by Dan Simmons
“Jesus,” I whispered, pushed away from the bookcase, bouncing off the opposite bulkhead, and followed her down the central dropshaft.
For the next hour we played in zero-g: zero-g tag, zero-g hide-and-seek (finding that one could hide in the oddest places when gravity was not a restraint), zero-g soccer using one of the plastic space helmets from a locker on the storage/corridor deck, and even zero-g wrestling, which was harder than I would have imagined. My first attempt to grab the child sent both of us tumbling and crashing through the length, breadth, and height of fugue deck.
In the end, exhausted and sweaty (the perspiration hung in the air until one moved or a trickle of air from the ventilators moved it, I discovered), Aenea ordered the balcony opened again—I shouted in fear when she did so, but the ship quietly reminded me that the exterior field was quite intact—and we floated out above the bolted-down Steinway, floated to the railing and beyond, into that no-man’s-land between the ship and the field, floated ten meters out and looked back at the ship itself, surrounded by exploding fractals, glowing in the cold fireworks glory of it as Hawking space folded and contracted around us several billion times a second.
Finally we kicked and swam our way back in (a difficult and awkward feat, I discovered, when there was nothing to push against), warned A. Bettik over the intercom to find a floor, and brought back the one-g internal field. Both the child and I giggled as sweaters, sandwiches, chairs, books, and several spheres of water from a glass that had been left out came crashing down to the carpet.
It was that same day, night rather, for the ship had dimmed the lights for sleep period, that I padded down the spiral stairs to the holopit level to fix a midnight snack and heard soft sounds through the opening to the fugue deck below.
“Aenea?” I said, speaking softly. There was no answer. Iwent to the head of the stairs, looking at the dark drop in the center of the stairwell and smiling as I remembered our midair antics there a few hours before. “Aenea?”
There still came no answer, but the soft sounds continued. Wishing I had a flashlight, I padded down the metal stairs in my sock feet.
There was a soft glow from the fugue-sleep monitors above the couches tucked in their cubbies. The soft sound was coming from Aenea’s cubby. She had her back to me. The blanket was pulled to her shoulders, but I could see the collar of the Consul’s old shirt that she had appropriated for use as a nightshirt. I walked over, my sock feet making no noise on the soft floor, and knelt by the couch. “Aenea?” The girl was crying, obviously trying to muffle her sobs.
I touched her shoulder and she finally turned. Even in the dim instrument glow I could see that she had been weeping for some time; her eyes were red and puffy, her cheeks streaked with tears.
“What’s wrong, kiddo?” I whispered. We were two decks above where A. Bettik slept in his hammock in the engine room, but the stairwell was open.
For a moment Aenea did not respond, but eventually the sobs slowed, then stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said at last.
“It’s all right. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Give me a tissue and I will,” said the girl.
I rummaged in the pockets of the old robe the Consul had left. I had no tissue, but I had been using a napkin with the cake I’d been eating upstairs. I handed her the linen.
“Thanks.” She blew her nose. “I’m glad we’re not still in zero-g,” she said through the cloth. “There’d be snot floating everywhere.”
I smiled and squeezed her shoulder. “What’s wrong, Aenea?”
She made a soft noise that I realized was an attempt at a laugh. “Everything,” she said. “Everything’s wrong. I’m scared. Everything I know about the future scares the shit out of me. I don’t know how we’re going to get past the Pax guys that I know will be waiting for us in a few days. I’m homesick. I can never go back, and everybody I knew except Martin is gone forever. Mostly, though, I guess I just miss my mother.”
I squeezed her shoulder. Brawne Lamia, her mother, was the stuff of legend—a woman who had lived and died two and a half long centuries ago. A few of her bones had already turned to dust, wherever they were buried. For this child, her mother’s death was only two weeks in the past.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and squeezed her shoulder again, feeling the texture of the Consul’s old shirt. “It’ll be all right.”
Aenea nodded and took my hand. Hers was still moist. I noticed how tiny her palm and fingers were against my huge paw.
“Want to come up to the galley and have some chalmaroot cake and milk with me?” I whispered. “It’s good.”
She shook her head. “I think I’ll sleep now. Thanks, Raul.” She squeezed my hand again before relinquishing it, and in that second I realized the great truth: the One Who Teaches, the new messiah, whatever Brawne Lamia’s daughter would turn out to be, she was also a child—one who giggled in zero-gravity antics and who wept in the night.
I went softly up the stairs, stopping to look back at her before my head rose above the level of the next deck. She was huddled under her blanket, her face turned away again, her hair catching only a bit of the console glow from above her cubby. “Good night, Aenea,” I whispered, knowing that she would not hear me. “It will be all right.”
22
Sergeant Gregorius and his two troopers are waiting in the open sally-port air lock of the Raphael as the archangel-class starship closes on the unidentified spacecraft that has just translated from C-plus. Their spacesuit armor is cumbersome and—with their reactionless rifles and energy weapons slung—the three men fill the air lock. Parvati’s sun gleams on their gold visors as they lean out into space.
“I’ve got it locked,” comes Father Captain de Soya’s voice in their earphones. “Distance, one hundred meters and closing.” The needle-shaped craft with fins on the stern fills their vision as the two ships close. Between the spacecraft, defensive containment fields blur and flash, dissipating high-energy CPB and lance attacks faster than the eye can follow. Gregorius’s visor opaques, clears, and then opaques as the close-in battle flares.
“All right, inside their minimum lance range,” says de Soya from his perch on the Combat Control Center couch. “Go!”
Gregorius gives a hand signal and his men kick off at the precise instant he does. Needle thrusters in their suits’ reaction paks spurt tiny blue flames as they correct their arc.
“Disrupting fields … now!” cries de Soya.
The clashing containment fields cancel each other for only a few seconds, but it is enough: Gregorius, Kee, and Rettig are in the other ship’s defensive egg now.
“Kee,” says Gregorius over the tightbeam, and the smaller figure tweaks thrusters and hurtles toward the bow of the decelerating ship. “Rettig.” The other suit of combat armor accelerates toward the lower third of the ship. Gregorius himself waits until the final second to kill his forward velocity, does a complete forward roll at the last instant, applies full thruster, and feels his heavy soles touch hullplate with hardly a tap. He activates the magties in his boots, feels the connection, widens his stance, and then crouches on the hull with only one boot in contact.
“On,” comes Corporal Kee’s voice on tightbeam.
“On,” says Rettig a second later.
Sergeant Gregorius pulls the line of boarding collar from around his waist, sets it against the hull, activates the sticktight, and continues kneeling in it. He is within a black hoop a little more than a meter and a half in diameter.
“On the count from three,” he says into his mike. “Three … two … one … deploy.” He touches his wristcontroller and blinks as a microthin canopy of molecular polymer spins up from the hoop, closes over his head, and continues to bulge above him. Within ten seconds he is within a twenty-meter transparent bag, like a combat-armored shape crouching within a giant condom.
“Ready,” says Kee. Rettig echoes the word.
“Set,” says Gregorius, slapping a charge against the hull and setting his gauntle
ted finger back against his wristplate. “From five …” The ship is rotating under them now, firing thrusters and its main engines almost at random, but the Raphael has it locked in a containment-field death grip, and the men on its hull are not thrown free. “Five … four … three … two … one … now!”
The detonation is soundless, of course, but is also without flash or recoil. A 120-centimeter circle of hull flies inward. Gregorius can see only the gossamer hint of Kee’s polymer bag around the curve of the hull, sees the sunlight strike it as it inflates. Gregorius’s bag also inflates like a giant balloon as atmosphere rushes out of the hullbreech and fills the space around him. He hears a hurricane screech through his external pickups for five seconds, then silence as the space around him—now filled with oxygen and nitrogen according to his helmet sensors—fills with dust and detritus blown out during the brief pressure differential.
“Going in … now!” cries Gregorius, unslinging his reactionless plasma rifle as he kicks his way into the interior.
There is no gravity. That is a surprise to the sergeant—he is ready to hit the decks rolling—but he adapts within seconds and twists in a circle, peering around.
Some sort of common area. Gregorius sees seat cushions, some sort of ancient vid screen, bookshelves with real books—
A man floats up the central dropshaft.
“Halt!” cries Gregorius, using common radio bands and his helmet loudspeaker. The figure—little more than a silhouette—does not halt. The man has something in his hand.
Gregorius fires from the hip. The plasma slug bores a hole ten centimeters wide through the man. Blood and viscera explode outward from the tumbling figure, some of the globules spattering on Gregorius’s visor and armored chestplate. The object falls from the dead man’s hand, and Gregorius glances at it as he kicks by to the stairwell. It is a book. “Shit,” mutters the sergeant. He has killed an unarmed man. He will lose points for this.
“In, top level, no one here,” radios Kee. “Coming down.”
“Engine room,” says Rettig. “One man here. Tried to run and I had to burn him. No sign of the child. Coming up.”
“She must be on the middle level or the air-lock level,” snaps the sergeant into his mike. “Proceed with care.” The lights go out, and Gregorius’s helmet searchlight and the penlight on his plasma rifle come on automatically, beams quite visible through air filled with dust, blood spheres, and tumbling artifacts. He stops at the top of the stairwell.
Someone or something is drifting up toward him. He shifts his helmet, but the light on the plasma rifle illuminates the shape first.
It is not the girl. Gregorius gets a confused impression of great size, razor wire, spikes, too many arms, and blazing red eyes. He must decide in a second or less: if he fires plasma bolts down the open dropshaft, he might hit the child. If he does nothing, he dies—razor talons reach for him even as he hesitates.
Gregorius has lashed the deathwand to his plasma rifle before making the ship-to-ship jump. Now he kicks aside, finds an angle, and triggers the wand.
The razor-wire shape floats past him, four arms limp, the red eyes fading. Gregorius thinks, The goddamn thing isn’t invulnerable to deathwands. It has synapses. He catches a glimpse of someone above him, swings the rifle, identifies Kee, and the two men kick down the dropshaft headfirst. Embarrassing if someone turns the internal field back on now and gravity comes on, thinks Gregorius. Make a note of that.
“I’ve got her,” calls Rettig. “She was hiding in one of the fugue cubbies.”
Gregorius and Kee float down past the common level and kick out into the fugue level. A massive figure in combat armor is holding the child. Gregorius notes the brown-blond hair, the dark eyes, and the small fists flailing uselessly against Rettig’s chest armor.
“That’s her,” he says. He keys the tightbeam to the ship. “Cleared the ship. We have the girl. Only two defenders and the creature this time.”
“Affirmative,” comes de Soya’s voice. “Two minutes fifteen seconds. Impressive. Come on out.”
Gregorius nods, takes a final glance at the captive child—no longer struggling—and keys his suit controls.
He blinks and sees the other two lying next to him, their suits connected umbilically to VR tactical. De Soya has actually turned off the internal fields in the Raphael, better to maintain the illusion. Gregorius removes his helmet, sees the other two sweaty faces as they do the same, and begins to help Kee remove his clumsy armor.
The three meet de Soya in the wardroom cubby. They could meet as easily in the stimsim of tactical space, but they prefer physical reality for their debriefings.
“It was smooth,” says de Soya as they take their places around the small table.
“Too smooth,” says the sergeant. “I don’t believe that deathwands are going to kill the Shrike thing. And I screwed up with the guy on the navigation deck.… He just had a book.”
De Soya nods. “You did the right thing, though. Better to take him out than to take chances.”
“Two unarmed men?” says Corporal Kee. “I doubt it. This is about as unrealistic as the dozen armed guys on the third run-through. We should play more of the Ouster encounters … Marine-level lethality, at least.”
“I don’t know,” mutters Rettig.
They look at him and wait.
“We keep getting the girl without any harm coming to her,” says the man at last.
“That fifth sim …,” begins Kee.
“Yeah, yeah,” says Rettig. “I know we accidentally killed her then. But the whole ship was wired to blow in that one. I doubt if that will happen.… Who ever heard of a hundred-million-mark spacecraft having a self-destruct button? That’s stupid.”
The other three look at one another and shrug.
“It is a silly idea,” says Father Captain de Soya, “but I programmed the tacticals for wide parameters of …”
“Yeah,” interrupts Lancer Rettig, his thin face as sharp and menacing as a knife blade, “I just mean that if it does come to a firelight, the chances of the girl getting burned are a lot greater than our sims suggest. That’s all.”
This is the most the other three have heard Rettig say in weeks of living and rehearsing on the small ship.
“You’re right,” says de Soya. “For our next sim, I’ll raise the danger level for the child.”
Gregorius shakes his head. “Captain, sir, I suggest we knock off the sims and go back to the physical rehearsals. I mean …”He glances at his wrist chronometer. The memory of the bulky combat suit slows his movements. “I mean, we’ve just got eight hours until this is for real.”
“Yeah,” says Corporal Kee. “I agree. I’d rather be outside doing it for real, even if we can’t sim the other ship that way.”
Rettig grunts his assent.
“I agree,” says de Soya. “But first we eat—double rations.… It’s just been tactical, but you three have each lost twenty pounds the last week.”
Sergeant Gregorius leans over the table. “Could we see the plot, sir?”
De Soya keys the monitor. Raphael’s long, ellipsoid trajectory and the escape ship’s translation point are almost intersecting. The intersect point blinks red.
“One more real-space run-through,” says de Soya, “and then I want all of us to sleep at least two hours, go over our equipment, and take it easy.” He looks at his own chronometer, even though the monitor is displaying ship and intercept time. “Barring accidents or the unexpected,” he says, “the girl should be in our custody in seven hours and forty minutes … and we’ll be getting ready to translate to Pacem.”
“Sir?” says Sergeant Gregorius.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“Meaning no disrespect, sir,” says the other man, “but there’s no way in the Good Lord’s fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.”
23
So,” I said, “What’s your plan?”
Aenea looked up from the book she was reading. “Wh
o says that I have a plan?”
I straddled a chair. “It’s less than an hour until we pop out in the Parvati System,” I said. “A week ago you said that we needed a plan in case they know we’re coming … so what’s the plan?”
Aenea sighed and closed the book. A. Bettik had come up the stairway to the library, and now he joined us at the table—actually sitting with us, which was unusual for him.
“I’m not sure I have a plan,” said the girl.
I’d been afraid of this. The week had passed pleasantly enough; the three of us had read a lot, talked a lot, played a lot—Aenea was excellent at chess, good at Go, and deadly at poker—and the days had passed without incident. Many times I had tried to press her on her plans—Where did she plan to go? Why choose Renaissance Vector? Was finding Ousters part of her quest?—but her answers, while polite, were always vague. What Aenea showed great talent for was getting me talking. I hadn’t known many children—even when I was a child myself, there were few others in our caravan group, and I rarely enjoyed their company, since Grandam was infinitely more interesting to me—but the children and teenagers I’d encountered over the years had never shown this much curiosity or ability to listen. Aenea got me describing my years as a shepherd; she showed special interest in my apprenticeship as a landscape architect; she asked a thousand questions about my riverbarge days and hunting-guide days—in truth, it was only my soldiering days that she did not show much interest in. What she had seemed especially interested in was my dog, although even discussing Izzy—about raising her, training her as bird dog, about her death—upset me quite a bit.