Not waiting for an answer, I drop the hawking mat like an express elevator. Slamming into the ground, I roll aside, bolts of energy ionizing the air not twenty centimeters above my head. The inertial compass, still on a lanyard around my neck, punches me in the face as I roll. There are no boulders to hide behind, no rocks; the sand is flat here. I try to dig a ditch with my fingers as the blue bolts crisscross the air over my head. Flechette clouds flash overhead with their characteristic ripping sound. If I had been airborne now, the hawking mat and I would be in small tatters.
Something huge is standing not three meters from me in the whipping sand. Its legs are planted wide. It looks like a giant in barbed combat armor—a giant with too many arms. A plasma bolt strikes it, outlining the spiked form for an instant. The thing does not melt or fall or fly apart.
Impossible. Fucking impossible. Part of my mind coolly notes that I am thinking in obscenities the way I always have in combat.
The huge shape is gone. There are more screams to my left, explosions straight ahead. How the hell am I supposed to find the kid in all this carnage? And if I do, how can I find my way to the Third Cave Tomb? The idea—the Plan—had been for me to swoop Aenea up in the miracle distraction the old poet had promised, make a dash for the Third Cave again, and then punch in the final bit of autopilot for the thirty-klick run for Chronos Keep on the edge of the Bridle Range, where A. Bettik and the spaceship would be waiting for me in … three minutes.
Even in all this confusion, whatever the hell it is, there is no way that the orbital torchships or ground-based AA batteries can miss something as big as the ship if it hangs around for more than the thirty seconds we’d allotted for it to be on the ground. This whole rescue mission is screwed.
The earth shakes and a boom fills the Valley. Either something huge has blown up—an ammo dump, at least—or something much larger than a skimmer has crashed. A wild red glow illuminates the entire northern part of the Valley, blossoms of flame visible even through the sandstorm. Against that glow I can see scores of armored figures running, firing, flying, falling. One form is smaller than the rest and is unarmored. The barbed giant is standing next to it. The smaller form, still silhouetted against the fiery glow of pure destruction, is attacking the giant, pounding small fists against barbs and spikes.
“Shit!” I crawl toward the hawking mat, cannot find it in the storm, rub sand out of my eyes, crawl in a circle, and feel cloth under my right palm. In the seconds I have been off the mat, it has become almost buried beneath the sand. Digging like a frenzied dog, I unearth the flight designs, activate the mat, and fly toward the fading glow. The two figures are no longer visible, but I have kept the presence of mind to take a compass reading. Two lance bolts scorch the air—one centimeters above my prone body, one millimeters under the mat.
“Shit! Goddamn!” I shout to no one in particular.
FATHER CAPTAIN DE SOYA IS ONLY SEMICONSCIOUS as he bounces along on Sergeant Gregorius’s armored shoulder. De Soya half senses other dark shapes running through the storm with them, occasionally firing plasma bolts at unseen targets, and he wonders if this is the rest of Gregorius’s squad. Fading in and out of awareness, he desperately wishes he could see the girl again, talk to her.
Gregorius almost runs into something, stops, orders his squad to close up. A scarab armored fighting vehicle has dropped its camouflage shield and is sitting askew on a boulder. The left track is missing, and the barrels of the rear miniguns have been melted like wax in a flame. The right eye blister is shattered and gaping.
“Here,” pants Gregorius, and carefully lowers Father Captain de Soya through the blister. A second later the sergeant pulls himself through, illuminating the interior of the scarab with the torch beam on his energy lance. The driver’s seat looks as if someone has spray-painted it red. The rear bulkheads seem to have been spattered with random colors, rather like some absurd pre-Hegira “abstract art” Father Captain de Soya once saw in a museum. Only this metal canvas has been daubed with human parts.
Sergeant Gregorius pulls him deeper into the tilted scarab and leans the torchship captain against the lower bulkhead. Two other suited figures squeeze through the shattered blister.
De Soya rubs blood and sand out of his eyes and says, “I’m all right.” He had meant to say it in a command tone, but his voice is weak, almost childlike.
“Yessir,” growls Gregorius. The sergeant is pulling his medkit from his beltpak.
“I don’t need that,” de Soya says weakly. “The suit …” All combat suits have their own sealant and semi-intelligent doc liners. De Soya is sure that for such minor slash or puncture wounds, the suit has already dealt with it. But now he looks down.
His left leg has been all but severed. The impact-proof, energy-resistant, omnipolymer combat armor is hanging in shreds, like tattered rubber on a cheap tire. He can see the white of his femur. The suit has tightened into a crude tourniquet around his upper thigh, saving his life, but there are half a dozen serious puncture wounds in his chest armor, and the medlights on his chest display are blinking red.
“Ah, Jesus,” whispers Father Captain de Soya. It is a prayer.
“It’s all right,” says Sergeant Gregorius, tightening his own tourniquet around the thigh. “We’ll be getting you to a medic and then liftin’ you to the ship’s hospital in no time, sir.” He looks to the two suited figures crouched in exhaustion behind the front seats. “Kee? Rettig?”
“Yes, Sergeant?” The smaller of the two figures looks up.
“Mellick and Ott?”
“Dead, Sergeant. The thing got them at the Sphinx.”
“Stay on the net,” says Sergeant Gregorius, and turns back to de Soya. The noncom removes his gauntlet and touches huge fingers to one of the larger puncture wounds. “Does that hurt, sir?”
De Soya shakes his head. He cannot feel the touch.
“All right,” says the sergeant, but he looks displeased. He begins calling on the tactical net.
“The girl,” says Father Captain de Soya. “We have to find the girl.”
“Yes, sir,” says Gregorius, but continues calling on different channels. De Soya listens now and can hear the babble.
“Look out! Christ! It’s coming back.…”
“St. Bonaventure! St. Bonaventure! You are venting into space! Say again, you are venting into …”
“Scorpion one-niner to any controller … Jesus … Scorpion one-niner, left engine out, any controller … can’t see the Valley … will divert …”
“Jamie! Jamie! Oh, God …”
“Get off the net! Crossdammit, maintain com discipline! Get off the fucking net!”
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name …”
“Watch the fucking … oh, shit … the fucking thing took a hit but … shit …”
“Multiple bogeys … say again … multiple bogeys … disregard fire control … there are multiple …” This is interrupted by screams.
“Command One, come in. Command One, come in.”
Feeling consciousness draining from him like the blood pooling under his ruined leg, de Soya flips down his visors. The tactical display is garbage. He keys the tightbeam com channel to Barnes-Avne’s command skimmer. “Commander, this is Father Captain de Soya. Commander?”
The line is no longer operative.
“The Commander is dead, sir,” says Gregorius, pressing an adrenaline ampule against de Soya’s bare arm. The father-captain has no memory of his gauntlet and combat armor being removed. “I saw her skimmer go in on tactical before it all went to hell,” continues the sergeant, wiring de Soya’s dangling leg to his upper thighbone like someone tying down loose cargo. “She’s dead, sir. Colonel Brideson’s not responding. Captain Ranier’s not answering from the torchship. The C-three ain’t answerin’.”
De Soya fights to stay conscious. “What’s happening, Sergeant?”
Gregorius leans closer. His visors are up, and de Soya sees for the first time that the giant is a black man. “We
had a phrase for this in the Marines before I joined Swiss Guard, sir.”
“Charlie Fox,” says Father Captain de Soya, trying to smile.
“That’s what you polite navy types call it,” agrees Gregorius. He gestures the other two troopers toward the broken blister. They crawl out. Gregorius lifts de Soya and carries him out like a baby. “In the Marines, sir,” continues the sergeant, not even breathing heavily, “we called it a cluster fuck.”
De Soya feels himself fading. The sergeant sets him down on the sand.
“You stay with me, Captain! Goddammit, you hear me? You stay with me!” Gregorius is shouting.
“Watch your language, Sergeant,” says de Soya, feeling himself sliding into unconsciousness but unable and unwilling to do anything about it. “I’m a priest, remember.… Taking the name of God in vain is a mortal sin.” The blackness is closing in, and Father Captain de Soya does not know if he has said the last sentence aloud or not.
15
Since I was a boy on the moors, standing apart to watch smoke from the peat fires rise from within the protective ring of circled caravans, waiting for the stars to appear, then seeing them cold and indifferent in the deepening lapis sky and wondering about my future while waiting for the call that would bring me in to warmth and dinner, I have had a sense of the irony of things. So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd. I saw this as a child. I have seen it throughout my life since then.
Flying toward the fading orange light of the explosion, I suddenly came across the child, Aenea. My first glimpse had been of two figures, the small one attacking the huge one, but when I arrived a moment later, sand howling and rasping around the bobbing hawking mat, there was only the girl.
This is the way we looked to each other at that moment: the girl with an expression of shock and anger, eyes red and narrowed against the sand or from her fury at something, her small fists clenched, her shirt and loose sweater flapping like wild banners in the wind, her shoulder-length hair—brown but with blond streaks that I would notice later—matted and blowing, her cheeks streaked with the muddy path of tears and snot, her rubber-soled, canvas kid’s shoes totally inappropriate to the adventure upon which she’d embarked, and her cheap backpack hanging from one shoulder; I must have been a wilder, less sane sight—a bulky, muscled, not-very-bright-looking twenty-seven-year-old lying flat on my belly on a flying carpet, my face largely obscured by the bandanna and dark glasses, my short hair filthy and spiked in the wind, my pack also lashed over one shoulder, my vest and trousers filthy with sand and grime.
The girl’s eyes widened in recognition, but it took only a second for me to realize that she was recognizing the hawking mat, not me.
“Get on!” I shouted. Armored forms ran by, firing as they went. Other shadows loomed in the storm.
The girl ignored me, turning away as if to find the shape she had been attacking. I noticed then that her fists were bleeding. “Goddamn him,” she was shouting, almost weeping. “Goddamn him.”
These were the first words I heard our messiah utter.
“Get on!” I shouted again, and began to dismount from the hawking mat to seize her.
Aenea turned, looked at me for the first time, and—somehow clearly over the rasping sandstorm—said, “Take that mask off.”
I remembered the bandanna. Lowering it, I spit sand as red mud.
As if satisfied, the girl stepped closer and jumped onto the mat. Now we were both sitting on the hovering, bobbing carpet—the girl behind me, our backpacks squeezed between us. I tugged the bandanna back up and shouted, “Hang on to me!”
She ignored me and gripped the edges of the mat.
I hesitated a moment, tugging my sleeve back to study my wrist chronometer. Less than two minutes remained before the ship was scheduled to perform its touch-and-go at Chronos Keep. I couldn’t even find the entrance to the Third Cave Tomb in that time—perhaps I could never find it in this carnage. As if to underline that point, a tracked scarab suddenly plowed over a dune, almost grinding us under its treads before it wheeled left, guns firing at something out of sight to the east.
“Hang on!” I shouted again, and keyed the mat to full acceleration, gaining altitude as I went, watching my compass and concentration on flying north until we left the Valley. This was no time to crash into a cliff wall.
A great stone wing passed under us. “Sphinx!” I shouted back to the girl huddling behind me. I realized in an instant how stupid this comment was—she had just come from that tomb.
Guessing our altitude to be several hundred meters, I leveled off and increased our speed. The deflection shield came on, but sand still whirled around us within the nacelle of trapped air. “We shouldn’t hit anything at this altitu—” I began, shouting over my shoulder again, but was interrupted by the looming shape of a skimmer flying directly at us in the storm cloud. I did not have time to react, but somehow I did, diving the mat so quickly that only the containment field held us in place, the shape of the skimmer passing over us with less than a meter to spare. The little hawking mat tumbled and twisted in the monster machine’s lift-wake.
“Heck and spit,” said Aenea behind me. “Hell and shit.”
It was the second utterance I heard from our messiah-to-be.
Leveling off again, I peered over the edge of the mat, trying to make out anything on the ground. It was folly to be flying so high—certainly every tactical sensor, detector, radar, and targeting imager in the area was tracking us. Except for the taste of chaos we had left behind, I had no idea why they hadn’t fired at us yet. Unless … I looked over my shoulder again. The girl was leaning close to my back, shielding her face from the stinging sand.
“Are you all right?” I called.
She nodded, her forehead touching my back. I had the sense that she was crying, but I could not be sure.
“I’m Raul Endymion,” I shouted.
“Endymion,” she said, pulling her head back. Her eyes were red, but dry. “Yes.”
“You’re Aenea …”I stopped. I could not think of anything intelligent to say. Checking the compass, I adjusted our direction of flight and hoped that our altitude was sufficient to clear the dunes here beyond the Valley. Without much hope, I looked up, wondering if the plasma trail of the ship would be visible through the storm. I saw nothing.
“Uncle Martin sent you,” said the girl. It was not a question.
“Yes,” I shouted back. “We’re going … well, the ship … I’d arranged for it to meet us at Chronos Keep, but we’re late.…”
A bolt of lightning ripped the clouds not thirty meters to our right. Both the child and I flinched and ducked. To this day I do not know if it was a lightning discharge or someone shooting at us. For the hundredth time on this endless day, I cursed the crudeness of this ancient flying device—no speed indicators, no altimeter. The wind roar beyond the deflection field suggested that we were traveling at füll speed, but with no guidepoints except the shifting curtains of cloud, it was impossible to tell. It was as bad as hurtling through the Labyrinth, but at least there the autopilot program had been dependable. Here, even with the entire Swiss Guard after us, I would have to decelerate soon: the Bridle Range of mountains with their vertical cliffs lay somewhere dead ahead. At almost three hundred klicks per hour, we should reach the mountains and the Keep within six minutes. I had checked my chronometer when we accelerated, now I glanced at it again. Four and a half minutes. According to maps I had studied, the desert ended abruptly at the Bridle Cliffs. I would give it another minute.…
Things happened simultaneously then.
Suddenly we were out of the dust storm; it did not taper off, we just flew out of it the way one would emerge from under a blanket. At that second I saw that we were pitched slightly down—or the ground here was rising—and that we were going to strike some huge boulders within seconds.
Aenea shouted. I ignored her, tweaked the control desig
ns with both hands, we lifted over the boulders with enough g-force to press us heavily against the hawking mat, and at that instant both the child and I saw that we were twenty meters from the cliff face and flying into it. There was no time to stop.
Theoretically, I knew, Sholokov’s design for the hawking mat allowed it to fly vertically, the incipient containment field keeping the passenger—theoretically, his beloved niece—from tumbling off backward. Theoretically.
It was time to test the theory.
Aenea’s arms came around my midsection as we accelerated into a ninety-degree climb. The mat took all of the twenty meters of free space to initiate the climb, and by the time we were vertical, the granite of the rock face was centimeters “beneath” us. Instinctively, I leaned full forward and grabbed the rigid front of the carpet, trying not to lean on the flight-control designs as I did so. Equally instinctively, Aenea leaned forward and increased her bear hug on my midsection. The effect was that I could not breathe for the minute or so it took the carpet to clear the top of the cliffs. I tried not to look back over my shoulder during the duration of the climb. A thousand or more meters of open space directly beneath me might have been more than my overworked nerves could stand.
We reached the top of the cliffs—suddenly there were stairs carved there, stone terraces, gargoyles—and I leveled the carpet.
The Swiss Guard had set up observation posts, detector stations, and antiaircraft batteries here along the terraces and balconies on the east side of Chronos Keep. The castle itself—carved out of the stone of the mountain—loomed more than a hundred meters above us, its overhanging turrets and higher balconies directly above us. There were more Swiss Guard on these flat areas.
All of them were dead. Their bodies, still clad in impermeable impact armor, were sprawled in the unmistakable attitudes of death. Some were grouped together, their lacerated forms looking as if a plasma bomb had exploded in their midst.
But Pax body armor could withstand a plasma grenade at that distance. These corpses had been shredded.