The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle (277 page)

The Propulsion Systems Engineer Lieutenant Meier had come to confession with the same concerns. The wholesale slaughter of the beautiful forcefield angels—which he had watched in tactical space—had sickened the young man and made him want to return to his ancestral religions of Judaism and Islam. Instead, he had gone to confession to admit his spiritual weakening. Father Captain de Soya had amazed Meier by telling him that his concerns were not in conflict with true Christianity.

In the days that followed, Environmental Systems Officer Commander Bettz Argyle and Energy Systems Officer Lieutenant Pol Denish followed their consciences to the confessional. Denish was among the hardest to convince, but long, whispered conversations with his cubby-mate, Lieutenant Meier, brought him along.

WHIZZO Commander Carel Shan was the last to join: the Weapons Systems Officer could no longer authorize deathbeam attacks. He had not slept in three weeks.

De Soya had realized during their last day in Lucifer System that none of the other officers was about to defect. They saw their work as distasteful but necessary. When push came to shove, he realized, the majority of flight officers and the remaining three Swiss Guard troopers would have sided with XO Hoag Liebler. Father Captain de Soya and Sergeant Gregorius decided not to give them the chance.

“The
Gabriel
is hailing us, Father Captain,” said Lieutenant Denish. The ESSO was plugged into comtact as well as into his energy systems’ console.

De Soya nodded. “Everyone make sure your couch crèches are active.” It was an unnecessary order, he knew. Every crew member went into battle stations or C-plus translation in his or
her acceleration couch, each rigged as an automated resurrection crèche.

Before jacking into tactical, de Soya checked their trajectory on the center pit display. They were pulling away from
Gabriel
, although the other archangel had gone to three hundred gravities of boost and had altered course to parallel
Raphael
’s. Across Lucifer’s solar system, the five Ouster torchships were still crawling toward their own translation points. De Soya wished them well, knowing all the while that the only reason the ships still existed was the momentary distraction
Raphael
’s puzzling course change had caused for
Gabriel
. He plugged into command tactsim.

Instantly he was a giant standing in space. The six worlds and countless moons and nascent, burning orbital forests of Lucifer spread out at his belt level. Far beyond the burning sun, the six Ouster motes balanced on tiny fusion tails.
Gabriel
’s tail was much longer;
Raphael
’s the longest yet, its brilliance rivaling the central star’s. Mother Captain Stone stood waiting a few giant’s paces from de Soya.

“Federico,” she said, “what in Christ’s name are you doing?”

De Soya had considered not answering
Gabriel
’s hail. If it would have offered them a few more minutes, he would have stayed silent. But he knew Stone. She would not hesitate. On a separate tactical channel, he glanced at the translation plot. Thirty-six minutes to shift point.

Captain! Four missile launches detected! Translating … now!
It was WHIZZO Commander Shan on the secure conduction line.

Father Captain de Soya felt sure that he had not visibly jumped or reacted in front of Mother Captain Stone in tactical. On his own bone line, he subvocalized,
It’s all right, Carel. I can see them on tac. They’ve translated toward the Ouster ships
. To Stone, he said on tactical, “You’ve launched against the Ousters.”

Stone’s face was tight even in simlight. “Of course. Why haven’t you, Federico?”

Rather than answer, de Soya stepped closer to the central sun and watched the missiles emerge from Hawking drive immediately in front of the six Ouster torchships. They detonated within seconds: two fusion, followed by two broader plasma. All of the Ousters had their defensive containment fields to maximum—an orange glow in tactical sim—but the close-range
bursts overloaded all of them. The images went from orange to red to white and then three of the ships simply ceased to exist as material objects. Two became scattered fragments tumbling toward the now infinitely distant translation points. One torchship remained intact, but its containment field dropped away and its fusion tail disappeared. If anyone aboard had survived the blast effects, they were now dead of the sleet storm of undeflected radiation that was tearing through the ship.

“What are you doing, Federico?” repeated Mother Captain Stone.

De Soya knew that Stone’s first name was Halen. He chose not to make his part of the conversation personal. “Following orders, Mother Captain.”

Even in tactsim, Stone’s expression was dubious. “What are you talking about, Father Captain de Soya?” Both knew that the conversation was being recorded. Whoever survived the next few minutes would have a record of the exchange.

De Soya kept his voice steady. “Admiral Aldikacti’s flagship tightbeamed us with a change of orders ten minutes before the flagship translated. We are carrying out those orders.”

Stone’s expression was impassive, but de Soya knew that she was subvocalizing her XO to confirm that there had been a tightbeam transmission between
Uriel
and
Raphael
at that time. There had been. But the substance of it had been trivial: updating rendezvous coordinates for the Tau Ceti System.

“What were the orders, Father Captain de Soya?”

“They were eyes-only, Mother Captain Stone. They do not concern the
Gabriel
.” On the bone circuit, he said to WHIZZO Shan,
Lock on deathbeam coordinates and give me the actuator as discussed
. A second later he felt the tactsim weight of an energy weapon in his right hand. The gun was invisible to Stone, but perfectly tactile to de Soya. He tried to make his hand on the butt of the weapon look relaxed as his finger curled around the invisible trigger. De Soya could tell from the casual way that Mother Captain Stone’s arm hung free from her body that she was also carrying a virtual weapon. They stood about three meters apart in tactsim space. Between them,
Raphael
’s long fusion tail and
Gabriel
’s shorter pillar of flame climbed toward chest height from the plane of the ecliptic.

“Father Captain de Soya, your new translation point will not take you to Tau Ceti System as ordered.”

“Those orders were superseded, Mother Captain.” De Soya was watching his former first officer’s eyes. Halen was always
good at concealing her emotions and intentions. He had lost to her in poker on more than one occasion on their old torchship,
Balthasar
.

“What is your new destination, Father Captain?”

Thirty-three minutes to shift point.

“Classified, Mother Captain. I can tell you this—
Raphael
will be rejoining the task force in Tau Ceti System after our mission is completed.”

With her left hand, Stone rubbed her cheek. De Soya watched the curled finger of her right hand. She would not have to raise the invisible handgun to trigger the deathbeam, but it was human instinct to aim the firearm at one’s opponent.

De Soya hated deathbeams and he knew that Stone did as well. They were cowardly weapons: banned by Pax Fleet and the Church until this expeditionary force incursion. Unlike the old Hegemony-era death wands that actually cast a scythelike beam of neural disruption, no coherent projection was involved in the ship-to-target deathbeam. Essentially, the powerful Gideon-drive accumulators extended a C-plus distortion of space/time within a finite cone. The result was a subtle twisting of the real-time matrix—similar to a failed translation into the old Hawking-drive space—but more than enough to destroy the delicate energy dance that was a human brain.

But however much Stone held the Pax Fleet officer’s hatred of deathbeams, it made sense for her to use it now. The
Raphael
represented a staggering investment of Pax funds: her first goal would be to stop the crew from stealing it without damaging the ship. Her problem, however, was that killing the crew with deathbeams probably would not stop
Raphael
from translating, depending upon how much of the spinup had been preprogrammed by her crew. It was traditional for a captain to make the actual translation manually—or at least to be ready to override the ship’s computer with a dead-man switch—but Stone had no assurance that de Soya would follow tradition.

“Please let me speak to Commander Liebler,” said Mother Captain Stone.

De Soya smiled. “My executive officer is attending to duties.” He thought,
So Hoag was the spy. This is the confirmation we needed
.

Gabriel
could not catch them now, not even by accelerating to six hundred gravities herself.
Raphael
would have reached translation requirements before the other ship could get within tow range. No, to stop them, Stone would have to kill the crew
and then disable the ship by using the last of her physical arsenal to overload
Raphael
’s external containment fields. If she was wrong—if de Soya
was
acting under last-minute orders—she would almost certainly be court-martialed and expelled from Pax Fleet. If she did nothing, and de Soya was stealing one of the Pax’s archangels, Stone would be court-martialed, expelled, excommunicated, and almost certainly executed.

“Federico,” she said softly, “please reduce thrust so that we can match velocities. You can still follow orders and spin up to your secret coordinates. I ask only that I board the
Raphael
, and confirm that everything is all right before you translate.”

De Soya hesitated. He could not use the guise of orders for his precipitous departure under six hundred gravities, since wherever
Raphael
ended up, there would be two days of slow resurrection for the crew before the mission could continue. He watched Stone’s eyes while also checking the tiny image of
Gabriel
on its three-hundred-gravity pillar of white fire. She might try overloading his fields with a salvo of her remaining conventional weaponry. De Soya had no wish to return missile or lance fire: a vaporized
Gabriel
was not acceptable. He was now a traitor to Church and state, but he had no intention of becoming a true-death murderer.

The deathbeams it had to be then.

“All right, Halen,” he said easily. “I’ll tell Hoag to drop to two-hundred-g’s long enough for you to come alongside.” He turned his head as if concentrating on issuing bone-channel orders.

His hand must have twitched. Stone’s did as well, the invisible handgun rising a bit as her finger tightened on the trigger.

In the split second before the disruption struck, Father Captain de Soya saw the eight sparks leaving the simtact
Gabriel
: Stone was taking no chances—she would vaporize
Raphael
rather than have it escape.

The mother-captain’s virtual image flew backward and evaporated as the deathbeam tore into her ship, severing all com connections as the humans aboard died.

Less than a second later, Father Captain de Soya felt himself jerked out of simspace as the neurons in his brain literally fried. Blood flew from his eyes, mouth, and ears, but the priest-captain was already dead, as was every conscious entity on the
Raphael
—Sergeant Gregorius and his two troopers on C deck, GOPRO Meier, VIRO Argyle, ESSO Denish, and WHIZZO Shan on the flight deck.

Sixteen seconds later, the eight Hawking-drive missiles flashed into real space and detonated on every side of the silent
Raphael
.

Gyges watched in real-time as Raul Endymion said good-bye to the family in red robes and paddled his kayak toward the farcaster arch. The world was in dual lunar eclipse. Fireworks exploded above the canal-river and strange ululations came from thousands of throats back in the linear city. Gyges stood and prepared to walk out across the water to pluck the man from his kayak. It had been agreed that if Raul Endymion was alone, that he needed to be kept alive for interrogation in the starship waiting above—finding the girl Aenea’s whereabouts was the goal of this mission—but no one said anything about not making it more difficult for the man to fight or escape. While still phase-shifted, Gyges planned to hamstring Endymion and sever the tendons in his forearms. He could do that instantly, surgically, so that there would be no danger of the human bleeding to death before being stored in the ship’s doc-in-the-box before interrogation.

Gyges had jogged the six klicks to the farcaster arch in no time, checking out pedestrians and the strange windcarts as he passed the frozen forms and figures. Once at the arch and concealed in a patch of willows on the canal’s high bank, he shifted back to slow time. His job was to guard the back door. Nemes would ping him when she found the missing spacer.

During the twenty minutes of waiting, Gyges communicated with Scylla and Briareus on the internal common band but heard nothing from Nemes. This was surprising. They had all assumed that she would find the missing man within the first few seconds of real-time after she had shifted up. Gyges was not worried—he was not actually capable of worry in the true sense of the word—but he assumed that Nemes had been searching in widening arcs, using up real-time by frequently shifting down and then back up. He assumed that his common-band queries had been made while she was phase-shifted. Added to that was his understanding that while Nemes was a clone-sibling, she had been the first to be devatted. She was less used to common-band sharing than Scylla, Briareus, and he. To be truthful, Gyges would not have minded if their orders had
been simply to pull Nemes out of the rock on God’s Grove and terminate her then and there.

The river was busy. Each time a ship approached the farcaster arch from either the east or west, Gyges shifted up and walked across the spongy surface of the river to search it and check on its passengers. Some he had to disrobe to ascertain that it was not Endymion or the android, A. Bettik, or the girl, Aenea, in disguise. To be sure, he sniffed them and took needle biopsies of the robed ones’ DNA to make sure that they were natives of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. All were.