Дэн Симмонс: Endymion

“It’s all right,” Aenea said again, pulling me back. “It won’t do anything. It’s all right.”

We crouched next to A. Bettik. The android’s eyelashes were fluttering. “Did I miss anything?” he whispered hoarsely.

We did not laugh. Aenea touched the blue man’s cheek and looked at me. The Shrike stayed where it had first appeared, burning embers drifting by its red eyes and soot settling on its carapace.

A. Bettik closed his eyes and the telltales began to blink again. “We need to get him serious help,” I whispered to Aenea, “or we’re going to lose him.”

She nodded. I thought she had whispered something back, but it was not her voice speaking.

I lifted my left arm, ignoring the tattered shirt and rising red welts there. All the hair had been burned off my forearm.

We both listened. The comlog was speaking in a familiar man’s voice.

Father de Soya is surprised when they finally respond on the common band. He had not thought their archaic comlog capable of transmitting on the tightbeam the ship was holding on them. There is even a visual display—the fuzzy holographic image of two burned and sooty faces float above the main monitor.

Corporal Kee looks at de Soya. “Well I’ll be damned, Father.”

“Me too,” says de Soya. To the waiting faces he says, “I am Father Captain de Soya on the Pax ship Raphael…”

“I remember you,” says the girl. De Soya realizes that the ship is transmitting holo images and that they can see him—no doubt a miniature ghostly face above a Roman collar, all floating above the comlog on the man’s wrist.

“I remember you, too,” is all de Soya can think to say. It has been a long search. He looks at the dark eyes and pale skin beneath the soot and superficial burns. So close…

The image of Raul Endymion speaks. “Who was that? What was that?”

Father Captain de Soya shakes his head. “I don’t know. Her name was Rhadamanth Nemes. She was assigned to us just a few days ago. She said that she was part of a new Legion they are training—” He stops. All of this is classified. He is speaking to the enemy. De Soya looks at Corporal Kee. In the other man’s slight smile, he sees their situation. They are condemned men anyway. “She said she was part of a new Legion of Pax warriors,” he continues, “but I don’t think that was the truth. I don’t think she was human.”

“Amen,” says the image of Raul Endymion. The face looks away from the comlog for a minute and then returns. “Our friend is dying, Father Captain de Soya. Can you do anything to help?”

The priest-captain shakes his head. “We can’t get to you. The Nemes creature took our dropship and overrode the remote autopilot. We can’t even get the beacon to respond. But if you can get to it, it has an autosurgeon.”

“Where is it?” says the girl.

Corporal Kee leans into the imaging field. “Our radar shows it 19 be about a klick and a half southeast of you,” he says. “In the hills. It has some camouflage crap on it, but you’ll be able to find it. We’ll lead you there.”

Raul Endymion says, “It was your voice on the comlog. Telling us to get to the rocks.”

“Well, yeah,” says Kee. “We had everything diverted into the ship’s tactical fire-control system—that was about eighty gigawatts that we could deliver through atmosphere—but the groundwater would have turned to steam and killed all of you. The rocks seemed the best bet.”

“She beat us there,” says Raul with a crooked smile.

“That was the idea,” responds Corporal Kee.

“Thank you,” says Aenea.

Kee nods, embarrassed, and ducks out of the imaging field. “As the good corporal said,” continues Father Captain de Soya, “we will help guide you to the dropship.”

“Why?” says the blurred image of Raul. “And why did you kill your own creature?”

De Soya shakes his head. “She was not my creature.”

“The Church’s, then,” insists Raul. “Why?”

“I hope she was not the Church’s creature,” de Soya says quietly. “If she was, then my Church has become the monster.”

There is a silence broken only by the hiss of the tightbeam. “You’d better get moving,” de Soya says at last. “It is getting dark.”

Both faces in the holo look around them almost comically, as if they have forgotten their surroundings. “Yeah,” says Raul, “and your lance or CPB or whatever it was melted my hand-lamp to slag.”

“I could light your way,” says de Soya without smiling, “but it would mean activating the main weapons system again.”

“Never mind,” says Raul. “We’ll manage. I’m shutting down the imager, but I’ll keep the audio channel open until we get to the dropship.”

It took us more than two hours to go the kilometer and a half. The lava hills were very rough. It would have been easy to break an ankle on those rills and fissures without the added weight of A. Bettik on my back. It was very dark—clouds had moved in to occlude the stars—and I don’t think we would have made it at all that night if Aenea hadn’t found the flashlight laser lying in the grass when we were packing up to move out. “How the hell did that get there?” I said. The last I remembered of the little laser, I had been ready to trigger it at the hell-woman’s eyes. Then it had been gone. Well, I thought, to hell with it. It had been a day for mysteries. We left with one last mystery behind us—the silent form of the Shrike, still frozen where it had reappeared. It did not attempt to follow us.

With Aenea leading the way with the flashlight set at widebeam, we struggled and scrabbled our way across the black rock and shifting ash back into the hills. We would have made it in half the time if A. Bettik had not required constant treatment. The medkit had used up its modest share of antibiotics, stimulants, painkillers, plasma, and IV drip. A. Bettik was alive because of the kit’s work, but it was still a close thing. He had simply lost too much blood in the river; the tourniquet had made a difference, but the belt had not been tight enough to staunch all the bleeding. We administered CPR when we had to, just to keep the blood flowing to his brain if nothing else, and stopped when the medkit alarms started squawking. The comlog kept us on track in the Pax corporal’s voice, and I decided that even if this was all a trick to capture Aenea, we owed those two men up there a hell of a debt of gratitude. And all the time we were scrambling through the darkness, Aenea’s flashlight beam playing over black lava and the skeletons of dead trees, I expected that hell-woman’s chromed hand to slash up through the rock and grab me by the ankle.

We found the dropship right where they said it would be. Aenea started up the metal ladder, but I grabbed her tattered pant leg and made her come down.

“I don’t want you in the ship, kiddo,” I said. “We only have their word that they can’t fly it by remote. If you get in and they can fly it from up there, they’ve got you.”

She sagged against the ladder. I had never seen her look so exhausted. “I trust them,” she said. “They said—”

“Yeah, but they can’t grab you if you’re not in there. You stay here while I carry A. Bettik up and see if there’s an autosurgeon.”

As I went up the ladder, I had a stomach-twisting thought. What if the metal door above me was locked and the keys were in the hell-woman’s jumper pocket?

There was a lighted diskey pad. “Six-nine-nine-two,” said Corporal Kee’s voice from the comlog.

I tapped it in and the outer air-lock door slid open. The autosurgeon was in there and it came alive with a touch. I gently lowered my blue friend into the cushioned enclosure—taking great pains not to hit the raw stump of his arm—made sure that the diagnostic patches and pressure cuffs were placing themselves properly, and then closed the lid. It felt too much like closing a coffin.