I made a rude gesture with my fist.
“Great, so all I have to do is stop at a local Pax garrison and ask directions to the Temple Hanging in Air, and you’ll be hanging there waiting for me.”
“There are only a few thousand mountains on T’ien Shan,” she said, her voice flat and unhappy. “And only a few… cities. The ship can find Heng Shan and Hsuan-k’ung Ssu from orbit. You won’t be able to land there, but you’ll be able to disembark.”
“Why won’t I be able to land there?” I said, irritated by all of these puzzles within enigmas within codes.
“You’ll see, Raul,” she said, her voice as filled with tears as her eyes had been. “Please, go.”
The current was trying to carry me away, but I paddled the buoyant little kayak back into place.
Aenea walked along the river’s edge to keep pace with me. The sky seemed to be lightening a bit in the east. “Are you certain we’ll see each other there?” I shouted through the thinning rain.
“I’m not certain of anything, Raul.”
“Not even that we’ll survive this?” I’m not sure what I meant by “this.” I’m not even sure what I meant when I said “survive.”
“Especially not of that,” said the girl, and I saw the old smile, full of mischief and anticipation and something like sadness mixed with involuntary wisdom.
The current was pulling me away. “How long will it take me to get to the ship?”
“I think only a few days,” she called.
We were several meters apart now, and the current was pulling me out into the Mississippi.
“And when I find the ship, how long to get to… T’ien Shan?” I called.
Aenea shouted back the answer but it was lost in the lapping of waves against the hull of my little kayak.
“What?” I yelled. “I couldn’t hear you.”
“I love you,” called Aenea, and her voice was clear and bright across the dark water.
The river pulled me out into it. I could not speak. My arms did not work when I thought to paddle against the powerful current. “Aenea?”
I aimed the flashlight toward the shore, caught a glimpse of her poncho gleaming in the light, the pale oval of her face in the shadow of the hood. “Aenea!” She shouted something, waved. I waved back. The current was very strong for a moment. I paddled violently to avoid being pulled into an entire tree that had snagged on a sandbar, and then I was out in the central current and hurtling south. I looked back but walls of the last buildings in Hannibal hid my dear girl from view.
A minute later I heard a hum like the dropship’s EM repulsors, but when I looked up I saw only shadow. It could have been her circling. It could have been a low cloud in the night. The river pulled me south.
5
Father Captain de Soya deadheaded from Pacem System on the H.H.S. Raguel, an archangel-class cruiser similar to the ship he had been ordered to command. Killed by the terrible vortex of the classified instantaneous drive, known to Pax Fleet now as the Gideon drive, de Soya was resurrected in two days rather than the usual three—the resurrection chaplains taking the added risk of unsuccessful resurrection because of the urgency of the father-captain’s orders—and found himself at the Omicron2-Epsilon3 Pax Fleet Strategic Positioning Station orbiting a lifeless, rocky world spinning in the darkness beyond Epsilon Eridani in the Old Neighborhood, only a handful of light-years from where Old Earth had once existed.
De Soya was given one day to recover his faculties and was then shuttled to the Omicron2-Epsilon3 fleet staging area, a hundred thousand klicks out from the military base. The midshipman piloting the wasp-shuttle went out of his way to give Father Captain de Soya a good look at his new command, and—despite himself—de Soya was thrilled with what he saw.
The H.H.S. Raphael was obviously state-of-the-art technology, no longer derivative—as all of the previous Pax ships de Soya had seen had been—of rediscovered Hegemony designs from before the Fall. The overall design seemed too lean for practical vacuum work and too complicated for atmosphere, but the overall effect was one of streamlined lethality. The hull was a composite of morphable alloys and areas of pure fixed energy, allowing rapid shape and function changes that would have been impossible a few years before. As the shuttle passed the Raphael in a long, slow ballistic arc, de Soya watched the exterior of the long ship go from chrome silver to a stealth matte black, essentially disappearing from view.
At the same time, several of the instrument booms and living cubbies were swallowed by the smooth central hull, until only weapons’ blisters and containment field probes remained. Either the ship was preparing for out-system translation checks, or the officers aboard knew very well that the passing wasp carried their new commander and they were showing off a bit.
De Soya knew that both assumptions were almost certainly true.
Before the cruiser blacked into oblivion, de Soya noticed how the fusion drive spheres had been clustered like pearls around the central ship’s axis rather than concentrated in a single swelling such as on his old torchship, the Balthasar. He also noticed how much smaller the hexagonal Gideon-drive array was on this ship than on the prototype Raphael. His last glimpse before the ship became invisible was of the lights glowing from the retracted, translucent living cubbies and the clear dome of the command deck.
During combat, de Soya knew from his reading on Pacem and the RNA-instructional injections he had received at Pax Fleet headquarters that these clear areas would morph thicker, armored epidermises, but de Soya had always enjoyed a view and would appreciate the window into space.
“Coming up on the Uriel, sir,” said the midshipman pilot.
De Soya nodded. The H.H.S. Uriel seemed a near-clone of the new Raphael, but as the wasp-shuttle decelerated closer, the father-captain could pick out the extra omega-knife generators, the added, glowing conference cubbies, and the more elaborate com antennae that made this vessel the flagship of the task force.
“Docking warning, sir,” said the midshipman.
De Soya nodded and took his seat on the number-two acceleration couch. The mating was smooth enough that he felt no jolt whatsoever as the connection clamps closed and the ship’s skin and umbilicals morphed around the shuttle. De Soya was tempted to praise the young midshipman, but old habits of command reasserted themselves.
“Next time,” he said, “try the final approach without the last-second flare. It’s showing off and the brass on a flagship frown on it.”
The young pilot’s face fell.
De Soya set his hand on her shoulder.
“Other than that, good job. I’d have you aboard my ship as a dropship pilot anyday.”
The crestfallen midshipman brightened. “I could only wish, sir. This station duty…” She stopped, realizing that she had gone too far.
“I know,” said de Soya, standing by the cycling lock. “I know. But for now, be glad that you’re not part of this Crusade.”
The lock cycled open and an honor guard whistled him aboard the H.H.S. Uriel—the archangel, if Father Captain de Soya remembered correctly, that the Old Testament had described as the leader of the heavenly hosts of angels. Ninety light-years away, in a star system only three light-years from Pacem, the original Raphael translated into real space with a violence that would have spit marrow from human bones, sliced through human cells like a hot blade through radiant gossamers, and scrambled human neurons like loose marbles on a steep hillside. Rhadamanth Nemes and her clone-siblings did not enjoy the sensation, but neither did they cry out nor grimace.
“Where is this place?” said Nemes, watching a brown planet grow in the viewscreen.
Raphael was decelerating under 230 gravities. Nemes did not sit in the acceleration couch, but she did hang on to a stanchion with the casual ease of a commuter on her way to work in a crowded groundbus.