“Not with the Core,” Johnny said softly. “With me.”
“You?” My arm and fist quivered with the anticipation of smashing his vat-cloned face. “You!” I sneered. “You’re human now, remember?”
“Yes. But certain cybrid functions remain. Do you remember when I touched your hand several days ago and brought us to datumplane?”
I stared at him. “I’m not going to datumplane again.”
“No. Nor am I. But I may need to relay incredible amounts of data to you within a very short period of time. I brought you to a black market surgeon in the Dregs’ last night. She implanted a Schrön disk.”
“Why?” The Schrön loop was tiny, no larger than my thumbnail, and very expensive. It held countless field-bubble memories, each capable of holding near infinite bits of information. Schrön loops could not be accessed by the biological carrier and thus were used for courier purposes. A man or woman could carry AI personalities or entire planetary dataspheres in a Schrön loop. Hell, a dog could carry all that.
“Why?” I said again, wondering if Johnny or some forces behind Johnny were using me as such a courier. “Why?”
Johnny moved closer and put his hand around my fist. “Trust me, Brawne.”
I don’t think I’d trusted anyone since Dad blew his brains out twenty years ago and Mom retreated into the pure selfishness of her seclusion. There was no reason in the universe to trust Johnny now.
But I did.
I relaxed my fist and took his hand.
“All right,” said Johnny. “Finish your meal and we’ll get busy trying to save our lives.”
Weapons and drugs were the two easiest things to buy in Dregs’ Hive. We spent the last of Johnny’s considerable stash of black marks to buy weapons.
By 2200 hours, we each wore whiskered titan-poly body armor. Johnny had a goonda’s mirror-black helmet and I wore a FORCE-surplus command mask. Johnny’s power gauntlets were massive and a bright red. I wore osmosis gloves with killing trim. Johnny carried an Ouster hellwhip captured on Bressia and had tucked a laser wand in his belt. Along with Dad’s automatic, I now carried a Steiner-Ginn mini-gun on a gyroed waist brace. It was slaved to my command visor and I could keep both hands free while firing.
Johnny and I looked at each other and began giggling. When the laughter stopped there was a long silence.
“Are you sure the Shrike Temple here on Lusus is our best chance?” I asked for the third or fourth time.
“We can’t farcast,” said Johnny. “All the Core has to do is record a malfunction and we’re dead. We can’t even take an elevator from the lower levels. We’ll have to find unmonitored stairways and climb the hundred and twenty floors. The best chance to make the Temple is straight down the Concourse Mall.”
“Yes, but will the Shrike Church people take us in?”
Johnny shrugged, a strangely insectoid gesture in his combat outfit. The voice through the goonda helmet was metallic. “They’re the only group which has a vested interest in our survival. And the only ones with enough political pull to shield us from the Hegemony while finding transit for us to Hyperion.”
I pushed up my visor. “Meina Gladstone said that no future pilgrimage flights to Hyperion would be allowed.”
The dome of mirror black nodded judiciously. “Well, fuck Meina Gladstone,” said my poet lover.
I took a breath and walked to the opening of our niche, our cave, our last sanctuary. Johnny came up behind me. Body armor rubbed against body armor. “Ready, Brawne?”
I nodded, brought the mini-gun around on its pivot, and started to leave.
Johnny stopped me with a touch. “I love you. Brawne.”
I nodded, still tough. I forgot that my visor was up and he could see my tears.
The Hive is awake all twenty-eight hours of the day, but through some tradition, Third Shift was the quietest, the least populated. We would have had a better chance at the height of First Shift rush hour along the pedestrian causeways. But if the goondas and thuggees were waiting for us, the death toll of civilians would have been staggering.
It took us more than three hours to climb our way to Concourse Mall, not up a single staircase but along an endless series of mech corridors, abandoned access verticals swept clean by the Luddite riots eighty years ago, and a final stairway that was more rust than metal. We exited onto a delivery corridor less than half a klick from the Shrike Temple.
“I can’t believe it was so easy,” I whispered to him on intercom.
“They are probably concentrating people on the spaceport and private farcaster clusters.”
We took the least exposed walkway onto the Concourse, thirty meters below the first shopping level and four hundred meters below the roof. The Shrike Temple was an ornate, free-standing structure now less than half a klick away. A few off-hour shoppers and joggers glanced at us and then moved quickly away. I had no doubt that the Mall police were being paged, but I’d be surprised if they showed up too quickly.
A gang of brightly painted street thugs exploded from a lift shaft, hollering and whooping. They carried pulse-knives, chains, and power gauntlets. Startled, Johnny wheeled toward them with the hellwhip sending out a score of targeting beams. The mini-gun whir-whirred out of my hands, shifting from aiming point to aiming point as I moved my eyes.
The gang of seven kids skidded to a halt, held up their hands, and backed away, eyes wide. They dropped into jthe lift shaft and were gone.
I looked at Johnny. Black mirrors looked back. Neither of us laughed.
We crossed to the northbound shopping lane. The few pedestrians scurried for open shopfronts. We were less than a hundred meters from the Temple stairs. I could actually hear my heartbeat in the FORCE helmet earphones. We were within fifty meters of the stairs. As if called, an acolyte or priest of some sort appeared at the ten-meter door of the Temple and watched us approach. Thirty meters. If anyone was going to intercept us, they would have done it before this.
I turned toward Johnny to say something funny. At least twenty beams and half that many projectiles hit us at once. The outer layer of the titan-poly exploded outward, deflecting most of the projectile energy in the counterblast. The mirrored surface beneath bounced most of the killing light. Most of it.
Johnny was flung off his feet by the impact. I went to one knee and let the mini-gun train on the laser source.
Ten stories up along the residential Hive wall. My visor opaqued. Body armor burned off in a steam of reflective gas. The mini-gun sounded precisely like the kind of chainsaw they use in history holodramas. Ten stories up, a five-meter section of balcony and wall disintegrated in a cloud of explosive flechettes and armor-piercing rounds.
Three heavy slugs struck me from behind.
I landed on my palms, silenced the mini-gun, and swiveled. There were at least a dozen of them on each level, moving quickly in precise combat choreography. Johnny had reached his knees and was firing the hellwhip in orchestrated bursts of light, working his way through the rainbow to beat bounce defenses.
One of the running figures exploded into flame as the shopwindow behind it turned to molten glass and spattered fifteen meters onto the Concourse. Two more men came up over the level railings and I sent them back with a burst from the mini-gun.
An open skimmer came down from the rafters, repellers laboring as it banked around pylons. Rocket fire slammed into concrete around Johnny and me. Shopfronts vomited a billion shards of glass over us. I looked, blinked twice, targeted, and fired. The skimmer lurched sideways, struck an escalator with a dozen cowering civilians on it, and tumbled in a mass of twisting metal and exploding ordnance. I saw one shopper leap in flames to the Hive floor eighty meters below.
“Left!” shouted Johnny over the tightbeam intercom.
Four men in combat armor had dropped from an upper level using personal lift packs. The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant kaleidoscope of refle
ctions. One moved inside the sweep arc of my mini-gun to neutralize me while the other three went for Johnny.
He came in with a pulse-blade, ghetto style. I let it chew at my armor, knowing it would get through to forearm flesh but using it to buy the second I needed. I got it. I killed the man with the rigid edge of my gauntlet and swept the mini-gun fire into the three worrying Johnny.
Their armor went rigid and I used the gun to sweep them backward like someone hosing down a littered sidewalk. Only one of the men got to his feet before I blew them all off the level overhang.
Johnny was down again. Parts of his chest armor were gone, melted away. I smelled cooking flesh but saw no mortal wounds. I half crouched, lifted him.
“Leave me, Brawne. Run. The stairs.” The tightbeam was breaking up.
“Fuck off,” I said, getting my left arm around him enough to support him while allowing room for the mini-gun to track. “I’m still getting paid to be your bodyguard.”
They were Sniping at us from both walls of the Hive, the rafters, and the shopping levels above us. I counted at least twenty bodies on the walkways; about half were brightly clad civilians. The power assist on the left leg of my armor was grinding. Straight-legged, I awkwardly pulled us another ten meters toward the Temple stairs. There were several Shrike priests at the head of the stairs now, seemingly oblivious to the gunfire all around them.
“Above!”
I swiveled, targeted, and fired in one moment, hearing the gun go empty after one burst and seeing the second skimmer get off its missiles in the instant before it became a thousand pieces of hurtling, unrelated metal and torn flesh. I dropped Johnny heavily to the pavement and fell on him, trying to cover his exposed flesh with my body.
The missiles detonated simultaneously, several in airburst and at least two burrowing. Johnny and I were lifted into the air and hurled fifteen or twenty meters down the pitching walkway. Good thing. The alloy and ferroconcrete pedestrian strip where we had been a second before burned, bubbled, sagged, and tumbled down onto the flaming walkway below. There was a natural moat there now, a gap between most of the other ground troops and us.
I rose, slapped away the useless mini-gun and mount, pulled off useless shards of my own armor, and lifted Johnny in both arms. His helmet had been blown off and his face was very bad. Blood seeped through a score of gaps in his armor. His right arm and left foot had been blown off. I turned and began carrying him up the Shrike Temple stairs.
There were sirens and security skimmers filling the Concourse flyspace now. The goondas on the upper levels and far side of the tumbled walkway ran for cover. Two of the commandos who had dropped on lift packs ran up the stairs after me. I did not turn. I had to lift my straight and useless left leg for every step. I knew that I had been seriously burned on my back and side and there were shrapnel wounds elsewhere.
The skimmers whooped and circled but avoided the Temple steps. Gunfire rattled up and down the Mall. I could hear metal-shod footsteps coming rapidly behind me. I managed another three steps. Twenty steps above, impossibly far away, the bishop stood amid a hundred Temple priests.
I made another step and looked down at Johnny. One eye was open, staring up at me. The other was closed with blood and swollen tissue. “It’s all right,” I whispered, aware for the first time that my own helmet was gone. “It’s all right. We’re almost there.” I managed one more step.
The two men in bright black combat armor blocked my way. Both had lifted visors streaked with deflection scars and their faces were very hard.
“Put hifri down, bitch, and maybe we’ll let you live.”
I nodded tiredly, too tired to take another step or do anything but stand there and hold him in both arms. Johnny’s blood dripped on white stone.
“I said, put the son of a bitch down and …”
I shot both of them, one in the left eye and one in the right, never lifting Dad’s automatic from where I held it under Johnny’s body.
They fell away. I managed another step. And then another. I rested a bit and then lifted my foot for another.
At the top of the stairs the group of black and red robes parted. The doorway was very tall and very dark. I did not look back but I could hear from the noise behind us that the crowd on the Concourse was very large. The bishop walked by my side as I went through the doors and into the dimness.
I laid Johnny on the cool floor. Robes rustled around us. I pulled my own armor off where I could, then batted at Johnny’s. It was fused to his flesh in several places. I touched his burned cheek with my good hand. “I’m sorry …”
Johnny’s head stirred slightly and his eye opened. He lifted his bare left hand to touch my cheek, my hair, the back of my head. “Fanny …”
I felt him die then. I also felt the surge as his hand found the neural shunt, the white-light warmth of the surge to the Schrön loop as everything Johnny Keats ever was or would be exploded into me; almost, almost it was like his orgasm inside me two nights earlier, the surge and throb and sudden warmth and stillness after, with the echo of sensation there.
I lowered him to the floor and let the acolytes remove the body, taking it out to show the crowd and the authorities and the ones who waited to know.
I let them take me away.
I spent two weeks in a Shrike Temple recovery crèche. Burns healed, scars removed, alien metal extracted, skin grafted, flesh regrown, nerves rewoven. And still I hurt.
Everyone except the Shrike priests lost interest in me. The Core made sure that Johnny was dead; that his presence in the Core had left no trace; that his cybrid was dead.
The authorities took my statement, revoked my license, and covered things up as best they could. The Web press reported that a battle between Dregs’ Level Hive gangs had erupted onto the Concourse Mall. Numerous gang members and innocent bystanders were killed. The police contained it.
A week before word came that the Hegemony would allow the Yggdrasill to sail with pilgrims for the war zone near Hyperion, I used a Temple farcaster to ’cast to Renaissance Vector where I spent an hour alone in the archives there.
The papers were in vacuum-press so I could not touch them. The handwriting was Johnny’s; I had seen his writing before. The parchment was yellow and brittle with age. There were two fragments. The first read:
The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone,
Bright eyes, accomplished shape, and languorous
waist!
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise—
Vanished unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday—or holinight—
Of fragrant-curtained love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight;
But, as I’ve read love’s missal through today,
He’ll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.
The second fragment was in a wilder hand and on rougher paper, as if slashed across a notepad in haste:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
I’m pregnant. I think that Johnny knew it. I don’t know for sure.
I’m pregnant twice. Once with Johnny’s child and once with the Schrön-loop memory of what he was. I don’t know if the two are meant to be linked. It will be months before the child is born and only days before I face the Shrike.
But I remembe
r those minutes after Johnny’s torn body was taken out to the crowd and before I was led away for help. They were all there in the darkness, hundreds of the priests and acolytes and exorcists and ostiaries and worshipers … and as one voice they began to chant, there in that red dimness under the revolving sculpture of the Shrike, and their voices echoed in Gothic vaults. And what they chanted went something like this:
“BLESSED BE SHE
BLESSED BE THE MOTHER OF OUR SALVATION
BLESSED BE THE INSTRUMENT OF OUR ATONEMENT
BLESSED BE THE BRIDE OF OUR CREATION
BLESSED BE SHE”
I was injured and in shock. I didn’t understand it then. I don’t understand it now.
But I know that, when the time arrives and the Shrike comes, Johnny and I will face it together.
It was long after dark. The tramcar rode between stars and ice. The group sat in silence, the only sound the creak of cable.
After a time had passed, Lenar Hoyt said to Brawne Lamia, “You also carry the cruciform.”
Lamia looked at the priest.
Colonel Kassad leaned toward the woman. “Do you think Het Masteen was the Templar who had spoken to Johnny?”
“Possibly,” said Brawne Lamia. “I never found out.”
Kassad did not blink. “Were you the one who killed Masteen?”
“No.”
Martin Silenus stretched and yawned. “We have a few hours before sunrise,” he said. “Anyone else interested in getting some sleep?”
Several heads nodded.
“I’Il stay up to keep watch,” said Fedmahn Kassad. “I’m not tired.”
“I’ll keep you company,” said the Consul.
“I’ll heat some coffee for the therm,” said Brawne Lamia.
When the others slept, the infant Rachel making soft cooing sounds in her sleep, the other three sat at the windows and watched the stars burn cold and distant in the high night.
6
Chronos Keep jutted from the easternmost rim of the great Bridle Range: a grim, baroque heap of sweating stones with three hundred rooms and halls, a maze of lightless corridors leading to deep halls, towers, turrets, balconies overlooking the northern moors, airshafts rising half a kilometer to light and rumored to drop to the world’s labyrinth itself, parapets scoured by cold winds from the peaks above, stairways—inside and out—carved from the mountain stone and leading nowhere, stained-glass windows a hundred meters tall set to catch the first rays of solstice sun or the moon on midwinter night, paneless windows the size of a man’s fist looking out on nothing in particular, an endless array of bas-relief, grotesque sculptures in half-hidden niches, and more than a thousand gargoyles staring down from eave and parapet, transept and sepulcher, peering down through wood rafters in the great halls and positioned so as to peer in the blood-tinted windows of the northeast face, their winged and hunchbacked shadows moving like grim sundial hours, cast by sunlight in the day and gas-fed torches at night. And everywhere in Chronos Keep sign of the Shrike Church’s long occupation—atonement altars draped in red velvet, hanging and free-standing sculptures of the Avatar with polychrome steel for blades and blood-gems for eyes, more statues of the Shrike carved from the stone of narrow stairways and dark halls so that nowhere in the night would one be free of the fear of touching hands emerging from rock, the sharp curve of blade descending from stone, four arms enveloping in a final embrace. As if in a last measure of ornamentation, a filigree of blood in many of the once occupied halls and rooms, arabesques of red spattered in almost recognizable patterns along walls and tunnel ceilings, bedclothes caked hard with rust-red substance, and a central dining hall filled with the stench of food rotting from a meal abandoned weeks earlier, the floor and table, chairs and wall adorned with blood, stained clothing and shredded robes lying in mute heaps. And everywhere the sound of flies.