“Jolly fucking place, isn’t it?” said Martin Silenus, his voice echoing.
Father Hoyt took several steps deeper into the great hall. Afternoon light from the west-facing skylight forty meters above fell in dusty columns. “It’s incredible,” he whispered. “St. Peter’s in the New Vatican is nothing like this.”
Martin Silenus laughed. Thick light outlined his cheekbones and satyr’s brows. “This was built for a living deity,” he said.
Fedmahn Kassad lowered his travel bag to the floor and cleared his throat. “Surely this place predates the Shrike Church.”
“It does,” said the Consul. “But they’ve occupied it for the past two centuries.”
“It doesn’t look too occupied now,” said Brawne Lamia. She held her father’s automatic in her left hand.
They had all shouted during their first twenty minutes in the Keep, but the dying echoes, silences, and buzz of flies in the dining hall had reduced them to silence.
“Sad King Billy’s androids and bond clones built the goddamn thing,” said the poet. “Eight local years of labor before the spinships arrived. It was supposed to be the greatest tourist resort in the Web, the jumping-off point for the Time Tombs and the City of Poets. But I suspect that even then the poor schmuck android laborers knew the locals’ version of the Shrike story.”
Sol Weintraub stood near an eastern window, holding his daughter up so that soft light fell across her cheek and curled fist. “All that matters little now,” he said. “Lets find a corner free of carnage where we can sleep and eat our evening meal.”
“Are we going on tonight?” asked Brawne Lamia.
“To the Tombs?” asked Silenus, showing real surprise for the first time on the voyage. “You’d go to the Shrike in the dark?”
Lamia shrugged. “What difference does it make?”
The Consul stood near a leaded glass door leading to a stone balcony and closed his eyes. His body still lurched and balanced to the movement of the tramcar. The night and day of travel above the peaks had blurred together in his mind, lost in the fatigue of almost three days without sleep and his rising tension. He opened his eyes before he dozed off standing up. “We’re tired,” he said. “We’ll stay here tonight and go down in the morning.”
Father Hoyt had gone out onto the narrow ledge of balcony. He leaned on a railing of jagged stone. “Can we see the Tombs from here?”
“No,” said Silenus. “They’re beyond that rise of hills. But see those white things to the north and west a bit … those things gleaming like shards of broken teeth in the sand?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the City of Poets. King Billy’s original site for Keats and for all things bright and beautiful. The locals say that it’s haunted now by headless ghosts.”
“Are you one of them?” asked Lamia.
Martin Silenus turned to say something, looked a moment at the pistol still in her hand, shook his head, and turned away.
Footsteps echoed from an unseen curve of staircase and Colonel Kassad reentered the room. “There are two small storerooms above the dining hall,” he said. “They have a section of balcony outside but no other access than this stairway. Easy to defend. The rooms are … clean.”
Silenus laughed. “Does that mean nothing can get at us or that, when something does get at us, we’ll have no way to get out?”
“Where would we go?” asked Sol Weintraub.
“Where indeed?” said the Consul. He was very tired. He lifted his gear and took one handle of the heavy Möbius cube, waiting for Father Hoyt to lift the other end. “Let’s do what Kassad says. Find a space to spend the night. Let’s at least get out of this room. It stinks of death.”
Dinner was the last of their dried rations, some wine from Silenus’s last bottle, and some stale cake which Sol Weintraub had brought along to celebrate their last evening together. Rachel was too little to eat the cake, but she took her milk and went to sleep on her stomach on a mat near her father.
Lenar Hoyt removed a small balalaika from his pack and strummed a few chords.
“I didn’t know you played,” said Brawne Lamia.
“Poorly.”
The Consul rubbed his eyes. “I wish we had a piano.”
“You do have one,” said Martin Silenus.
The Consul looked at the poet.
“Bring it here,” said Silenus. “I’d welcome a Scotch.”
“What are you talking about?” snapped Father Hoyt. “Make sense.”
“His ship,” said Silenus. “Do you remember our dear, departed Voice of the Bush Masteen telling our Consul friend that his secret weapon was that nice Hegemony singleship sitting back at Keats Spaceport? Call it up, Your Consulship. Bring it on in.”
Kassad moved away from the stairway where he had been placing tripbeams. “The planet’s datasphere is dead. The comsats are down. The orbiting FORCE ships are on tightbeam. How is he supposed to call it?”
It was Lamia who spoke. “A fatline transmitter.”
The Consul moved his stare to her.
“Fatline transmitters are the size of buildings,” said Kassad.
Brawne Lamia shrugged. “What Masteen said made sense. If I were the Consul … if I were one of the few thousand individuals in the entire damn Web to own a singleship … I’d be damn sure I could fly it on remote if I needed it. The planet’s too primitive to depend on its comm net, the ionosphere’s too weak for shortwave, the comsats are the first things to go in a skirmish … I’d call it by fatline.”
“And the size?” said the Consul.
Brawne Lamia returned the diplomat’s level gaze. “The Hegemony can’t yet build portable fatline transmitters. There are rumors that the Ousters can.”
The Consul smiled. From somewhere there came a scrape and then the sound of metal crashing.
“Stay here,” said Kassad. He removed a deathwand from his tunic, canceled the tripbeams with his tactical comlog, and descended from sight.
“I guess we’re under martial law now,” said Silenus when the Colonel was gone. “Mars ascendant.”
“Shut up,” said Lamia.
“Do you think it’s the Shrike?” asked Hoyt.
The Consul made a gesture. “The Shrike doesn’t have to clank around downstairs. It can simply appear … here.”
Hoyt shook his head. “I mean the Shrike that has been the cause of everyone’s … absence. The signs of slaughter here in the Keep.”
“The empty villages might be the result of the evacuation order,” said the Consul. “No one wants to stay behind to face the Ousters. The SDF forces have been running wild. Much of the carnage could be their doing.”
“With no bodies?” laughed Martin Silenus. “Wishful thinking. Our absent hosts downstairs dangle now on the Shrike’s steel tree. Where, ere long, we too will be.”
“Shut up,” Brawne Lamia said tiredly.
“And if I don’t,” grinned the poet, “will you shoot me, madam?”
“Yes.”
The silence lasted until Colonel Kassad returned. He reactivated the tripbeams and turned to the group seated on packing crates and flowfoam cubes. “It was nothing. Some carrion birds—harbingers, I think the locals call them—had come in through the broken glass doors in the dining hall and were finishing the feast.”
Silenus chuckled. “Harbingers. Very appropriate.”
Kassad sighed, sat on a blanket with his back to a crate, and poked at his cold fobd. A single lantern brought from the windwagon lighted the room and the shadows were beginning to mount the walls in the corners away from the door to the balcony. “It’s our last night,” said Kassad. “One more story to tell.” He looked at the Consul.
The Consul had been twisting his slip of paper with the number 7 scrawled on it. He licked his lips. “What’s the purpose? The purpose of the pilgrimage has been destroyed already.”
The others stirred.
“What do you mean?” asked Father Hoyt.
The Consul crumpled th
e paper and threw it into a corner. “For the Shrike to grant a request, the band of pilgrims must constitute a prime number. We had seven. Masteen’s … disappearance … reduces us to six. We go to our deaths now with no hope of a wish being granted.”
“Superstition,” said Lamia.
The Consul sighed and rubbed his brow. “Yes. But that is our final hope.”
Father Hoyt gestured toward the sleeping infant. “Can’t Rachel be our seventh?”
Sol Weintraub rubbed his beard. “No. A pilgrim must come to the Tombs of his or her own free will.”
“But she did once,” said Hoyt. “Maybe it qualifies.”
“No,” said the Consul.
Martin Silenus had been writing notes on a pad but now he stood and paced the length of the room. “Jesus Christ, people. Look at us. We’re not six fucking pilgrims, we’re a mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform carrying the ghost of Paul Duré. Our ‘semisentient’ erg in the box there. Colonel Kassad with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if we are to believe her tale, carrying not only an unborn child but a dead Romantic poet. Our scholar with the child his daughter used to be. Me with my muse. The Consul with whatever fucking baggage he’s brought to this insane trek. My God, people, we should have received a fucking group rate for this trip.”
“Sit down,” said Lamia in a dead even tone.
“No, he’s right,” said Hoyt. “Even the presence of Father Duré in cruciform must affect the prime-number superstition somehow. I say that we press on in the morning in the belief that …”
“Look!” cried Brawne Lamia, pointing to the balcony doorway where the fading twilight had been replaced with pulses of strong light.
The group went out into the cool evening air, shielding their eyes from the staggering display of silent explosions which filled the sky: pure white fusion bursts expanding like explosive ripples across a lapis pond; smaller, brighter plasma implosions in blue and yellow and brightest red, curling inward like flowers folding for the night: the lightning dance of gigantic hellwhip displays, beams the size of small worlds cutting their swath across light-hours and being contorted by the riptides of defensive singularities: the aurora shimmer of defense fields leaping and dying under the assault of terrible energies only to be reborn nanoseconds later. Amid it all, the blue-white fusion tails of torchships and larger warships slicing perfectly true lines across the sky like diamond scratches on blue glass.
“The Ousters,” breathed Brawne Lamia.
“The war’s begun,” said Kassad. There was no elation in his voice, no emotion of any kind.
The Consul was shocked to discover that he was weeping silently. He turned his face from the group.
“Are we in danger here?” asked Martin Silenus. He sheltered under the stone archway of the door, squinting at the brilliant display.
“Not at this distance,” said Kassad. He raised his combat binoculars, made an adjustment, and consulted his tactical comlog. “Most of the engagements are at least three AU away. The Ousters are testing the FORCE:space defenses.” He lowered the glasses. “It’s just begun.”
“Has the farcaster been activated yet?” asked Brawne Lamia. “Are the people being evacuated from Keats and the other cities?”
Kassad shook his head. “I don’t believe so. Not yet. The fleet will be fighting a holding action until the cislunar sphere is completed. Then the evacuation portals will be opened to the Web while FORCE units come through by the hundreds.” He raised the binoculars again. “It’ll be a hell of a show.”
“Look!” It was Father Hoyt pointing this time, not at the fireworks display in the sky but out across the low dunes of the northern moors. Several kilometers toward the unseen Tombs, a single figure was just visible as a speck of a form throwing multiple shadows under the fractured sky.
Kassad trained his glasses on the figure.
“The Shrike?” asked Lamia.
“No, I don’t think so … I think it’s … a Templar by the looks of the robe.”
“Het Masteen!” cried Father Hoyt.
Kassad shrugged and handed the glasses around. The Consul walked back to the group and leaned on the balcony. There was no sound but the whisper of wind, but that made the violence of explosions above them more ominous somehow.
The Consul took his turn looking when the glasses came to him. The figure was tall and robed, its back to the Keep, and strode across the flashing vermilion sands with purposeful intent.
“Is he headed toward us or the Tombs?” asked Lamia.
“The Tombs,” said the Consul.
Father Hoyt leaned elbows on the ledge and raised his gaunt face to the exploding sky. “If it is Masteen, then we’re back to seven, aren’t we?”
“He’ll arrive hours before us,” said the Consul. “Half a day if we sleep here tonight as we proposed.”
Hoyt shrugged. “That can’t matter too much. Seven set out on the pilgrimage. Seven will arrive. The Shrike will be satisfied.”
“If it is Masteen,” said Colonel Kassad, “why the charade on the windwagon? And how did he get here before us? There were no other tramcars running and he couldn’t have walked over the Bridle Range passes.”
“We’ll ask him when we arrive at the Tombs tomorrow,” Father Hoyt said tiredly.
Brawne Lamia had been trying to raise someone on her comlog’s general comm frequencies. Nothing emerged but the hiss of static and the occasional growl of distant EMPs. She looked at Colonel Kassad. “When do they start bombing?”
“I don’t know. It depends upon the strength of the FORCE, fleet defenses.”
“The defenses weren’t very good the other day when the Ouster scouts got through and destroyed the Yggdrasill,” said Lamia.
Kassad nodded.
“Hey,” said Martin Silenus, “are we sitting on a fucking target?”
“Of course,” said the Consul. “If the Ousters are attacking Hyperion to prevent the opening of the Time Tombs, as M. Lamia’s tale suggests, then the Tombs and this entire area would be a primary target.”
“For nukes?” asked Silenus, his voice strained.
“Almost certainly,” answered Kassad.
“I thought something about the anti-entropic fields kept ships away from here,” said Father Hoyt.
“Crewed ships,” said the Consul without looking back at the others from where he leaned on the railing. “The anti-entropic fields won’t bother guided missiles, smart bombs, or hellwhip beams. It won’t bother mech infantry, for that matter. The Ousters could land a few attack skimmers or automated tanks and watch on remote while they destroy the valley.”
“But they won’t,” said Brawne Lamia. “They want to control Hyperion, not destroy it.”
“I wouldn’t wager my life on that supposition,” said Kassad.
Lamia smiled at him. “But we are, aren’t we, Colonel?”
Above them, a single spark separated itself from the continuous patchwork of explosions, grew into a bright orange ember, and streaked across the sky. The group on the terrace could see the flames, hear the tortured shriek of atmospheric penetration. The fireball disappeared beyond the mountains behind the Keep.
Almost a minute later, the Consul realized that he had been holding his breath, his hands rigid on the stone railing. He let out air in a gasp. The others seemed to be taking a breath at the same moment. There had been no explosion, no shock wave rumbling through the rock.
“A dud?” asked Father Hoyt.
“Probably an injured FORCE skirmisher trying to reach the orbital perimeter or the spaceport at Keats,” said Colonel Kassd.
“He didn’t mpke it, did he?” asked Lamia. Kassad did not respond.
Martin Silenus lifted the field glasses and searched the darkening moors for the Templar. “Out of sight,” said Silenus. “The good Captain either rounded that hill just this side of the Time Tombs valley or he pulled his disappearing act again.”
“It’s a pity that well never hear his story,” said Father Hoyt. He turned to
ward the Consul. “But we’ll hear yours, won’t we?”
The Consul rubbed his palms against his pant legs. His heart was racing. “Yes,” he said, realizing even as he spoke that he had finally made up his mind. “I’ll tell mine.”
The wind roared down the east slopes of the mountains and whistled along the escarpment of Chronos Keep. The explosions above them seemed to have diminished ever so slightly, but the coming of darkness made each one look even more violent than the last.