“Gold,” says the Consul, knowing that this is the only syllable that has held its power over the ages.
The crouching man does not react—there is a sick light in his eyes as he watches the blade—but the other man steps forward and sets a heavy hand on his partner’s shoulder. “What bey you talkin’ about, man? Wherefore you got gold?”
“My ship,” says the Consul. “The Benares.”
The crouching man raises the blade next to his own cheek. “He bey lyin’, Chez. The Benares bey that old flat-bottomed manta-pulled barge belongin’ to the blue-skins we finished trey day ago.”
The Consul closes his eyes for a second, feeling the nausea in him but not surrendering to it. A. Bettik and the other android crewmen had left the Benares in one of the ship’s launches less than a week earlier, heading downstream toward “freedom.” Evidently they had found something else. “A. Bettik,” he says. “The crew captain. He didn’t mention the gold?”
The man with the knife grins. “He make lots a noise, but he don’t speak much. He say the boat way and the shit gone up to Edge. Too fuckin’ far for a barge with no mantas, me-think.”
“Shut up, Obem.” The other man crouches in front of the Consul. “Why would you have gold on that old barge, man?”
The Consul raises his face. “Don’t you recognize me? I was Hegemony Consul to Hyperion for years.”
“Hey, don’t bey fuckin’ with us …” begins the man with the knife, but the other interrupts. “Yeah, man, I remember your face on the camp holie when I bey kid-like. So why you carryin’ gold upriver now when the sky bey fallin’, Hegemony-man?”
“We were heading for the shelter … Chronos Keep,” says the Consul, trying not to sound too eager but at the same time grateful for each second he is allowed to live. Why? part of him thinks. You were tired of living. Ready to die. Not like this. Not while Sol and Rachel and the others need his help.
“Several of Hyperion’s most wealthy citizens,” he says. “The evacuation authorities wouldn’t allow them to transfer the bullion, so I agreed to help them store it in vaults in Chronos Keep, the old castle north of the Bridle Range. For a commission.”
“You bey fuckin’ crazy!” sneers the man with the knife. “Everything north of here bey Shrike country now. ”
The Consul lowers his head. There is no need to simulate the fatigue and sense of defeat he projects. “So we discovered. The android crew deserted last week. Several of the passengers were killed by the Shrike. I was coming downriver by myself.”
“This bey shit,” says the man with the knife. His eyes have that sick, distracted look again.
“Just a second,” says his partner. He slaps the Consul once, hard. “So where bey this so-called gold ship, old man?”
The Consul tastes blood. “Upriver. Not on the river, but hidden in one of the tributaries.”
“Yeah,” says the knife-man, setting the zero-edge blade flat against the side of the Consul’s neck. He will not need to slash in order to sever the Consul’s throat, merely rotate the blade. “I say this bey shit. And I say we bey wastin’ time.”
“Just a second,” snaps the other man. “How far upriver?”
The Consul thinks of the tributaries he has passed in the last few hours. It is late. The sun almost touches the line of a copse of trees to the west. “Just above Karla Locks,” he says.
“So why you bey flyin’ down on that toy-like rather than bargin’ it?”
“Trying to get help,” says the Consul. The adrenaline has faded, and now he feels a terminal exhaustion very close to despair. “There were too many … too many bandits along the shore. The barge seemed too risky. The hawking mat was … safer.”
The man called Chez laughs. “Put the knife away, Obem. We bey walkin’ up it a bit, hey?”
Obem leaps to his feet. The knife is still in his hand but now the blade—and the anger—are aimed toward his partner. “Bey you fucked, man, hey? Bey your head bey full of shit between ears, hey? He bey lyin’ to keep from deathwards flyin’.”
Chez neither blinks nor steps back. “Sure, he bey maybe lyin’. Don’t matter, hey? The Locks they bey less’n half-day walk we bey makin’ anyway, hey? No boat, no gold, you cut his throat, hey? Only slowwise, ankles-up like. They bey gold, you still gets the job, bladewise, only bey rich man now, hey?”
Obem teeters a second between rage and reason, turns to the side, and swings the ceramic zero-edge blade at a neville tree eight centimeters thick through the trunk. He has time to tum back and crouch in front of the Consul before gravity informs the tree that it has been severed and the neville falls back toward the river’s edge with a crash of branches. Obem grabs the Consul’s still-damp shirtfront. “OK, we see what bey there, Hegemony-man. Talk, run, trip, stumble, and I bey slicin’ fingers and ears just for practice, hey?”
The Consul staggers to his feet, and the three of them move back into the cover of brush and low trees, the Consul three meters behind Chez and the same distance in front of Obem, trudging back the way he had come, moving away from the city and the ship and any chance of saving Sol and Rachel.
An hour passes. The Consul can think of no clever scheme once the tributaries are reached, the barge not discovered. Several times Chez waves them into silence and hiding, once at the sound of gossamers fluttering in branches, again at a disturbance across the river, but there is no sign of other human beings. No sign of help. The Consul remembers the burned-out buildings along the river, the empty huts and vacant wharves. Fear of the Shrike, fear of being left behind to the Ousters in the evacuation, and months of plundering by rogue elements of the SDF have turned this area into a no-man’s-land. The Consul concocts excuses and extensions, then discards them. His only hope is that they will walk close to the Locks where he can make a leap for the deep and rapid water there, try to stay afloat with his hands tied behind him until he is hidden in the maze of small islands below that point.
Except that he is too tired to swim, even if his arms were free. And the weapons the two men carry would target him easily, even if he had a ten-minute start among the snags and isles. The Consul is too tired to be clever, too old to be brave. He thinks about his wife and son, dead these many years now, killed in the bombing of Bressia by men with no more honor than these two creatures. The Consul is only sorry that he has broken his word to help the other pilgrims. Sorry about that … and that he will not see how it all comes out.
Obem makes a spitting noise behind him. “Shit with this, Chez, hey? What say we sit him and slit him and help him talk a bit, hey? Then we go lonewise to the barge, if barge they bey?”
Chez turns, rubs sweat out of his eyes, frowns at the Consul speculatively, and says, “Hey, yeah, I think maybe timewise and quietwise you bey right, goyo, but leave it talkable toward the end, hey?”
“Sure,” grins Obem, slinging his weapon and extracting his zero-edge.
“DO NOT MOVE!” booms a voice from above. The Consul drops to his knees and the ex-SDF bandits unsling weapons with practiced swiftness. There is a rush, a roar, a whipping of branches and dust about them, the Consul looks up in time to see a rippling of the cloud-covered evening sky, lower than the clouds, a sense of mass directly above, descending, and then Chez is lifting his fléchette rifle and Obem is targeting his launcher and then all three are falling, pitching over, not like soldiers shot, not like recoil elements in some ballistic equation, but dropping like the tree Obem had felled earlier on.
The Consul lands face first in dust and gravel and lies there unblinking, unable to blink.
Stun weapon he thinks through synapses gone sluggish as old oil. A localized cyclone erupts as something large and invisible lands between the three bodies in the dust and the river’s edge. The Consul hears a hatch whine open and the internal tick of repellor turbines dropping below lift-critical. He still cannot blink, much less lift his head, and his vision is limited to several pebbles, a dunescape of sand, a small grass forest, and a single architect ant, huge at this d
istance, that seems to be taking a sudden interest in the Consul’s moist but unblinking eye. The ant turns to hurry the half meter between itself and its moist prize, and the Consul thinks Hurry at the unhurried footsteps behind him.
Hands under his arms, grunting, a familiar but strained voice saying, “Damn, you’ve put on weight.”
The Consul’s heels drag in the dirt, bouncing over the randomly twitching fingers of Chez … or perhaps it is Obem … the Consul cannot turn his head to see their faces. Nor can he see his rescuer until he is lifted—with a grunted litany of soft curses near his ear—through the starboard blister-hatch of the decamouflaged skimmer, into the long, soft leather of the reclining passenger seat.
Governor-General Theo Lane appears in the Consul’s field of vision, boyish-looking but slightly demonic-looking too as the hatch lowers and the red interior lamps light his face. The younger man leans over to secure crashweb snaps across the Consul’s chest. “I’m sorry I had to stun you along with those other two.” Theo sits back, snaps his own web in place, and twitches the omni controller. The Consul feels the skimmer shiver and then lift off, hovering a second before spinning left like a plate on frictionless bearings. Acceleration pushes the Consul into his seat.
“I didn’t have much choice,” says Theo over the soft internal skimmer noises. “The only weapon these things are allowed to carry are the riot-control stunners, and the easiest way was to drop all three of you at lowest setting and get you out of there fast.” Theo pushes his archaic glasses higher on his nose with a familiar twitch of one finger and turns to grin at the Consul. “Old mercenary proverb—‘Kill ’em all and let God sort ‘em out.’ ”
The Consul manages to move his tongue enough to make a sound and to drool a bit on his cheek and the seat leather.
“Relax a minute,” says Theo, returning his attention to the instruments and view outside. “Two or three minutes and you should be talking all right. I’m staying low, flying slow, so it’s about a ten-minute ride back to Keats.” Theo glances toward his passenger. “You’re lucky, sir. You must have been dehydrated. Those other two wet their pants when they went down. Humane weapon, the stunner, but embarrassing if you don’t have a change of pants around.”
The Consul tries to express his opinion of this “humane” weapon.
“Another couple of minutes, sir,” says Governor-General Theo Lane, reaching over to dab at the Consul’s cheek with a handkerchief. “I should warn you, it’s a mite uncomfortable when the stun begins to wear off.”
At that moment, someone inserts several thousand pins and needles in the Consul’s body.
“How the hell did you find me?” asks the Consul. They are a few kilometers above the city, still flying over the Hoolie River. He is able to sit up, and his words are more or less intelligible, but the Consul is glad that he has several more minutes before he will have to stand or walk.
“What, sir?”
“I said, how did you find me? How could you possibly know that I had come back down the Hoolie?”
“CEO Gladstone fatlined me. Eyes-only on the old consulate onetime pad.”
“Gladstone?” The Consul is shaking his hands, trying to agitate feeling back into fingers as useful as rubber sausages. “How the hell could Gladstone possibly know that I was in trouble on the Hollie River? I left Grandmother Siri’s comlog receiver back in the valley so I could call the other pilgrims when I got to the ship. How could Gladstone know?”
“I don’t know, sir, but she specified your location and that you were in trouble. She even said you’d been flying a hawking mat that went down.”
The Consul shakes his head. “This lady has resources we hadn’t dreamt of, Theo.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Consul glances at his friend. Theo Lane had been Governor-General of the new Protectorate world of Hyperion for over a local year now, but old habits died hard and the “sir” came from the seven years Theo had served as Vice-Consul and principal aide during the Consul’s years. The last time he had seen the young man—not so young now, the Consul realizes: responsibility has brought lines and wrinkles to that young face—Theo had been furious that the Consul would not take over the governor-generalship. That had been a little more than a week ago. Ages and eons ago.
“By the way,” says the Consul, enunciating each word carefully, “thank you, Theo.”
The Governor-General nods, apparently lost in thought. He does not ask about what the Consul has seen north of the mountains, nor the fate of the other pilgrims. Beneath them, the Hoolie widens and winds toward the capital of Keats. Far back on either side, low bluffs rise, their granite slabs glowing softly in the evening light. Stands of everblues shimmer in the breeze.
“Theo, how did you possibly have time to come for me yourself? The situation on Hyperion must be pure madness.”
“It is.” Theo ordered the autopilot to take over as he turned to look at the Consul. “It’s a matter of hours … perhaps minutes … before the Ousters actually invade.”
The Consul blinked. “Invade? You mean land?”
“Exactly.”
“But the Hegemony fleet—”
“Is in total chaos. They were barely holding their own against the Swarm before the Web was invaded.”
“The Web!”
“Entire systems falling. Others threatened. FORCE has ordered the fleet back through their military farcasters, but evidently the ships insystem have found it hard to disengage. No one gives me details, but it’s obvious that the Ousters have free rein everywhere except for the defensive perimeter FORCE has put up around the singularity spheres and the portals.”
“The spaceport?” The Consul thinks of his beautiful ship lying as glowing wreckage.
“It hasn’t been attacked yet, but FORCE has been pulling its dropships and supply craft out as quickly as they can. They’ve left a skeleton force of Marines behind.”
“What about the evacuation?”
Theo laughed. It was the most bitter sound the Consul had ever heard from the young man. “The evacuation will consist of whatever consulate people and Hegemony VIPs can fit on the last dropship out.”
“They’ve given up trying to save the people of Hyperion?”
“Sir, they can’t save their own people. Word trickling down through the ambassadors’ fatline says that Gladstone has decided to let the threatened Web worlds fall so that FORCE can regroup, have a couple of years to create defenses while the Swarms accrue time-debt.”
“My God,” whispers the Consul. He had worked most of his life to represent the Hegemony, all the while plotting its downfall in order to avenge his grandmother … his grandmother’s way of life. But now the thought of it actually happening …
“What about the Shrike?” he asks suddenly, seeing the low white buildings of Keats a few kilometers ahead. Sunlight touches the hills and river like a final benediction before darkness.
Theo shakes his head. “There are still reports, but the Ousters have taken over as the primary source of panic.”
“But it’s not in the Web? The Shrike, I mean.”
The Governor-General gives the Consul a sharp look. “In the Web? How could it be in the Web? They still haven’t allowed farcaster portals on Hyperion. And there have been no sightings near Keats or Endymion or Port Romance. None of the larger cities.”
The Consul says nothing, but he is thinking: My God, my betrayal was for nothing. I sold my soul to open the Time Tombs, and the Shrike will not be the cause of the Web’s fall … The Ousters! They were wise to us all along. My betrayal of the Hegemony was part of their plan!
“Listen,” Theo says harshly, gripping the Consul’s wrist, “there’s a reason Gladstone had me leave everything to find you. She’s authorized the release of your ship—”
“Wonderful!” says the Consul. “I can—”
“Listen! You’re not to go back to the Valley of the Time Tombs. Gladstone wants you to avoid the FORCE perimeter and travel insystem until you contact e
lements of the Swarm.”
“The Swarm? Why would—”
“The CEO wants you to negotiate with them. They know you. Somehow she’s managed to let them know that you’re coming. She thinks that they’ll let you … that they won’t destroy your ship. But she hasn’t received confirmation of that. It’ll be risky.”
The Consul sits back in the leather seat. He feels as if he has been hit by the neural stunner again. “Negotiate? What the hell would I have to negotiate?”
“Gladstone said that she would contact you via your ship’s fatline once you’re off Hyperion. This has to be done quickly. Today. Before all the first-wave worlds fall to the Swarms.”
The Consul hears first-wave worlds but does not ask if his beloved Maui-Covenant is amongst them. Perhaps, he thinks, it would be best if it were. He says, “No, I’m going back to the valley.”
Theo adjusts his glasses. “She won’t allow that, sir.”
“Oh?” The Consul smiles. “How is she going to stop me? Shoot down my ship?”
“I don’t know, but she said that she wouldn’t allow it.” Theo sounds sincerely worried. “The FORCE fleet does have picket ships and torchships in orbit, sir. To escort the last dropships.”
“Well,” says the Consul, still smiling, “let them try to shoot me down. Manned ships haven’t been able to land near the Valley of the Time Tombs for two centuries anyway: ships land perfectly, but their crews disappear. Before they slag me, I’ll be hanging on the Shrike’s tree.” The Consul closes his eyes a moment and imagines the ship landing, empty, on the plain above the valley. He imagines Sol, Duré, and the others—miraculously returned—running for shelter in the ship, using its surgery to save Het Masteen and Brawne Lauia, its cryogenic fugue and sleep chambers to save little Rachel.
“My God,” whispers Theo and the shocked tone slams the Consul out of his reverie.
They have come around the final turn in the river above the city. The bluffs rise higher here, culminating to the south in the carved-mountain likeness of Sad King Billy. The sun is just setting, igniting low clouds and buildings high on the eastern bluffs.