by Dan Simmons
Stan Leweski stared at the Consul as if he were a ghost. The big man’s face was streaked with soot and tears, and his eyes were wide, almost uncomprehending. Cicero’s had been in his family for six generations. It was raining softly now, and the fire seemed beaten. Men shouted up and down the line as a few timbers from the burned-out sections sagged into the embers of the basement.
“By God, it’s gone,” said Leweski. “You see? Grandfather Jiri’s addition? It’s gone.”
The Consul grabbed the huge man by his shoulders. “Stan, we need help. Theo’s over there. Hurt. Our skimmer crashed. We need to get to the spaceport … to use your phone. It’s an emergency, Stan.”
Leweski shook his head. “Phone’s gone. Comlog bands are jammed. Goddamn war is on.” He pointed toward the burned sections of the old inn. “They’re gone, by damn. Gone.”
The Consul made a fist, furious in the grip of sheer frustration. Other men milled around, but the Consul recognized none of them. There were no FORCE or SDF authorities in sight. Suddenly a voice behind him said, “I can help. I have a skimmer.”
The Consul whirled to see a man in his late fifties or early sixties, soot and sweat covering his handsome face and streaking his wavy hair. “Great,” said the Consul. “I’d appreciate it.” He paused. “Do I know you?”
“Dr. Melio Arundez,” said the man, already moving toward the parkway where Theo rested.
“Arundez,” repeated the Consul, hurrying to keep up. The name echoed strangely. Someone he knew? Someone he should know? “My God, Arundez!” he said. “You were the friend of Rachel Weintraub when she came here decades ago.”
“Her university advisor, actually,” said Arundez. “I know you. You went on the pilgrimage with Sol.” They stopped where Theo was sitting, still holding his head in his hands. “My skimmer’s over there,” said Arundez.
The Consul could see a small, two-person Vikken Zephyr parked under the trees. “Great. We’ll get Theo to the hospital and then I need to get to the spaceport immediately.”
“The hospital’s overcrowded to the point of insanity,” said Arundez. “If you’re trying to get to your ship, I suggest you take the Governor-General there and use the ship’s surgery.”
The Consul paused. “How did you know I have a ship there?”
Arundez dilated the doors and helped Theo onto the narrow bench behind the front contour seats. “I know all about you and the other pilgrims, M. Consul. I’ve been trying to get permission to go to the Valley of the Time Tombs for months. You can’t believe my frustration when I learned that your pilgrims’ barge left secretly with Sol aboard.” Arundez took a deep breath and asked a question which he obviously had been afraid to ask before. “Is Rachel still alive?”
He was her lover when she was a grown woman, thought the Consul. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to get back in time to help her, if I can.”
Melio Arundez nodded and settled into the driver’s seat, gesturing for the Consul to get in. “We’ll try to get to the spaceport. It won’t be easy with the fighting around there.”
The Consul sat back, feeling his bruises, cuts, and exhaustion as the seat folded around him. “We need to get Theo … the Governor-General … to the consulate or government house or whatever they call it now.”
Arundez shook his head and powered up the repellors. “Uh-uh. The consulate’s gone, hit by a wayward missile, according to the emergency news channel. All the Hegemony officials went out to the spaceport for evacuation before your friend even went hunting for you.”
The Consul looked at the semiconscious Theo Lane. “Let’s go,” he said softly to Arundez.
The skimmer came under small-arms fire as they crossed the river, but fléchettes merely rattled on the hull and the single energy beam fired sliced beneath them, sending a spout of steam ten meters high. Arundez drove like a crazy person—weaving, bobbing, pitching, yawing, and occasionally slewing the skimmer around on its axis like a plate sliding atop a sea of marbles. The Consul’s seat restraints closed around him, but he still felt his gorge threaten to rise. Behind them, Theo’s head moved loosely back and forth on the rear bench as he surrendered to unconsciousness.
“The downtown’s a mess!” Arundez shouted over repellor roar. “I’ll follow the old viaduct to the spaceport highway and then cut across country, staying low.” They pirouetted around a burning structure which the Consul belatedly recognized as his old apartment building.
“Is the spaceport highway open?”
Arundez shook his head. “Never make it. Paratroopers have been dropping around it for the last thirty minutes.”
“Are the Ousters trying to destroy the city?”
“Uh-uh. They could have done that from orbit without all this fuss. They seem to be investing the capital. Most of their dropships and paratroopers land at least ten klicks out.”
“Is it our SDF who’s fighting back?”
Arundez laughed, showing white teeth against tanned skin. “They’re halfway to Endymion and Port Romance by now … though reports ten minutes ago, before the comm lines were jammed, say that those cities are also under attack. No, the little resistance you see is from a few dozen FORCE: Marines left behind to guard the city and the spaceport.”
“So the Ousters haven’t destroyed or captured the spaceport?”
“Not yet. At least not as of a few minutes ago. We’ll soon see. Hang on!”
The ten-kilometer ride to the spaceport via the VIP highway or the skylanes above it usually took a few minutes, but Arundez’s roundabout, up-and-down approach over the hills, through the valleys, and between the trees added time and excitement to the trip. The Consul turned his head to watch hillsides and the slums of burning refugee camps flash by to his right. Men and women crouched against boulders and under low trees, covering their heads as the skimmer rushed past. Once the Consul saw a squad of FORCE: Marines dug in on a hilltop, but their attention was focused on a hill to the north from which there came a panoply of laser-lance fire. Arundez saw the Marines at the same instant and jinked the skimmer hard left, dropping it into a narrow ravine scant seconds before the treetops on the ridge above were sliced off as if by invisible shears.
Finally they roared up and over a final ridgeline, and the western gates and fences of the spaceport became visible ahead of them. The perimeter was ablaze with the blue and violet glows of containment and interdiction fields, and they were still a klick away when a visible tightbeam laser flicked out, found them, and a voice over the radio said, “Unidentified skimmer, land immediately or be destroyed.”
Arundez landed.
The tree line ten meters away seemed to shimmer, and suddenly they were surrounded by wraiths in activated chameleon polymers. Arundez had opened the cockpit blisters, and now assault rifles were aimed at him and the Consul.
“Step away from the machine,” said a disembodied voice behind the camouflage shimmer.
“We have the Governor-General,” called the Consul. “We have to get in.”
“The hell you say,” snapped a voice with a definite Web accent. “Out!”
The Consul and Arundez hastily released their seat restraints and had started to climb out when a voice from the back seat snapped, “Lieutenant Mueller, is that you?”
“Ah, yes, sir.”
“Do you recognize me, Lieutenant?”
The camouflage shimmer depolarized, and a young Marine in full battle armor stood not a meter from the skimmer. His face was nothing more than a black visor but the voice sounded young. “Yes, sir … ah … Governor. Sorry I didn’t recognize you without your glasses. You’ve been hurt, sir.”
“I know I’ve been hurt, Lieutenant. That is why these gentlemen have escorted me here. Don’t you recognize the former Hegemony Consul for Hyperion?”
“Sorry, sir,” said Lieutenant Mueller, waving his men back into the tree line. “The base is sealed.”
“Of course the base is sealed,” Theo said through gritted teeth. “I countersigned
those orders. But I also authorized evacuation of all essential Hegemony personnel. You did allow those skimmers through, did you not, Lieutenant Mueller?”
An armored hand rose as if to scratch the helmeted and visored head. “Ah … yes, sir. Ah, affirmative. But that was an hour ago, sir. The evacuation dropships are gone and—”
“For God’s sake, Mueller, get on your tactical channel and get authorization from Colonel Gerasimov to let us through.”
“The Colonel’s dead, sir. There was a dropship assault on the east perimeter and—”
“Captain Lewellyn then,” said Theo. He swayed and then steadied himself against the back of the Consul’s seat. His face was very white under the blood.
“Ah … tactical channels are down, sir. The Ousters are jamming on wideband with—”
“Lieutenant,” snapped Theo in a tone the Consul had never heard his young friend use, “you’ve visually identified me and scanned my implant ID. Now either admit us to the field or shoot us.”
The armored Marine glanced back toward the tree line as if considering whether to order his men to open fire. “The dropships are all gone, sir. Nothing else is coming down.”
Theo nodded. Blood had dried and caked on his forehead, but now a fresh trickle started from his scalp line. “The impounded ship is still in Blast Pit Nine, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Mueller, snapping to attention at last. “But it’s a civilian ship and could never make space with all the Ouster—”
Theo waved the officer into silence and gestured for Arundez to drive toward the perimeter. The Consul glanced ahead toward the deadlines, interdiction fields, containment fields, and probable pressure mines that the skimmer would encounter in ten seconds. He saw the Marine lieutenant wave, and an opening irised in the violet and blue energy fields ahead. No one fired. In half a minute they were crossing the hardpan of the spaceport itself. Something large was burning on the northern perimeter. To their left, a huddle of FORCE trailers and command modules had been slagged to a pool of bubbling plastic.
There had been people in there, thought the Consul and once again had to fight to keep his gorge from rising.
Blast Pit Seven had been destroyed, its circular walls of reinforced ten-centimeter carbon-carbon blown outward and apart as if they had been made of cardboard. Blast Pit Eight was burning with that white-hot incandescence which suggested plasma grenades. Blast Pit Nine was intact, with the bow of the Consul’s ship just visible above the pit wall through the shimmer of a class-three containment field.
“The interdiction’s been lifted?” said the Consul.
Theo lay back on the cushioned bench. His voice was thick. “Yeah. Gladstone authorized the dropping of the restraining dome field. That’s just the usual protective field. You can override it with a command.”
Arundez dropped the skimmer to tarmac just as warning lights went red and synthesized voices began describing malfunctions. They helped Theo out and paused near the rear of the small skimmer where a line of fléchettes had stitched a ragged row through the engine cowling and repellor housing. Part of the hood had melted from overload.
Melio Arundez patted the machine once, and both men turned to help Theo through the blast pit door and up the docking umbilical.
“My God,” said Dr. Melio Arundez, “this is beautiful. I’ve never been in a private interstellar spacecraft before.”
“There are only a few dozen in existence,” said the Consul, setting the osmosis mask in place over Theo’s mouth and nose and gently lowering the redhead into the surgery’s tank of emergency care nutrient. “Small as it is, this ship cost several hundred million marks. It’s not cost-effective for corporations and Outback planetary governments to use their military craft on those rare occasions when they need to travel between the stars.” The Consul sealed the tank and conversed briefly with the diagnostics program. “He’ll be all right,” he said at last to Arundez, and returned to the holopit.
Melio Arundez stood near the antique Steinway, gently running his hand over the glossy finish of the grand piano. He glanced out through the transparent section of hull above the stowed balcony platform and said, “I see fires near the main gate. We’d better get out of here.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” said the Consul, gesturing Arundez toward the circular couch lining the projection pit.
The archaeologist dropped into the deep cushions and glanced around. “Aren’t there … ah … controls?”
The Consul smiled. “A bridge? Cockpit instruments? Maybe a wheel I can steer with? Uh-uh. Ship?”
“Yes,” came the soft voice from nowhere.
“Are we cleared for takeoff?”
“Yes.”
“Is that containment field removed?”
“It was our field. I’ve withdrawn it.”
“OK, let’s get the hell out of here. I don’t have to tell you that we’re in the middle of a shooting war, do I?”
“No. I’ve been monitoring all developments. The last FORCE spacecraft are in the process of leaving the Hyperion system. These Marines are stranded and—”
“Save the tactical analyses for later, Ship,” said the Consul. “Set our course for the Valley of the Time Tombs and get us out of here.”
“Yes, sir,” said the ship. “I was just pointing out that the forces defending this spaceport have little chance of holding out for more than an hour or so.”
“Noted,” said the Consul. “Now take off.”
“I’m required to share this fatline transmission first. The squirt arrived at 1622:38:14, Web standard, this afternoon.”
“Whoa! Hold it!” cried the Consul, freezing the holo transmission in midconstruction. Half of Meina Gladstone’s face hung above them. “You’re required to show this before we leave? Whose commands do you respond to, Ship?”
“CEO Gladstone’s, sir. The Chief Executive empowered a priority override on all ship’s functions five days ago. This fatline squirt is the last requirment before—”
“So that’s why you didn’t respond to my remote commands,” murmured the Consul.
“Yes,” said the ship in conversational tones. “I was about to say that the showing of this transmission is the last requirement prior to returning command to you.”
“And then you’ll do what I say?
“Yes.”
“Take us where I’ll tell you to?”
“Yes.”
“No hidden overrides?”
“None that I know of.”
“Play the squirt,” said the Consul.
The Lincolnesque countenance of CEO Meina Gladstone floated in the center of the projection pit with the telltale twitches and breakups endemic to fatline transmissions. “I am pleased that you survived the visit to the Time Tombs,” she said to the Consul. “By now you must know that I am asking you to negotiate with the Ousters before you return to the valley.”
The Consul folded his arms and glared at Gladstone’s image. Outside, the sun was setting. He had only a few minutes before Rachel Weintraub reached her birth hour and minute and simply ceased to exist.
“I understand your urgency to return and help your friends,” said Gladstone, “but you can do nothing to help the child at this moment … experts in the Web assure us that neither cryogenic sleep or fugue could arrest the Merlin’s sickness. Sol knows this.”
Across the projection pit, Dr. Arundez said, “It’s true. They experimented for years. She would die in fugue state.”
“… you can help the billions of people in the Web whom you believe you have betrayed,” Gladstone was saying.
The Consul leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists. His heart was pounding very loudly in his ears.
“I knew that you would open the Time Tombs,” Gladstone said, her sad brown eyes seeming to stare directly at the Consul. “Core predictors showed that your loyalty to Maui-Covenant … and to the memory of your grandparents’ rebellion … would override all other factors
. It was time for the Tombs to be opened, and only you could activate the Ouster device before the Ousters themselves decided to.”
“I’ve heard enough of this,” said the Consul and stood, turning his back on the projection. “Cancel message,” he said to the ship, knowing that it would not obey.
Melio Arundez walked through the projection and gripped the Consul’s arm tightly. “Hear her out. Please.”
The Consul shook his head but stayed in the pit, arms folded.
“Now the worst has happened,” said Gladstone. “The Ousters are invading the Web. Heaven’s Gate is being destroyed. God’s Grove has less than an hour before the invasion sweeps over it. It is imperative that you meet with the Ousters in Hyperion system and negotiate … use your diplomatic skills to open a dialogue with them. The Ousters will not respond to our fatline or radio messages, but we have alerted them to your coming. I think they will still trust you.”
The Consul moaned and walked over to the piano, pounding his fist against its lid.
“We have minutes, not hours, Consul,” said Gladstone. “I will ask you to go first to the Ousters in Hyperion system and then attempt to return to the Valley of the Time Tombs if you must. You know better than I the results of warfare. Millions will die needlessly if we cannot find a secure channel through which to communicate with the Ousters.
“It is your decision, but please consider the ramifications if we fail in this last attempt to find the truth and preserve the peace. I will contact you via fatline once you have reached the Ouster Swarm.”
Gladstone’s image shimmered, fogged, and faded.
“Response?” asked the ship.
“No.” The Consul paced back and forth between the Steinway and the projection pit.
“No spacecraft or skimmer has landed near the valley with its crew intact for almost two centuries,” said Melio Arundez. “She must know how small the odds are that you can go there … survive the Shrike … and then rendezvous with the Ousters.”
“Things are different now,” said the Consul without turning to face the other man. “The time tides have gone berserk. The Shrike goes where it pleases. Perhaps whatever phenomenon prevented manned landings before is no longer operative.”