“Missiles launched against us,” said one of the captain’s Templar lieutenants in a voice no more excited than I would use to announce the arrival of dinner. “Two… four… nine. Sublight. Presumably plasma warheads.”
“Can we survive that?” asked Theo. Rachel had walked over to watch the Colonel climb toward the Shrike.
Het Masteen was too occupied to answer, so Aenea said, “We don’t know. It depends on the binders… the ergs.”
“Sixty seconds to missile impact,” said the same Templar lieutenant in the same flat tones.
Het Masteen touched a comwand. His voice sounded normal, but I realized that it was being amplified all over the klick-long treeship.
“Everyone will please shield their eyes and avoid looking toward the field. The binders will polarize the flash as much as possible, but please do not look up. May the peace of the Muir be with us.”
I looked at Aenea. “Kiddo, does this treeship carry weapons?”
“No,” she said. Her eyes looked as weary as her voice had sounded.
“So we’re not going to fight… just run?”
“Yes, Raul.”
I ground my molars. “Then I agree with Lhomo,” I said. “We’ve run too much. It’s time to help our friends here. Time to…”
At least three of the missiles exploded.
Later, I recall the light so blinding that I could see Aenea’s skull and vertebrae through her skin and flesh, but that must be impossible. There was a sense of falling… of the bottom falling out of everything… and then the one-sixth-g field was restored. A subsonic rumble made my teeth and bones hurt. I blinked away retinal afterimages. Aenea’s face was still before me—her cheeks flushed and sweaty, her hair pulled back by a hastily tied band, her eyes tired but infinitely alive, her forearms bare and sunburned—and in a thick moment of sentimentality I thought that it would not have been unthinkable to die like that, with Aenea’s face seared into my soul and memory.
Two more plasma warheads made the treeship shudder. Then four more. “Holding,” said Het Masteen’s lieutenant. “All fields holding.”
“Lhomo and Raul are right, Aenea,” said the Dorje Phamo, stepping forward with regal elegance in her simple cotton robe. “You have run away from the Pax for years. It is time to fight them… time for all of us to fight them.” I was staring at the old woman with something close to rude intensity. I had realized that there was an aura about her… no, wrong word, too mystical… but a feeling of strong color emanating from her, a deep carmine as strong as the Thunderbolt Sow’s personality. I also realized that I had been noticing that with everyone on the platform that evening—the bright blue of Lhomo’s courage, the golden confidence of Het Masteen’s command, the shimmering violet of Colonel Kassad’s shock at seeing the Shrike—and I wondered if this was some artifact of learning the language of the living. Or perhaps it was a result of the overload of light from the plasma explosions. Whatever it was, I knew that the colors were not real—I was not hallucinating and my vision was not clouded—but I also thought that I knew that my mind was making these connections, these shorthand glimpses into the true spirit of the person, on some level below and above sight. And I knew that the colors surrounding Aenea covered the spectrum and beyond—a glow so pervasive that it filled the treeship as surely as the plasma explosions filled the world outside it.
Father de Soya spoke. “No, ma’am,” he said to the Dorje Phamo, his voice soft and respectful. “Lhomo and Raul are not correct. In spite of all of our anger and our wish to strike back, Aenea is correct. Lhomo may learn—if he lives—what we all will learn if we live. That is, after communion with Aenea, we share the pain of those we attack. Truly share it. Literally share it. Physically share it. Share it as part of having learned the language of the living.”
The Dorje Phamo looked down at the shorter priest. “I know this is true, Christian. But this does not mean that we cannot strike back when others hurt us.” She swept one arm upward to include the slowly clearing containment field and the starfield of fusion trails and burning embers beyond it. “These Pax… monsters… are destroying one of the greatest achievements of the human race. We must stop them!”
“Not now,” said Father de Soya. “Not by fighting them here. Trust Aenea.”
The giant named Sergeant Gregorius stepped into the circle. “Every fiber of my being, every moment of my training, every scar from my years of fighting… everything urges me to fight now,” he growled. “But I trusted my captain. Now I trust him as my priest. And if he says we must trust the young woman… then we must trust her.”
Het Masteen held up a hand. The group fell into silence. “This argument is a waste of time. As the One Who Teaches told you, the Yggdrasill has no weapons and the ergs are our only defense. But they cannot phase-shift the fusion drive while providing this level of shield. Effectively, we have no propulsion… we are drifting on our former course only a few light-minutes beyond our original position. And five of the archangels have changed course to intercept us.” The Templar turned to face us. “Please, everyone except the Revered One Who Teaches and her tall friend Raul, please leave the bridge platform and wait below.”
The others left without another word. I saw the direction of Rachel’s gaze before she turned away and I looked up. Colonel Kassad was at the top crow’s nest, standing next to the Shrike, the tall man still dwarfed by the three-meter sculpture of chrome and blades and thorns. Neither the Colonel nor the killing machine moved as they regarded one another from less than a meter’s distance. I looked back at the simulacra display.
The Pax ship embers were closing fast. Above us the containment field cleared.
“Take my hand, Raul,” said Aenea.
I took her hand, remembering all of the other times I had touched it in the last ten standard years.
“The stars,” she whispered. “Look up at the stars. And listen to them.”
The treeship Yggdrasill hung in low orbit around an orange-red world with white polar caps, ancient volcanoes larger than my world’s Pinion Plateau, and a river valley running for more than five thousand kilometers like an appendectomy scar around the world’s belly.
“This is Mars,” said Aenea. “Colonel Kassad will leave us here.”
The Colonel had come down from his close regard of the Shrike after the quantum-shift jump. There was no word or phrase for what we did: one moment the treeship was in the Biosphere System, coasting at low velocity, drives dead, under attack by a swarm of archangels, and the next instant we were in low and stable orbit around this dead world in Old Earth System.
“How did you do that?” I had asked Aenea a second after she had done it. I’d had no doubt whatsoever that she had… shifted… us there.
“I learned to hear the music of the spheres,” she said. “And then to take a step.”
I kept staring at her. I was still holding her hand. I had no plans to release it until she spoke to me in plain language.
“One can understand a place, Raul,” she said, knowing that so many others were undoubtedly listening at that moment, “and when you do, it is like hearing the music of it. Each world a different chord. Each star system a different sonata. Each specific place a clear and distinct note.”
I did not release her hand. “And the farcasting without a farcaster?” I said.
Aenea nodded. “Freecasting. A quantum leap in the real sense of the term,” she said. “Moving in the macro universe the way an electron moves in the infinitely micro. Taking a step with the help of the Void Which Binds.”