the priest-captain. “I brought you here because your machines can go to the bottom. Why won’t you?”

“The Lamp Mouths,” says the senior of the two captains. “To search, we’ll have to use lights. To six hundred fathoms, our sonar and deep radar can detect them rising and we could beat them to the surface. Below that, and we wouldn’t have a chance. We won’t go deeper.”

“You will go deeper,” says Father Captain de Soya, the papal diskey glowing against the black of his cassock.

The senior captain takes a step closer. “You can arrest me,
shoot me, excommunicate me … I won’t take my men and machine down to certain death. You haven’t
seen
a Lamp Mouth, Father.”

De Soya sets a friendly hand on the captain’s shoulder. “I will not arrest, shoot, or excommunicate you, Captain. And I will see a Lamp Mouth soon. Perhaps more than one.”

The captain does not understand.

“I’ve ordered in three more of the Ocean Fleet’s attack submarines,” says de Soya. “We are going to find, flush, and kill every Lamp Mouth and any other threatening ’canth within five hundred klicks. When you dive, the area will be completely safe.”

The senior captain looks at the other deep-sea submersible captain and then back to de Soya. Both of the captains appear to be in shock. “Father … Captain … sir … do you know how much a Lamp Mouth is
worth
? To the offworld sport fishermen and the big factories at Thérèse … sir.”

“About fifteen thousand Mare-Eye seidons,” says de Soya. “That’s about thirty-five thousand Pax florins. Almost fifty thousand Mercantilus marks. Each.” De Soya smiles. “And since you two will receive thirty percent finders’ fees for locating the Mouths for the navy, I wish you good hunting.”

The two deep-submersible captains hurry out the door.