by Дэн Симмонс
On Tau Ceti Center, once the political center of the WorldWeb but now just a heavily populated and popular garden planet, the rebellion took a different shape. While offworld visitors had brought Aenea’s anti-cruciform contagion, the bulk of the problem there for the Vatican centered on the Archbishop Achilla Silvaski, a scheming woman who had taken over the role of governor and autocrat on TC2 more than two centuries earlier. It was Archbishop Silvaski who had attempted to overthrow the reelection of the permanent pope through intrigue among the cardinals and now, having failed at that, she simply staged her own planet-wide version of the pre-Hegira Reformation, announcing that the Catholic Church on Tau Ceti Center would henceforth recognize her as pontiff and be forever separated from the “corrupt” interstellar Church of the Pax. Because she had carefully formed an alliance with the local bishops in charge of resurrection ceremonies and machineries, she could control the Sacrament of Resurrection—and thus the local Church. More importantly, the Archbishop had wooed the local Pax military authorities with land, wealth, and power until an unprecedented event occurred—a Pax Fleet, Pax military coup that overthrew most senior officers in Tau Ceti System and replaced them with New Church advocates. No archangel starships were seized this way, but eighteen cruisers and forty-one torchships committed themselves to defending the New Church on TC2 and its new pontiff. Tens of thousands of faithful Church members on the planet protested. They were arrested, threatened with excommunication—i.e. immediate revocation of their cruciforms—and released on probation under the watchful eye of the Archbishop’s—new pope’s—New Church Security Force.
Several priestly orders, most notably the Jesuits on Tau Ceti Center, refused to comply. Most were quietly arrested, excommunicated, and executed. Some hundreds escaped, however, and used their network to offer resistance to the new order—at first nonviolent, then increasingly severe. Many of the Jesuits had served as priest-officers in the Pax military before returning to civilian clerical life, and they used their military skills to create havoc in and around the planet.
Pope Urban XVI and his Pax Fleet advisors looked at their options. Already the crushing blow in the great Crusade against the Ousters had been delayed and derailed by Captain de Soya’s continued harassing attacks, by the need to send Fleet units to a score of worlds to quell the Aenea contagion rebellions, by the logistical requirements for the ambush in T’ien Shan System, and now by this and other unrelated rebellions. Over Admiral Marusyn’s advice to ignore the Archbishop’s heresy until after other political and military goals were reached, Pope Urban XVI and his Secretary of State Lourdusamy decided to divert twenty archangels, thirty-two old-style cruisers, eight transport ships, and a hundred torchships to Tau Ceti System—although it would be many weeks of time-debt before the old Hawking-drive ships could arrive. Once formed up in that system, the task force’s orders were to overcome all resistance by rebellious spacecraft, establish orbit around TC2, demand the Archbishop’s immediate surrender and the surrender of all those who supported her, and—failing compliance with that order—as much of the planet as it took to destroy the New Church’s infrastructure.
After that, tens of thousands of Marines would drop to the planet to occupy the remaining urban centers and to reestablish the rule of the Pax and the Holy Mother Church.
On Mars, in Old Earth System, the rebellion had worsened, despite years of Pax bombardment from space and constant military incursions from orbit. Two standard months earlier, Governor Clare Palo and Archbishop Robeson had both died the true death in a nuclear suicide attack on their palace-in-exile on Phobos. The Pax response had been terrifying—asteroids diverted from the nearby belt and dropped on Mars, carpet plasma bombing, and nightly lance attacks that sliced through the new planetary dust storm kicked up by the asteroid bombardment like so many deadly searchlights crisscrossing the frozen desert. Deathbeams would have been more efficient, but the Pax Fleet planners wanted to make an example of Mars, and wanted it to be a visible example.
The results were not exactly what the Pax had hoped for. The Martian terraforming environment, already precarious after years of poor maintenance, collapsed. Breathable atmosphere on the world was now restricted to Hellas Basin and a few other low pockets. The oceans were gone, boiled away as the pressure dropped or frozen back in the poles and permafrost subcrust. The last large plants and trees died off until only the original brandy cactus and bradberry orchards were left clinging to life in the near vacuum. The dust storms would last for years, making Pax Marine patrols on the Red Planet all but impossible.
But the Martians, especially the militant Palestinian Martians, were adapted to such a life and ready for this contingency. They hunkered down, killed the Pax troopers when they landed, and waited. Templar missionaries among the other Martian colonies urged the final nanotech adaptation to the original planetary conditions.
Thousands and thousands took the gamble, allowing the molecular machines to alter their bodies and DNA to the planet. More disturbingly to the Vatican, space battles broke out as ships once belonging to the presumably defunct Martian War Machine came out of hiding in the distant Kuiper Belt and began a series of hit-and-run attacks on the Pax Fleet convoys in Old Earth System.
The kill ratio in these attacks was five to one in favor of Pax Fleet, but the losses were unacceptable and the cost of maintaining the Mars operation was frightful.
Admiral Marusyn and the Joint Chiefs advised His Holiness to cut his losses and leave Old Earth System to fester for the time being. The Admiral assured the Pope that nothing would be allowed out of the system. He pointed out that there was nothing of real value in Old Earth System any longer, now that Mars was untenable. The Pope listened but refused to authorize the pullout. At each conference, Cardinal Lourdusamy stressed the symbolic importance of keeping Old Earth’s system within the Pax. His Holiness decided to wait to make his decision. The hemorrhage of ships, men, money, and materiel went on.
On Mare Infinitus, the rebellion was old—based around the submarine smugglers, poachers, and those hundreds of thousands of stubborn indigenies who had always refused the cross—but stirred up anew now that the Aenea contagion had arrived.
The great fishing zones were now all but off-limits to unescorted Pax fishing fleets. The automated fishing ships and isolated floating platforms were attacked and sunk. More and more of the deadly Lantern Mouth monsters were seen in shallower waters and Archbishop Jane Kelley was furious at the Pax authorities for their failure to stop the problem. When Bishop Melandriano counseled moderation, Kelley had him excommunicated. In turn, Melandriano declared the Southern Seas seceded from the Pax and Church’s authority and thousands of the faithful followed the charismatic leader. The Vatican sent more Pax Fleet ships, but there was little they could do to settle the four-way surface and subsurface struggles between the rebels, the Archbishop’s forces, the Bishop’s forces, and the Lantern Mouths.
And in the midst of all this confusion and carnage, Aenea’s message traveled with the speed of speech and secret communion.
Rebellion—both violent and spiritual—flared elsewhere: the worlds where Aenea had traveled—Ixion, Patawpha, Amritsar, and Groombridge Dyson D; on Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna where word of the roundup of non-Christians elsewhere created first panic and then grim resistance to all things Pax, on Deneb Drei where the Jamnu Republic declared the wearing of a cruciform cause for beheading; on Fuji where Aenea’s message had been brought by renegade members of the Pax Mercantilus and where it spread like a planetary firestorm; on the desert world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B where Aenea’s teachings came via refugees from Sibiatu’s Bitterness and combined with the realization that the Pax way of life would destroy their culture forever—the Amoiete Spectrum Helix people led the fight. The city of Keroa Tambat was liberated in the first month of fighting, and Pax Base Bombasino soon became a fortress under siege. Base Commander Solznykov screamed for help from Pax Fleet, but the Vatican and Pax Fleet commanders—preoccupied elsewhere—ordered
him to be patient and threatened excommunication if Solznykov did not end the rebellion on his own.
Solznykov did so, but not in the way Pax Fleet or His Holiness would have countenanced: he arranged for a peace treaty with the Amoiete Spectrum Helix armies in which his Pax forces would enter the countryside only with the permission of the indigenies. In return, Pax Base Bombasino was allowed to continue its existence.
Solznykov, Colonel Vinara, and the other loyal Christians settled in to wait for Vatican and Pax Fleet retribution, but the Aenea-changed civilians were among the Spectrum Helix people who came to market at Bombasino, who met and ate and drank with the troopers, who moved among the dispirited Pax men and women and told their story, and who offered their communion. Many accepted.
This, of course, was the tiniest slice of events on the hundreds of worlds of the Pax that last, sad night I would ever spend on T’ien Shan. I did not guess of any of these events, of course, but if I had—if I had already mastered the skill and discipline of learning these things via the Void Which Binds—I still would not have cared. Aenea had loved another man. They had been married. She must still be married… she had not mentioned divorce or death. She had had a child.
I do not know why my carelessness did not send me falling to my death those wild hours on the icy ridge east of Jo-kung and Hsuan-k’ung Ssu, but it did not. Eventually I came to my senses and returned via the ridgeline and the fixed rappelling ropes so that I could be back with Aenea by first light. I loved her. She was my dear friend. I would give my life to protect her.
An opportunity to prove that would be offered within the day, its inevitability created by the events that unfolded shortly after my return to the Temple Hanging in Air and our departure to the east.
It was not that long after first light, in the old gompa beneath the Phallus Shiva now turned into Christian enclave, where John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa, Admiral Marget Wu, Father Farrell, Archbishop Breque, Father LeBlanc, Rhadamanth Nemes, and her two remaining siblings met in conference. In truth, it was the humans who met in conference, while Nemes and her clone sister and brother sat silently by the window looking out over the billowing cloudscapes around Otter Lake below the Shivling peak.
“And you are certain that the rogue ship Raphael is finished?” the Grand Inquisitor was saying.
“Absolutely,” said Admiral Wu. “Although it destroyed seven of our archangel ships of the line before we slagged it.” She shook her head. “De Soya was a brilliant tactician. It was the true work of the Evil One when he turned apostate.”
Father Farrell leaned over the polished bonsai-wood table. “And there is no chance that de Soya or any of the others survived?”
Admiral Wu shrugged. “It was a near-orbit battle,” she said. “We let Raphael get within cislunar distance before springing our trap. Thousands of pieces of debris—mostly from our unfortunate ships—entered the atmosphere. None of our people appear to have survived—at least no beacons have been detected. If any of de Soya’s people escaped, the chances are that their pods came down in the poisonous oceans.”
“Still…” began Archbishop Breque. He was a quiet man, cerebral and cautious.
Wu looked exhausted and irritated. “Your Eminence,” she said briskly, addressing Breque but looking at Mustafa, “we can decide the issue one way or the other if you allow us to send dropships, skimmers, and EMV’s into the atmosphere.”
Breque blinked. Cardinal Mustafa shook his head. “No,” he said, “our orders are not to show a military presence until the Vatican commands the final step in our seizure of the girl.”
Wu smiled with apparent bitterness. “Last night’s battle just above the atmosphere must have made that order somewhat obsolete,” she said softly. “Our military presence must have been rather impressive.”
“It was,” said Father LeBlanc. “I have never seen anything like it.”
Admiral Wu spoke to Mustafa. “Your Excellency, the people on this world have no energy weapons, no Hawking-drive detectors, no orbital defenses, no gravitonic detectors… hell, they don’t have radar or a communications system as far as we can tell. We can send dropships or fighter aircraft into the atmosphere to search for survivors without them ever knowing. It has to be a lot less intrusive than last night’s firefight and…”
“No,” said Cardinal Mustafa and there was no doubting the finality of his decision. The Grand Inquisitor pushed back his robe to glance at his chronometer. “The Vatican courier drone should arrive any moment with final orders for the arrest of the contagion vector named Aenea. Nothing must complicate that.”
Father Farrell rubbed his lean cheeks. “Regent Tokra called me this morning on the communicator channel we allocated him. It seems that their precious and precocious little Dalai Lama has gone missing…”
Breque and LeBlanc looked up in surprise.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Cardinal Mustafa, obviously aware of the news. “Nothing matters right now except receiving final go-ahead on this mission and arresting Aenea.” He looked at Admiral Wu. “And you must tell your Swiss Guard and Marine officers that no harm can come to the young woman.” Wu nodded wearily. She had been briefed and rebriefed for months. “When do you think that the orders will come?” she asked the Cardinal.
Rhadamanth Nemes and her two siblings stood and walked toward the door. “The time for waiting is over,” said Nemes with a thin-lipped smile. “We will bring Aenea’s head back to you.”
Cardinal Mustafa and the others were on their feet in an instant. “Sit down!” bellowed the Grand Inquisitor. “You have not been ordered to move.”
Nemes smiled and turned toward the door. All of the clerics in the room were shouting. Archbishop Jean Daniel Breque crossed himself. Admiral Wu went for the flechette pistol in her holster.
Things then happened too quickly to perceive. The air seemed to blur. One instant, Nemes, Scylla, and Briareus were at the doorway eight meters away, the next instant they were gone and three shimmering chrome shapes stood among the black- and red-robed figures at the table. Scylla intercepted Admiral Marget Wu before the woman could raise her flechette pistol.
A chrome arm blurred. Wu’s head tumbled across the polished tabletop. The headless body stood a few seconds, some random nerve impulse ordered the fingers of the right hand to close, and the flechette pistol fired, blowing apart the legs of the heavy table and splintering the stone floor in ten thousand places.
Father LeBlanc leaped between Briareus and Archbishop Breque. The blurred, silver shape disemboweled LeBlanc. Breque dropped his glasses and ran into the adjoining room. Suddenly Briareus was gone—leaving nothing but a soft implosion of air where the blurred shape had stood a second before. There was a short scream from the other room, cut off almost before it began.
Cardinal Mustafa backed away from Rhadamanth Nemes. She took one step forward for every step he took backward. The blurred field around her had dropped away, but she looked no more human or less menacing.
“Damn you for the foul thing you are,” the Cardinal said softly. “Come ahead, I’m not afraid to die.”
Nemes raised one eyebrow. “Of course not, Your Excellency. But would it change your mind if I tell you that we’re throwing these bodies… and that head”—she gestured to where Marget Wu’s eyes had just stopped blinking and now stared blindly—“far out into the acid ocean, so that no resurrection will be possible?”
Cardinal Mustafa reached the wall and stopped. Nemes was only two paces in front of him.
“Why are you doing this?” he said, his voice firm.
Nemes shrugged. “Our priorities diverge for the time being,” she said. “Are you ready, Grand Inquisitor?”
Cardinal Mustafa crossed himself and said a hurried Act of Contrition.
Nemes smiled again, her right arm and right leg became shimmering silver things, and she stepped forward.
Mustafa watched in amazement. She did not kill him. With motions too quick to detect, she broke his left arm, shattered
his right arm, kicked his legs out from under him—splintering both of them—and blinded him with two fingers that stopped just short of jabbing into his brain.
The roar of pain was without precedent for the Grand Inquisitor. Through it, he could hear her voice, still flat and lifeless. “I know your doc-in-the-box in the dropship or on the Jibril will fix you up,” she said. “We’ve buzzed them. They’ll be here in a few minutes. When you see the Pope and his parasites, tell them that those to whom I must report did not want the girl alive. Our apologies, but her death is necessary. And tell them to be careful in the future not to act without the consent of all elements of the Core. Good-bye, Your Excellency. I hope that the doc on the Jibril can grow you new eyes. What we are about to do will be worth seeing.”
Mustafa heard footsteps, the door sliding, and then silence except for the sound of someone screaming in terrible pain. It took him several minutes to realize that it was he who was screaming.
When I returned to the Temple Hanging in Air, first light was seeping through the fog but the morning remained dark, drizzly, and cold. I had finally sobered up enough from my distraught and distracted state to take greater care while rappelling down the fixed lines, and it was good that I had—several times the brakes on the rappel gear slipped on the ice-shrouded rope and I would have fallen to my death if the safety lines had not arrested me.