The pod shakes wildly and Aenea turns away to look. The pod wall is a bright red, melting.
I pull open my storage cubby, throw clothes and gear aside, and pull out the one extraneous artifact I own, tugging it out of its leather storage tube. Father Captain de Soya’s gift.
I tap the activator threads. The hawking mat stiffens and hovers in zero-g. The EM field around this section of the Startree is still intact.
“Come on,” I shout as the wall melts. I pull my beloved onto the hawking mat.
We are swept out through the fissure, into vacuum and madness.
28
The erg-folded magnetic fields were still standing but strangely scrambled. Instead of flying along and above the boulevard-wide swath of branch toward the Yggdrasill, the hawking mat wanted to align itself at right angles to the branch, so that our faces seemed to be pointing down as the mat rose like an elevator through shaking branches, dangling bridges, severed stemways, globes of flame, and hordes of Ousters leaping off into space to do battle and die. As long as we made progress toward the treeship, I let the hawking mat do what it wanted.
There were bubbles of containment-field atmosphere remaining, but most of the erg-fields had died along with the ergs who maintained them. Despite multiple redundancies, air was either leaking or explosively decompressing all along this region of the Startree. We had no suits.
What I had remembered in the pod at the last moment was that the ancient hawking mat had its own low-level field for holding passengers or air in. It was never meant as a long-term pressurization device, but we had used it nine years ago on the unnamed jungle planet when we’d flown too high to breathe, and I hoped the systems were still working.
They still worked… at least after a fashion. As soon as we were out of the pod and rising like a parawing through the chaos, the hawking mat’s low-level field kicked in. I could almost feel the thin air leaking out, but I told myself that it should last us the length of time it would take to reach the Yggdrasill.
We almost did not reach the Yggdrasill.
It was not the first space battle I had witnessed—Aenea and I had sat on the high platform of the Temple Hanging in Air not that many standard days, eons, ago and watched the light show in cislunar space as the Pax task force had destroyed Father de Soya’s ship—but this was the first space battle I had seen where someone was trying to kill me.
Where there was air, the noise was deafening: explosions, implosions, shattering trunks and stemways, rupturing branches and dying squids, the howl of alarms and babble and squeal of comlogs and other communicators. Where there was vacuum, the silence was even more deafening: Ouster and Templar bodies being blown noiselessly into space—women and children, warriors unable to reach their weapons or battle stations, robed priests of the Muir tumbling toward the sun while wrapped in the ultimate indignity of violent death—flames with no crackling, screams with no sound, cyclones with no windrush warning.
Aenea was huddled over Siri’s ancient comlog as we rose through the maelstrom. I saw Systenj Coredwell shouting from the tiny holo display above the diskey, and then Kent Quinkent and Sian Quintana Ka’an speaking earnestly.
I was too busy guiding the hawking mat to listen to their desperate conversations.
I could no longer see the fusion tails of the Pax Fleet archangels, only their lances cutting through gas clouds and debris fields, slicing the Startree like scalpels through living flesh. The great trunks and winding branches actually bled, their sap and other vital fluids mixing with the kilometers of fiber-optic vine and Ouster blood as they exploded into space or boiled away in vacuum. A ten-klick worker squid was sliced through and then sliced through again as I watched, its delicate tentacles spasming in a destructive dance as it died. Ouster angels took flight by the thousands and died by the thousands. A treeship tried to get under way and was lanced through in seconds, its rich oxygen atmosphere igniting within the containment field, its crew dying in the time it took for the energy globe to fill with swirling smoke. “Not the Yggdrasill,” shouted Aenea. I nodded. The dying treeship had been coming from sphere north, but the Yggdrasill should be close now, a klick or less above us along the vibrating, splintering branch.
Unless I had taken a wrong turn. Or unless it had already been destroyed. Or unless it had left without us. “I talked to Het Masteen,” Aenea shouted. We were in a globe of escaping air now and the din was terrible. “Only about three hundred of the thousand are aboard.”
“All right,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. What thousand? No time to ask.
I caught a glimpse of the deeper green of a treeship a klick or more above us and to the left—on another branch helix alt—and swept the hawking mat in that direction. If it was not the Yggdrasill we would have to seek shelter there anyway. The Startree EM fields were failing, the hawking mat losing energy and inertia.
The EM field failed. The hawking mat surged a final time and then began tumbling in the blackness between shattered branches, a kilometer or more from the nearest burning stemways. Far below and behind us I could see the cluster of environment pods from which we had come: they were all shattered, leaking air and bodies, the podstems and connecting branches writhing in blind Newtonian response.
“That’s it,” I said, my voice low because there was no more air or noise outside our failing bubble of energy. The hawking mat had been designed seven centuries ago to seduce a teenage niece into loving an old man, not to keep its flyers alive in outer space. “We tried, kiddo.” I moved back from the flight threads and put my arm around Aenea.
“No,” said Aenea, rejecting not my hug but the death sentence. She gripped my arm so fiercely that her fingers sank into the flesh of my bicep. “No, no,” she said to herself and tapped the comlog diskey.
Het Masteen’s cowled face appeared against the tumbling starfield. “Yes,” he said. “I see you.”
The huge treeship now hung a thousand meters above us, a single great ceiling of branches and leaves green behind the flickering violet containment field, the bulk of it slowly separating from the burning Startree. There was a sudden, violent tug, and for a second I was sure that one of the archangel lances had found us.
“The ergs are pulling us in,” said Aenea, still grasping my arm.
“Ergs?” I said. “I thought a treeship only had one erg aboard to handle the drive and fields.”
“Usually they do,” said Aenea. “Sometimes two if it’s an extraordinary voyage… into the outer envelope of a star, for instance, or through the shock wave of a binary’s heliosphere.”
“So there are two aboard the Yggdrasill?” I said, watching the tree grow and fill the sky.
Plasma explosions unfolded silently behind us.
“No,” said Aenea, “there are twenty-seven.”
The extended field pulled us in. Up rearranged itself and became down. We were lowered onto a high deck, just beneath the bridge platform near the crown of the treeship. Even before I tapped the flight threads to collapse our own puny containment field, Aenea was scooping up her comlog and backpack and was racing toward the stairway.
I rolled the hawking mat neatly, shoved it into its leather carrier, flung the tube on my back, and rushed to catch up.
Only the Templar treeship captain Het Masteen and a few of his lieutenants were on the crown bridge, but the platforms and stairways beneath the bridge level were crowded with people I knew and did not know: Rachel, Theo, A. Bettik, Father de Soya, Sergeant Gregorius, Lhomo Dondrub, and the dozens of other familiar refugees from T’ien Shan, but there were also scores of other non-Ouster, non-Templar humans, men, women, and children whom I had not seen previously. “Refugees fleeing a hundred Pax worlds, picked up by Father Captain de Soya in the Raphael over the past few years,” said Aenea. “We’d expected hundreds more to arrive today before departure, but it’s too late now.”