Hyperion h-1 Read online

  Twice he squeezed into crevices when he saw lights in the distance. He was just about to the deck opening where he had watched the squid approach when he rounded a corner and almost floated into three Ouster commandos.

  The fact that he was wearing an Ouster suit gave him at least a two-second advantage. He shot the first suited figure in the helmet at point-blank range. The second man—or woman—fired a wild sonic burst past Kassad’s left shoulder a second before he put three bolts into the Ouster’s chestplate. The third commando flipped backward, found three handholds, and was out of sight around a broken bulkhead before Kassad could retarget. His headset rang with curses, commands, and questions.

  Kassad gave silent chase.

  The third Ouster would have escaped if he had not rediscovered honor and turned to fight. Kassad felt an inexplicable sense of déjà vu as he put an energy bolt through the man’s left eye from five meters away.

  The corpse tumbled backward into sunlight. Kassad pulled himself to the opening and stared at the squid moored not twenty meters away. It was, he thought, the first undiluted piece of luck he had had in some time.

  He kicked across the gap, knowing that if someone wanted to shoot him from the squid or the wreckage there was nothing he could do about it.

  He felt the scrotum-lifting tension he always experienced when he was an obvious target. No shots were fired. Commands and interrogatives squawked in his ears. He could not understand them, did not know where they originated, and, on the whole, thought it best if he stayed out of the dialogue.

  The clumsiness of the suit almost caused him to miss the squid. He thought briefly that such an anticlimax would be the universe’s fitting verdict on his martial pretensions: the brave warrior floating off into near-planet orbit, no maneuvering systems, no propellant, no reaction mass of any sort—even the pistol was non-recoil.

  He would end his life as useless and harmless as a child’s runaway balloon.

  Kassad stretched until his joints popped, caught a whip antenna, and pulled himself hand over hand to the squid’s hull.

  Where the hell was the airlock? The hull was relatively smooth for a spacefaring vessel but was decorated with a riot of designs, decals, and panels announcing what he assumed were the Ouster equivalents of NO STEP and DANGER: THRUSTER PORT. No entrances were visible. He guessed that there were Ousters on board, a pilot at least, and that they were probably wondering why their returning commando was crawling around the hull like a spavined crab rather than cycling the airlock. Or perhaps they knew why and were waiting inside with drawn pistols.

  At any rate, it was obvious that no one was going to open the door for him.

  The hell with it, thought Kassad and shot out one of the observation blisters.

  The Ousters kept a tidy ship. Not much more than the equivalent of a few lost paper clips and coins geysered out with the ship’s air. Kassad waited until the eruption had died down and squeezed through the gap.

  He was in the carrier section: a cushioned hold looking a lot like the jump rat bay of any dropship or APC.

  Kassad made a mental note that a squid probably held about twenty Ouster commandos in full vacuum combat gear. Now it was empty. An open hatch led to the cockpit.

  Only the command pilot had remained on board and he was in the final process of unbelting when Kassad shot him. Kassad pushed the body into the carrier section and strapped himself into what he hoped was the command chair.

  Warm sunlight came through the blister above him.

  Video monitors and console holos showed scenes from dead ahead, astern, and shoulder-camera glimpses of the search operation inside. Kassad caught a glimpse of the nude body in Operating Room 3 and several figures in a firefight with surgical lasers.

  In the holodramas of Fedmahn Kassad’s childhood, heroes always seemed to know how to operate skimmers, spacecraft, exotic EMVs, and other strange machinery whenever the need arose. Kassad had been trained to handle military transports, simple tanks and APCs, even an assault boat or dropship if he was desperate. If stranded on a runaway FORCE spacecraft, a remote possibility, he could find his way around the command core sufficiently to communicate with the primary computer or put out a distress call on a radio or fatline transmitter.

  Sitting in the command chair of an Ouster squid, Kassad did not have a clue.

  That was not quite true. He immediately recognized the remote grip slots for the squid’s tentacle manipulators, and given two or three hours of thought and inspection, he might have figured out several other controls. He did not have the time. The forward screen showed three spacesuited figures jumping for the squid, firing as they came. The pale, oddly alien head of an Ouster commander suddenly materialized on the holo console. Kassad heard shouts from his bubble earpatches.

  Globules of sweat hung in front of his eyes and streaked the inside of his helmet. He shook them away as best he could, squinted at the control consoles, and pushed several likely-looking surfaces. If there were voice command circuits, override controls, or a suspicious ship’s computer, Kassad knew, he was screwed. He had thought of all this in the second or two before he shot the pilot but had not been able to think of a way to coerce or trust the man. No, this had to be the way, thought Kassad even as he tapped more control surfaces.

  A thruster began firing.

  The squid pulled and tugged at its moorings. Kassad bounced back and forth in his webbing. “Shit,” he whispered, his first audible comment since he had asked the FORCE medic where the ship was putting in. He strained far enough forward to get his gauntleted fingers into the grip slots. Four of the six manipulators released. One ripped off. The final one tore away a chunk of bulkhead from the HS Merrick.

  The squid tumbled free. Video cameras showed two of the space-suited figures missing their jumps, the third clutching at the same whip antenna which had saved Kassad. Knowing roughly where the thruster controls were now, Kassad tapped in a frenzy. An overhead light came on. All of the holo projectors went dead. The squid commenced a maneuver which incorporated all of the most violent elements of pitch, roll, and yaw. Kassad saw the spacesuited form tumble past the overhead blister, appear briefly on the forward video screen, become a speck on the aft screen. The Ouster was still firing energy bolts as he—or she—became too small to see.

  Kassad struggled to stay conscious as the violent tumbling continued.

  Various voice and visual alarms were screaming for his attention. Kassad tapped at thruster controls, considered it a success, and pulled his hands away when he felt as if he were being pulled apart in only two directions rather than five.

  A random camera shot showed him that the torchship was receding. Good.

  Kassad had no doubt that the Ouster warship could destroy him at any second, and that it would if he approached or threatened it in any way.

  He did not know if the squid was armed, personally doubted if it would carry anything larger than antipersonnel weapons, but he knew beyond a doubt that no torchship commander would allow an out-of-control shuttlecraft to come anywhere near his ship.

  Kassad assumed that the Ousters all knew by now that the squid had been hijacked by the enemy. He would not be surprised—disappointed, but not surprised—if the torchship vaporized him at any second, but in the meantime he was counting on two emotions that were quintessentially human if not necessarily Ouster human: curiosity and the desire for revenge.

  Curiosity, he knew, could easily be overridden in times of stress, but he counted on a paramilitary, semifeudal culture like the Ousters’ to be deeply involved with revenge. Everything else being equal, with no chance to hurt them further and almost no chance to escape, it would seem that Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had become a prime candidate for one of their dissection trays. He hoped so.

  Kassad looked at the forward video display, frowned, and loosened his harness long enough to look out the overhead blister. The ship was tumbling but not nearly so violently as before. The planet seemed closer—one hemisphere filled the view “a
bove” him—but he had no idea how close the squid was to atmosphere. He could read none of the data displays. He could only guess what their orbital velocity had been and how violent a reentry shock would be. His one long glimpse from the wreckage of the Merrick had suggested to Kassad that they were very close, perhaps only five or six hundred klicks above the surface, and in the kind of parking orbit which he knew preceded the launching of dropships.

  Kassad tried to wipe his face and frowned when the tips of loose gauntlet fingers tapped at his visor. He was tired. Hell, only a few hours earlier he had been in fugue and just a few ship-weeks before that he had almost certainly been body-dead.

  He wondered if the world below was Hyperion or Garden; he had been to neither but knew that Garden was more widely settled, closer to becoming a Hegemony colony. He hoped it was Garden.

  The torchship launched three assault boats. Kassad saw them clearly before the aft camera panned beyond range. He tapped at the thruster controls until it felt as though the ship was tumbling more quickly toward the wall of planet above. There was little else he could do.

  The squid reached atmosphere before the three Ouster assault boats reached the squid. The boats undoubtedly were armed and well within range, but someone on the command circuit must have been curious. Or furious.

  Kassad’s squid was in no way aerodynamic. As with most ship-to-ship craft, the squid could flirt with planetary atmospheres but was doomed if it dove too deeply into the gravity well. Kassad saw the telltale red glow of reentry, heard the ion buildup on the active radio channels, and suddenly wondered if this had been such a good idea.

  Atmospheric drag stabilized the squid and Kassad felt the first tentative tug of gravity as he searched the console and the command chair arms for the control circuit he prayed would be there. A static-filled video screen showed one of the dropships growing a blue-plasma tail as it decelerated. The illusion created was similar to that encountered when one skydiver watched another open his chute or activate his suspension rig; the assault boat seemed to climb suddenly.

  Kassad had other things to worry about. There seemed to be no obvious bail-out control, no ejection apparatus.

  Every FORCE:space shuttle carried some sort of atmospheric egress device—it was a custom dating back almost eight centuries to when the entire realm of space flight consisted only of tentative excursions just above the skin of Old Earth’s atmosphere. A ship-to-ship shuttle probably would never need a planetary bail-out device, but age-old fears written into ancient regulations tended to die hard.

  Or so the theory went. Kassad could find nothing. The ship was quaking now, spinning, and beginning to heat up in earnest. Kassad slapped open his harness release and pulled himself toward the rear of the squid, not even sure what he was looking for. Suspension packs? Parachutes?

  A set of wings?

  There was nothing in the troop carrier section except the corpse of the Ouster pilot and a few storage compartments not much larger than lunchboxes. Kassad tore through them, finding nothing bigger than a medkit. No miracle devices.

  Kassad could hear the squid shaking and beginning to break up as he hung on a pivot ring and all but accepted the fact that the Ousters had not wasted money or space on such low-probability rescue devices for their squids.

  Why should they? Their lifetimes were spent in the dark-nesses between star systems; their concept of an atmosphere was the eight-klick pressurized tube of a can city.

  The external audio sensors on Kassad’s bubble helmet began to pick up the raging hiss of air on the hull and through the broken blister in the aft section. Kassad shrugged. He had gambled too many times and lost.

  The squid shuddered and bounced. Kassad could hear the manipulator tentacles tearing away from the bow.

  The Ouster’s corpse suddenly was sucked up and out of the broken blister like an ant into a vacuum cleaner.

  Kassad clung to the pivot ring and stared through the open hatch at the control seats in the cockpit. It struck him that they were wonderfully archaic, like something out of a textbook of the earliest spacecraft.

  Parts of the ship’s exterior were burning away now, roaring past the observation blisters like gobbets of lava. Kassad closed his eyes and tried to remember lectures from Olympus Command School on the structure and layout of ancient spacegoing craft. The squid began a terminal tumble.

  The noise was incredible.

  “By Allah!” gasped Kassad, a cry he had not uttered since childhood. He began pulling himself forward into the cockpit, bracing himself on the open hatch, finding handholds on the deck as if he were climbing a vertical wall. He was climbing a wall. The squid had spun, stabilized in a stern-first death dive. Kassad climbed under a 3-g load, knowing that a single slip would break every bone in his body. Behind him, atmospheric hiss turned to a scream and then to a dragon roar. The troop carrier section was burning through in fierce, molten explosions.

  Climbing into the command seat was like negotiating a rock overhang with the weight of two other climbers swinging from his back. The clumsy gauntlets made his grip on the headrest even less sure as Kassad hung over the vertical drop to the flaming cauldron of the carrier section. The ship lurched, Kassad swung his legs up, and he was in the command seat. The display videos were dead. Flame heated the overhead blister to a sick red.

  Kassad almost lost consciousness as he bent forward, his fingers feeling in the darkness below the command seat, between his knees. There was nothing. Wait… a hand-grip.

  No, sweet Christ and Allah… a D-ring. Something out of the history books.

  The squid began to break up. Overhead, the blister burned through and spattered liquid Perspex throughout the interior of the cockpit, splashing Kassad’s suit and visor. He smelled plastic melting. The squid was spinning as it broke up. Kassad’s sight turned pink, dimmed, was gone. He used numb fingers to tighten the harness… tighter… either it was cutting into his chest or the Perspex had burned through.

  His hand went back to the D-ring. Fingers too clumsy to close around it… no.

  Pull.

  Too late. The squid flew apart in a final screech and explosion of flame, the control console tearing through the cockpit in ten thousand shrapnel-sized bits.

  Kassad was slammed into his seat. Up. Out. Into the heart of the flame.

  Tumbling.

  Kassad was dimly aware that the seat was projecting its own containment field as it tumbled. Flame was centimeters from his face.

  Pyrobolts fired, kicking the ejection seat out of the squid’s blazing slipstream. The command seat made its own track of blue flame across the sky. Microprocessors spun the seat so that the disc of the forcefield was between Kassad and the furnace of friction. A giant sat on Kassad’s chest as he decelerated across two thousand kilometers of sky at eight gravities.

  Kassad forced his eyelids open once, noted that he lay curled in the belly of a long column of blue-white flame, and then he closed his eyes again. He saw no sign of a control for a parachute, suspension pack, or any other braking device. It didn’t matter. He could not move his arms or hands in any case.

  The giant shifted, grew heavier.

  Kassad realized that part of his helmet bubble had melted or been blown away. The noise was indescribable.

  It didn’t matter.

  He closed his eyes more tightly. It was a good time to take a nap.

  Kassad opened his eyes and saw the dark shape of a woman bending over him. For a second he thought it was her. He looked again and realized that it was her. She touched his cheek with cool fingers.

  “Am I dead?” whispered Kassad, raising his own hand to grip her wrist.

  “No.” Her voice was soft and throaty, burred with the hint of an accent he could not place. He had never heard her speak before.

  “You’re real?”

  “Yes.”

  Kassad sighed and looked around. He lay naked under a thin robe on some sort of couch or platform set in the middle of a dark, cavernous room.

&
nbsp; Overhead, starlight was visible through a broken roof. Kassad raised his other hand to touch her shoulder. Her hair was a dark nimbus above him. She wore a loose, thin gown which—even in the starlight—allowed him to see the outlines of her body. He caught her scent, the fragrant hint of soap and skin and her that he knew so well from their other times together.

  “You must have questions,” she whispered as Kassad released the gold clasp which held her gown in place. The gown whispered to the floor.

  She wore nothing underneath.

  Above them, the band of the Milky Way was clearly visible.

  “No,” said Kassad and pulled her to him.

  Toward morning a breeze arose, and Kassad pulled the light cover over them. The thin material seemed to preserve all of their body heat and they lay together in perfect warmth. Somewhere sand or snow rasped at bare walls. The stars were very clear and very bright.

  They awoke at the first hint of dawn, their faces close together under the silken coverlet. She ran her hand down Kassad’s side, finding old and recent scars.

  “Your name?” whispered Kassad.

  “Hush,” she whispered back, her hand sliding lower.

  Kassad moved his face into the scented curve of her neck. Her breasts were soft against him. Night paled to morning. Somewhere sand or snow blew against bare walls.

  They made love, slept, made love again. In full light they rose and dressed. She had laid out underwear, gray tunic and trousers for Kassad. They fit perfectly, as did the spongesocks and soft hoots. The woman wore a similar outfit of navy blue.

  “Your name?” Kassad asked as they left the building with the shattered dome and walked through a dead city.

  “Moneta,” said his dream, “or Mnemosyne, whichever name pleases you more.”

  “Moneta,” whispered Kassad. He looked up at a small sun rising into a lapis sky. “This is Hyperion?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did I land? Suspensor field? Parachute?”