Дэн Симмонс: Endymion

The young man, Raul, is on one knee adjusting a low-power laser. Nemes cannot help but smile. “You wouldn’t use that on me, would you?” she says.

The man does not answer. He lifts the laser. Nemes thinks that if he uses it on her, in an attempt to blind her, no doubt, she will phase-shift and ram it all the way up past his colon into his lower intestine—without turning the beam off.

Aenea looks at her for the first time. Nemes can see why the Core is nervous about the young human’s potential—access elements of the Void Which Binds shimmer around the girl like static electricity—but Nemes also sees that the girl is years away from using any potential she has in that area. All this Sturm und Drang and galloping urgency has been for nothing. The human girl is not just immature in her powers, she is innocent of their true meaning.

Nemes realizes that she has harbored some small anxiety that the child herself would pose a problem in the final seconds, somehow tapping into a Void interface and creating difficulties. Nemes realizes that she was mistaken to have worried. Oddly enough, it is a disappointment. “Somehow I expected something more interesting,” she says aloud, and takes another step closer.

“What do you want?” demands young Raul, struggling to his feet. Nemes sees that the man has become exhausted just pulling his friends from the river.

“I want nothing from you,” she says easily. “Nor from your dying blue friend. From Aenea, I need just a few seconds of conversation.” Nemes nods toward the nearby trees where the claymores are seeded. “Why don’t you take your golem into the trees and wait for the girl to join you? We’ll just have a word in private, and then she’s yours.” She takes another step closer.

“Stay back,” says Raul, and lifts the little flashlight laser.

Nemes holds up her hands as if frightened. “Hey, don’t shoot, pardner,” she says. If the laser carried ten thousand times the amperage it did, Nemes would not be worried.

“Just back away,” says Raul. His thumb is on the trigger button. The toy laser is aimed at Nemes’s eyes.

“All right, all right,” says Nemes. She takes a step back. And phase-shifts into a gleaming chrome figure only sketchily human.

“Raul!” cries Aenea.

Nemes is bored. She shifts into fast time. The tableau in front of her is frozen. Aenea’s mouth is open, still speaking, but the vibrations in the air do not move. The rushing river is frozen, as if in a photograph with an impossibly high shutter speed. Droplets of spray hang in the air. Another droplet of water hangs suspended a millimeter beneath Raul’s dripping chin.

Nemes strides over and takes the flashlight laser from Raul’s hand. She is tempted to act on her earlier impulse right now and then drop to slow time to watch everyone’s reaction, but she sees Aenea out of the corner of her eye—the girl’s little hand is still molded into a fist—and Nemes realizes that she has work to do before having fun.

She drops her phase-shifted morphic layer long enough to retrieve the specimen bag from her belt and then shifts again. She walks over to the crouching girl, holds the open bag like a waiting basket beneath the child’s chin with her left hand, and rigidifies the edge of her phase-shifted right hand and all of her forearm into a cutting blade not much duller than the monofilament wire still hanging over the river.

Nemes smiles behind her chrome mask. “So long… kiddo,” she says. She had eavesdropped on their conversation when the trio had been kilometers upriver.

She brings her blade-sharp forearm down in a killing arc.

“What the hell’s going on?” Shouts Corporal Kee. “I can’t see.”

“Quiet,” orders de Soya. Both men are in their command chairs, leaning over the telescope monitors.

“Nemes turned… I don’t know… metallic,” says Kee, playing the video again in an insert box while watching the milling tableau below, “and then she disappeared.”

“Radar doesn’t show her,” says de Soya, keying through different sensor modes. “No IR… although the ambient temperature’s risen almost ten degrees centigrade in the immediate region. Heavy ionization.”

“Local storm cell?” says Kee, bewildered. Before de Soya can answer, Kee points to the monitor. “Now what? The girl’s down. Something’s happening with the guy…”

“Raul Endymion,” says de Soya, trying to improve the image quality on the monitor. The rising heat and atmospheric turbulence makes the image ripple and blur in spite of the computer’s best efforts to stabilize it. Raphael is holding its place only 280 klicks above hypothetical sea level on God’s Grove, far too low for an easy geosynchronous orbit and low enough that the ship is paranoid about expansion of the atmosphere adding to the already molecular heating the ship is encountering.

Father Captain de Soya has seen enough to make a decision. “Divert all power from ship functions and drop life support to minimal levels,” his voice orders. “Bring the fusion core to one hundred fifteen percent and kill forward deflection shields. Shift power for tactical use.”

“That would not be advisable—” begins the ship’s voice.

“Override all voice response and safety protocols,” snaps de Soya. “Priority code delta-nine-nine-two-zero. Papal diskey override… now. Readout confirmation.”

The monitors fill with data columns superimposed over the shifting image on the ground. Kee is watching wide-eyed. “Dear sweet Jesus,” whispers the corporal. “My God.”

“Yes,” whispers de Soya, watching the power to all systems except visual monitoring and tactical fall beneath red lines.

The explosions on the surface begin then.

At this point I had precisely enough time to have a retinal echo of the woman becoming silver blur, I blinked, and the flashlight laser was gone from my fingers. The air was becoming superheated. On either side of Aenea the air suddenly misted and seemed filled with a struggling chrome figure—six arms, four legs, flailing blades—and then I was leaping at the girl, knowing that nothing I could do would be in time, but—amazingly—reaching her in time to pull her down and roll aside from the blast of hot air and blurred motion.

The medkit warning alarm went off like fingers on slate—a sound impossible to ignore. We were losing A. Bettik. I covered Aenea with my body and pulled her toward A. Bettik’s body. Then the explosions began in the woods behind us.

Nemes swings her arm, expecting to feel nothing as the edge slices through muscle and vertebrae, and is shocked by the violent contact.

She looks down. The sharpened edge of her phase-shifted hand is in the grip of two sets of fingerblades. Her forearm is gripped by two other scalpel-sharp hands. The bulk of the Shrike presses close, the blades on the lower body almost in the frozen girl’s face. The creature’s eyes are bright red.

Nemes is momentarily startled and seriously irritated, but not alarmed. She rips her hand away and jumps back.

The tableau is exactly as it had been a second before—river in freeze time, Raul Endymion’s empty hand outstretched as if pressing the firing stud on the little laser, the android dying on the ground with medpak lights frozen in midblink—only the girl is now overshadowed by the huge bulk of the Shrike.

Nemes smiles beneath her chrome mask. She had been concentrating on the girl’s neck and not noticed the clumsy thing coming up on her in fast time. That is a mistake she will not make again.

“You want her?” says Nemes. “Have you also been sent to kill her? Be my guest… as long as I get the head.”