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6. Debris

A missile, perhaps, could shoot and destroy the fleeing tower, if there were any surface-to-orbit multistage rockets prepared—but Del Azarchel had no reason to kill her, even if he had every reason to prevent her flight: and Exarchel wanted her to escape, out of spite, if for no better reason.

It was utterly silent to Montrose, whose ears were filled with a noise like churchbells, endlessly ringing.

Montrose was still supine, and cocooned in pain, grinning in victory.

The last sight he saw was a little glint in the deep blue. He could see one of the spider cars, its lights still lit, that had been carrying the soldiers up toward his wife. The bubble-shaped car seemed to hang in the air, its many broken legs no longer touching the cable. At this distance, no motion was visible: it did not seem to be falling, but looked weightless and serene. There was another car behind it, smaller and higher, and another, a parabola of pearls from a broken necklace. He could not see the doomed men trapped inside, or hear their last screams. It looked so peaceful.

Del Azarchel at long last raised his pistol, even though the barrel shook from the weakness of his grip. Before he could maneuver the awkward barrel up to Montrose’s helmet, a scattering of pebbles like hail began to patter around them, and then falling stones, then rocks, then shards of metal, and all the debris launched upward by the ascension of the tower, and now shaken free of the ragged stump of buildings pulled aloft, and landing on the street. There was a rush of rocks, a cloud of dust.

One of the falling objects struck Del Azarchel, whose armor rang like a gong, and his body cushioned the blow for Montrose as the two men were buried alive. Pebbles and dust swirled over Montrose’s goggles, and the noise of his breathing and heartbeat was suddenly loud and close as all outside sound was buried. He heard the air filters snap shut, and the whine of oxynitrogen bottles cracking open. Whether Del Azarchel was still near him, or had been swept away, alive or dead, he could not tell.

Hell, he was not all that sure if he were still alive himself.

Montrose laughed. Then, with a slow, sickening, floating, flowing, spinning motion, he entered a darkness blacker and wider than outer space. It seemed to him as if ancient titans, indescribable, bent with shining eyes over the dark well in which the whole sidereal universe was caught, a knot of night punctuated by tiny stars, and wondered at the fate of the small living things trapped within.

TOR BOOKS BY JOHN C. WRIGHT

The Golden Age

The Phoenix Exultant

The Golden Transcendence

The Last Guardian of Everness

Mists of Everness

Orphans of Chaos

Fugitives of Chaos

Titans of Chaos

Null-A Continuum

Available in December, 2012

THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA

by John C. Wright

hardcover: 0-7653-2928-X

eBook: 1-4299-4830-2

Read on for a preview!

Copyright © 2012 by John C. Wright

1 Theft of Fire

A.D. 2535

1. Sir Guy

All he wanted to do was stay dead.

Menelaus Montrose woke up while his body was still frozen solid. The bioimplants the battle surgeons of the Knights Hospitalier had woven into his brain stem were working well enough for him to send a signal to the surface of the coffin, activate the pinpoint camera cells dotting its outer armor, and see who was trying to wake him up.

The light in the crypt was dim. The walls were irregular brick, and in places were cemented with bones and skulls. Niches held both coffins for the dead and cryonic suspension coffins for the slumbering.

There was a figure like a metal ape near the vault door, which had moved on vast pistons and stood open. The light spilled in from here. Only things near the door were clear.

To one side of the larger metal statue was a marble sculpture of Saint Barbara, the patron of grave-diggers, holding a cup and a palm leaf in her stiff, stone hands; to the other was Saint Ubaldo, carrying a crosier, whose office was to ward off neural disorders and obsessions. Above the vault door was a relief showing the martyrdom of Saint Renatus Goupil under the tomahawks of Iroquois. He was the patron saint of anesthesiologists and cryonicists. Above all this, in an arch, were written the words TUITIO FIDEI ET OBSEQUIUM PAUPERUM.

From this, Menelaus knew he had been moved, at least once, from his previous interment site beneath Tiber Island in the Fatebenefratelli Hospital vault. That had been little over a quarter century ago: the calculations of Cliomancy did not predict any historical crisis sufficient to require him to be relocated in so short a space as thirty years. That meant Blackie was interfering with the progression of history again.

The larger metal statue moved, ducking its head and stepping farther into the vault. Menelaus could see the Maltese cross enameled in white on the red breastplate. There were four antennae and microwave horns on his back, folded down. The scabbard for his (ceremonial) broadsword was empty, and so was the holster for his (equally ceremonial) chemical-energy pistol. Between helmet and goggles and breather mask, the figure looked like a nightmarish bug.

Montrose turned on the microphones on the outside of the coffin, and special cells in his brain stem sent signals to receivers dotting the inner coffin lid, and also to implants lining his auditory nerve. It sounded like a strange, flat, echoless noise, not like something that actually came through his ear, but he could make it out.

Menelaus turned on the speaker vox. “Why do you disturb my slumber, Sir Knight?”

He heard the ticking hum of motors and actuators coming from the armored figure. Like a mountain sinking into the sea, the big armored figure knelt. Menelaus realized this was strength-amplification armor. He tried to work out the Cliometric constellation of a set of military circumstances where this type of gear would serve any purpose that a sniper with a powerful set of winged remotes could not serve better, and his imagination failed. Unless the man was wrestling giants, or facing enemies who could walk up to arm’s length and tear the flesh from his bones, he did not see the purpose.

“My apologies, sleeper. Ah. Our records are somewhat dark. Are you Menelaus Montrose? You don’t sound like him.”

“Why the poxy hell do you disturb my poxy slumber, Sir goddam Knight?”

“Ah! Montrose! Good to hear you again, Liege.”

“Guy? Sir Guy, is that you?”

“Pellucid thawed me out two days ago. As we agreed, I have a veto over anyone trying to disturb you, even your pet machine. And it is His Excellency Grandmaster Guiden von Hompesch zu Bolheim now. They promoted me when I slept.”

“Yeah, they do poxified pox like that to you when you ain’t up and about to fend it off.”

Another implanted circuit in his brain stem made contact with a library cloth stored in an airtight capsule inside the coffin armor. The self-diagnostic showed much more deterioration than he would have expected. Half the circuits were dead, and file after file was corrupt. But he brought up the calendar, and a fiber fed the pixy image directly into the same neural circuits he was using to peer through the cameras.