Unless I had taken a wrong turn. Or unless it had already been destroyed. Or unless it had left without us.
“I talked to Het Masteen,” Aenea shouted. We were in a globe of escaping air now and the din was terrible. “Only about three hundred of the thousand are aboard.”
“All right,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. What thousand? No time to ask. I caught a glimpse of the deeper green of a treeship a klick or more above us and to the left—on another branch helix altogether—and swept the hawking mat in that direction. If it was not the Yggdrasill we would have to seek shelter there anyway. The Startree EM fields were failing, the hawking mat losing energy and inertia.
The EM field failed. The hawking mat surged a final time and then began tumbling in the blackness between shattered branches, a kilometer or more from the nearest burning stem ways. Far below and behind us I could see the cluster of environment pods from which we had come: they were all shattered, leaking air and bodies, the podstems and connecting branches writhing in blind Newtonian response.
“That’s it,” I said, my voice low because there was no more air or noise outside our failing bubble of energy. The hawking mat had been designed seven centuries ago to seduce a teenage niece into loving an old man, not to keep its flyers alive in outer space. “We tried, kiddo.” I moved back from the flight threads and put my arm around Aenea.
“No,” said Aenea, rejecting not my hug but the death sentence. She gripped my arm so fiercely that her fingers sank into the flesh of my bicep. “No, no,” she said to herself and tapped the comlog diskey.
Het Masteen’s cowled face appeared against the tumbling starfield. “Yes,” he said. “I see you.”
The huge treeship now hung a thousand meters above us, a single great ceiling of branches and leaves green behind the flickering violet containment field, the bulk of it slowly separating from the burning Startree. There was a sudden, violent tug, and for a second I was sure that one of the archangel lances had found us.
“The ergs are pulling us in,” said Aenea, still grasping my arm.
“Ergs?” I said. “I thought a treeship only had one erg aboard to handle the drive and fields.”
“Usually they do,” said Aenea. “Sometimes two if it’s an extraordinary voyage … into the outer envelope of a star, for instance, or through the shock wave of a binary’s heliosphere.”
“So there are two aboard the Yggdrasill?” I said, watching the tree grow and fill the sky. Plasma explosions unfolded silently behind us.
“No,” said Aenea, “there are twenty-seven.”
The extended field pulled us in. Up rearranged itself and became down. We were lowered onto a high deck, just beneath the bridge platform near the crown of the treeship. Even before I tapped the flight threads to collapse our own puny containment field, Aenea was scooping up her comlog and backpack and was racing toward the stairway.
I rolled the hawking mat neatly, shoved it into its leather carrier, flung the tube on my back, and rushed to catch up.
ONLY THE TEMPLAR TREESHIP CAPTAIN HET MASTEEN and a few of his lieutenants were on the crown bridge, but the platforms and stairways beneath the bridge level were crowded with people I knew and did not know: Rachel, Theo, A. Bettik, Father de Soya, Sergeant Gregorius, Lhomo Dondrub, and the dozens of other familiar refugees from T’ien Shan, but there were also scores of other non-Ouster, non-Templar humans, men, women, and children whom I had not seen previously. “Refugees fleeing a hundred Pax worlds, picked up by Father Captain de Soya in the Raphael over the past few years,” said Aenea. “We’d expected hundreds more to arrive today before departure, but it’s too late now.”
I followed her up to the bridge level. Het Masteen stood at the locus of a circle of organic control diskeys—displays from the fiber-optic nerves running throughout the ship, holo displays from onboard, astern, and ahead of the treeship, a communicator nexus to put him in touch with the Templars standing duty with the ergs, in the singularity containment core, at the drive roots, and elsewhere, and the central holo-simulacrum of the treeship itself, which he could touch with his long fingers to call up interactives or change headings. The Templar looked up as Aenea walked quickly across the sacred bridge toward him. His countenance—shaped from Old Earth Asian stock—was calm beneath his cowl.
“I am pleased that you were not left behind, One Who Teaches,” he said dryly. “Where do you wish us to go?”
“Out-system,” said Aenea without hesitation.
Het Masteen nodded. “We will draw fire, of course. The Pax Fleet firepower is formidable.”
Aenea only nodded. I saw the treeship simulacrum turning slowly and looked up to see the starfield rotating above us. We had moved in-system only a few hundred kilometers and were now turning back toward the battered inner surface of the Biosphere Startree. Where our meeting and environment pods had been there was now a ragged hole in the braided branches. All across the thousands of square klicks of this region were gaping wounds and denuded branches. The Yggdrasill moved slowly through billions of tumbling leaves—those still in containment-field atmosphere burning brightly and painting the containment-field perimeter gray with ash—as the treeship returned to the sphere wall and carefully passed through.
Emerging from the far side and picking up speed as the erg-controlled fusion drive flared, we could see even more of the battle now. Space here was a myriad of winking pinpoints of light, fiery sparks appearing as defensive containment fields came alight under lance attack, countless thermonuclear and plasma explosions, the drive tails of missiles, hyperkinetic weapons, small attack craft, and archangels. The curving-away outer surface of the Startree looked like a fibrous volcano world erupting with flames and geysers of debris. Watering comets and shepherd asteroids, knocked from their perfect balancing act by Pax weapon blasts, tore through the Startree like cannon-balls through kindling. Het Masteen called up tactical holos and we stared at the image of the entire Biosphere, pocked now with ten thousand fires—many individual conflagrations as large as my homeworld of Hyperion—and a hundred thousand visible rents and tears in the sphere fabric that had taken almost a thousand years to weave. There were thousands of under-drive objects being plotted on the radar and deep distance sensors, but fewer each second as the powerful archangels picked off Ouster ramscouts, torchships, destroyers, and treeships with their lances at distances of several AUs. Millions of space-adapted Ousters threw themselves at the attackers, but they died like moths in a flamethrower.
Lhomo Dondrub strode onto the bridge. He was wearing an Ouster skinsuit and carrying a long, class-four assault weapon. “Aenea, where the goddamned hell are we going?”
“Away,” said my beloved. “We have to leave, Lhomo.”
The flyer shook his head. “No, we don’t. We have to stay and fight. We can’t just abandon our friends to these Pax carrion birds.”
“Lhomo,” said Aenea, “we can’t help the Startree. I have to leave here in order to fight the Pax.”
“Run again if you have to,” said Lhomo, his handsome features contorted by rage and frustration. He molded the silvery skinsuit cowl up over his head. “I am going to stay and fight.”
“They’ll kill you, my friend,” said Aenea. “You can’t fight archangel-class starships.”
“Watch me,” said Lhomo, the silvery suit covering everything but his face now. He shook my hand. “Good luck, Raul.”
“And to you,” I said, feeling my throat tighten and face flush as much from my own shame at fleeing as from bidding farewell to this brave man.
Aenea touched the powerful silver arm. “Lhomo, you can help the fight more if you come with us …”
Lhomo Dondrub shook his head and lowered the fluid cowl. The audio pickups sounded metallic as they spoke for him. “Good luck to you, Aenea. May God and the Buddha help you. May God and the Buddha help us all.” He stepped to the edge of the platform and looked back at Het Masteen. The Templar nodded, touched the control simulacrum near the crown
of the tree, and whispered into one of the fiberthreads.
I felt gravity lessen. The outer field shimmered and shifted. Lhomo was lifted, turned, and catapulted out into space beyond our branches and air and lights. I saw his silver wings unfold, saw the light fill his wings, and watched him form up with a score of other Ouster angels carrying their puny weapons and riding sunlight toward the nearest archangel.
Others were coming onto the bridge now—Rachel, Theo, the Dorje Phamo, Father de Soya and his sergeant, A. Bettik, the Dalai Lama—but all held back, keeping a respectful distance from the busy Templar captain.
“They’ve acquired us,” said Het Masteen. “Firing.”
The containment field exploded red. I could hear the sizzling, it was as if we had fallen into the heart of a star.
Displays flickered. “Holding,” said the True Voice of the Tree Het Masteen. “Holding.”
He meant the defensive fields, but the Pax ships were also holding—maintaining their energy lance fire even as we accelerated out-system. Except for the display holos, there was no sign of our movement—no stars visible—only the crackling, hissing, boiling ovoid of destructive energy bubbling and slithering a few dozen meters above and around us.
“What is our course, please?” asked Het Masteen of Aenea.
My friend touched her forehead briefly as if tired or lost. “Just out where we can see the stars.”
“We will never reach a translation point while under this severity of attack,” said the Templar.
“I know,” said Aenea. “Just … out … where I can see the stars.”
Het Masteen looked up at the inferno above us. “We may never see the stars again.”
“We have to,” Aenea said simply.
There was a sudden flurry of shouts. I looked up at where the commotion was centered.
There were only a few small platforms above the control bridge—tiny structures looking like crow’s nests on a holodrama pirate ship or like a treehouse I had seen once in the Hyperion fens—and it was on one of these that the figure stood. Crew clones were shouting and pointing. Het Masteen peered up toward the tiny platform fifteen meters above us and turned to Aenea. “The Lord of Pain rides with us.”
I could see the colors from the inferno beyond the containment field reflecting on the Shrike’s forehead and chest carapace.
“I thought it died on T’ien Shan,” I said.
Aenea looked more weary than I had ever seen her. “The thing moves through time more easily than we move through space, Raul. It may have died on T’ien Shan … it may die a thousand years hence in a battle with Colonel Kassad … it may not be capable of dying … we will never know.”
As if her use of his name had summoned him, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad came up the stairs to the bridge platform. The Colonel was in archaic Hegemony-era battle dress and was carrying the assault rifle I had once seen in the Consul’s ship armory. He stared at the Shrike like a man possessed.
“Can I get up there?” Kassad asked the Templar captain.
Still absorbed with issuing commands and monitoring displays, Het Masteen pointed to some ratlines and rope ladders that rose to the highest platform.
“No shooting on this treeship,” Het Masteen called after the Colonel. Kassad nodded and began climbing.
The rest of us turned our attention back to the simulacra displays. There were at least three archangels directing some of their fire at us from distances of less than a million klicks. They would take turns lancing us, each then directing some of its fire at other targets. But our odd refusal to die seemed to increase their anger at us and the lances would return, creeping across the four to ten light-seconds and exploding on the containment field above us. One of the ships was about to pass around the curve of the blazing Startree, but the two others were still decelerating in-system toward us with clear fields of fire.
“Missiles launched against us,” said one of the captain’s Templar lieutenants in a voice no more excited than I would use to announce the arrival of dinner. “Two … four … nine. Sublight. Presumably plasma warheads.”
“Can we survive that?” asked Theo. Rachel had walked over to watch the Colonel climb toward the Shrike.
Het Masteen was too occupied to answer, so Aenea said, “We don’t know. It depends on the binders … the ergs.”
“Sixty seconds to missile impact,” said the same Templar lieutenant in the same flat tones.
Het Masteen touched a comwand. His voice sounded normal, but I realized that it was being amplified all over the klick-long treeship. “Everyone will please shield their eyes and avoid looking toward the field. The binders will polarize the flash as much as possible, but please do not look up. May the peace of the Muir be with us.”
I looked at Aenea. “Kiddo, does this treeship carry weapons?”
“No,” she said. Her eyes looked as weary as her voice had sounded.
“So we’re not going to fight … just run?”
“Yes, Raul.”
I ground my molars. “Then I agree with Lhomo,” I said. “We’ve run too much. It’s time to help our friends here. Time to …”
At least three of the missiles exploded. Later, I recall the light so blinding that I could see Aenea’s skull and vertebrae through her skin and flesh, but that must be impossible. There was a sense of falling … of the bottom falling out of everything … and then the one-sixth-g field was restored. A subsonic rumble made my teeth and bones hurt.
I blinked away retinal afterimages. Aenea’s face was still before me—her cheeks flushed and sweaty, her hair pulled back by a hastily tied band, her eyes tired but infinitely alive, her forearms bare and sunburned—and in a thick moment of sentimentality I thought that it would not have been unthinkable to die like that, with Aenea’s face seared into my soul and memory.
Two more plasma warheads made the treeship shudder. Then four more. “Holding,” said Het Masteen’s lieutenant. “All fields holding.”
“Lhomo and Raul are right, Aenea,” said the Dorje Phamo, stepping forward with regal elegance in her simple cotton robe. “You have run away from the Pax for years. It is time to fight them … time for all of us to fight them.”
I was staring at the old woman with something close to rude intensity. I had realized that there was an aura about her … no, wrong word, too mystical … but a feeling of strong color emanating from her, a deep carmine as strong as the Thunderbolt Sow’s personality. I also realized that I had been noticing that with everyone on the platform that evening—the bright blue of Lhomo’s courage, the golden confidence of Het Masteen’s command, the shimmering violet of Colonel Kassad’s shock at seeing the Shrike—and I wondered if this was some artifact of learning the language of the living. Or perhaps it was a result of the overload of light from the plasma explosions. Whatever it was, I knew that the colors were not real—I was not hallucinating and my vision was not clouded—but I also thought that I knew that my mind was making these connections, these shorthand glimpses into the true spirit of the person, on some level below and above sight.
And I knew that the colors surrounding Aenea covered the spectrum and beyond—a glow so pervasive that it filled the treeship as surely as the plasma explosions filled the world outside it.
Father de Soya spoke. “No, ma’am,” he said to the Dorje Phamo, his voice soft and respectful. “Lhomo and Raul are not correct. In spite of all of our anger and our wish to strike back, Aenea is correct. Lhomo may learn—if he lives—what we all will learn if we live. That is, after communion with Aenea, we share the pain of those we attack. Truly share it. Literally share it. Physically share it. Share it as part of having learned the language of the living.”
The Dorje Phamo looked down at the shorter priest. “I know this is true, Christian. But this does not mean that we cannot strike back when others hurt us.” She swept one arm upward to include the slowly clearing containment field and the starfield of fusion trails and burning embers beyond it. “These Pax … monsters … are de
stroying one of the greatest achievements of the human race. We must stop them!”
“Not now,” said Father de Soya. “Not by fighting them here. Trust Aenea.”
The giant named Sergeant Gregorius stepped into the circle. “Every fiber of my being, every moment of my training, every scar from my years of fighting … everything urges me to fight now,” he growled. “But I trusted my captain. Now I trust him as my priest. And if he says we must trust the young woman … then we must trust her.”
Het Masteen held up a hand. The group fell into silence. “This argument is a waste of time. As the One Who Teaches told you, the Yggdrasill has no weapons and the ergs are our only defense. But they cannot phase-shift the fusion drive while providing this level of shield. Effectively, we have no propulsion … we are drifting on our former course only a few light-minutes beyond our original position. And five of the archangels have changed course to intercept us.” The Templar turned to face us. “Please, everyone except the Revered One Who Teaches and her tall friend Raul, please leave the bridge platform and wait below.”
The others left without another word. I saw the direction of Rachel’s gaze before she turned away and I looked up. Colonel Kassad was at the top crow’s nest, standing next to the Shrike, the tall man still dwarfed by the three-meter sculpture of chrome and blades and thorns. Neither the Colonel nor the killing machine moved as they regarded one another from less than a meter’s distance.
I looked back at the simulacra display. The Pax ship embers were closing fast. Above us the containment field cleared.
“Take my hand, Raul,” said Aenea.
I took her hand, remembering all of the other times I had touched it in the last ten standard years.
“The stars,” she whispered. “Look up at the stars. And listen to them.”
• • •
THE TREESHIP YGGDRASILL HUNG IN LOW ORBIT around an orange-red world with white polar caps, ancient volcanoes larger than my world’s Pinion Plateau, and a river valley running for more than five thousand kilometers like an appendectomy scar around the world’s belly.