“No. What happens on Hyperion is problematic, but the disruption in the Web and elsewhere is quite clear. The Ultimates use this knowledge as the prime argument for hurrying the next step in Core evolution.”
“And what did BB’s stolen data show about us, Johnny?”
Johnny smiled, touched my hand, but did not hold it. “It showed that I am somehow part of the Hyperion unknown. Their creation of a Keats cybrid was a terrible gamble. Only my apparent lack of success as a Keats analog allowed the Stables to preserve me. When I made up my mind to go to Hyperion, the Volatiles killed me with the clear intention of obliterating my AI existence if my cybrid again made that decision.”
“You did. What happened?”
“They failed. In the Core’s limitless arrogance, they failed to take two things into account. First, that I might invest all consciousness in my cybrid and thus change the nature of the Keats analog. Second, that I would go to you.”
“Me!”
He took my hand. “Yes, Brawne. It seems that you also are part of the Hyperion unknown.”
I shook my head. Realizing that there was a numbness in my scalp above and behind my left ear, I raised my hand, half expecting to find damage from the datumplane fight. Instead, my fingers encountered the plastic of a neural shunt socket.
I jerked my other hand from Johnny’s grasp and stared at him in horror. He’d had me wired while I was unconscious.
Johnny held up both hands, palms toward me. “I had to, Brawne. It may be necessary for the survival of both of us.”
I made a fist. “You fucking low-life son of a bitch. Why do I need to interface directly, you lying bastard?”
“Not with the Core,” Johnny said softly. “With me.”
“You?” My arm and fist quivered with the anticipation of smashing his vat-cloned face. “You!” I sneered. “You’re human now, remember?”
“Yes. But certain cybrid functions remain. Do you remember when I touched your hand several days ago and brought us to datumplane?”
I stared at him. “I’m not going to datumplane again.”
“No. Nor am I. But I may need to relay incredible amounts of data to you within a very short period of time. I brought you to a black market surgeon in the Dregs’ last night. She implanted a Schrön disk.”
“Why?” The Schrön loop was tiny, no larger than my thumbnail, and very expensive. It held countless field-bubble memories, each capable of holding near infinite bits of information. Schrön loops could not be accessed by the biological carrier and thus were used for courier purposes. A man or woman could carry AI personalities or entire planetary dataspheres in a Schrön loop. Hell, a dog could carry all that.
“Why?” I said again, wondering if Johnny or some forces behind Johnny were using me as such a courier. “Why?”
Johnny moved closer and put his hand around my fist. “Trust me, Brawne.”
I don’t think I’d trusted anyone since Dad blew his brains out twenty years ago and Mom retreated into the pure selfishness of her seclusion. There was no reason in the universe to trust Johnny now.
But I did.
I relaxed my fist and took his hand.
“All right,” said Johnny. “Finish your meal and we’ll get busy trying to save our lives.”
Weapons and drugs were the two easiest things to buy in Dregs’ Hive. We spent the last of Johnny’s considerable stash of black marks to buy weapons.
By 2200 hours, we each wore whiskered titan-poly body armor. Johnny had a goonda’s mirror-black helmet and I wore a FORCE-surplus command mask. Johnny’s power gauntlets were massive and a bright red. I wore osmosis gloves with killing trim. Johnny carried an Ouster hellwhip captured on Bressia and had tucked a laser wand in his belt. Along with Dad’s automatic, I now carried a Steiner-Ginn mini-gun on a gyroed waist brace. It was slaved to my command visor and I could keep both hands free while firing.
Johnny and I looked at each other and began giggling. When the laughter stopped there was a long silence.
“Are you sure the Shrike Temple here on Lusus is our best chance?” I asked for the third or fourth time.
“We can’t farcast,” said Johnny. “All the Core has to do is record a malfunction and we’re dead. We can’t even take an elevator from the lower levels. We’ll have to find unmonitored stairways and climb the hundred and twenty floors. The best chance to make the Temple is straight down the Concourse Mall.”
“Yes, but will the Shrike Church people take us in?”
Johnny shrugged, a strangely insectoid gesture in his combat outfit. The voice through the goonda helmet was metallic. “They’re the only group which has a vested interest in our survival. And the only ones with enough political pull to shield us from the Hegemony while finding transit for us to Hyperion.”
I pushed up my visor. “Meina Gladstone said that no future pilgrimage flights to Hyperion would be allowed.”
The dome of mirror black nodded judiciously. “Well, fuck Meina Gladstone,” said my poet lover.
I took a breath and walked to the opening of our niche, our cave, our last sanctuary. Johnny came up behind me. Body armor rubbed against body armor. “Ready, Brawne?”
I nodded, brought the mini-gun around on its pivot, and started to leave.
Johnny stopped me with a touch. “I love you, Brawne.”
I nodded, still tough. I forgot that my visor was up and he could see my tears.
The Hive is awake all twenty-eight hours of the day, but through some tradition, Third Shift was the quietest, the least populated. We would have had a better chance at the height of First Shift rush hour along the pedestrian causeways. But if the goondas and thuggees were waiting for us, the death toll of civilians would have been staggering.
It took us more than three hours to climb our way to Concourse Mall, not up a single staircase but along an endless series of mech corridors, abandoned access verticals swept clean by the Luddite riots eighty years ago, and a final stairway that was more rust than metal. We exited onto a delivery corridor less than half a klick from the Shrike Temple.
“I can’t believe it was so easy,” I whispered to him on intercom.
“They are probably concentrating people on the spaceport and private farcaster clusters.”
We took the least exposed walkway onto the Concourse, thirty meters below the first shopping level and four hundred meters below the roof. The Shrike Temple was an ornate, free-standing structure now less than half a klick away. A few off-hour shoppers and joggers glanced at us and then moved quickly away. I had no doubt that the Mall police were being paged, but I’d be surprised if they showed up too quickly.
A gang of brightly painted street thugs exploded from a lift shaft, hollering and whooping. They carried pulse-knives, chains, and power gauntlets. Startled, Johnny wheeled toward them with the hellwhip sending out a score of targeting beams. The mini-gun whir-whirred out of my hands, shifting from aiming point to aiming point as I moved my eyes.
The gang of seven kids skidded to a halt, held up their hands, and backed away, eyes wide. They dropped into the lift shaft and were gone.
I looked at Johnny. Black mirrors looked back. Neither of us laughed.
We crossed to the northbound shopping lane. The few pedestrians scurried for open shopfronts. We were less than a hundred meters from the Temple stairs. I could actually hear my heartbeat in the FORCE helmet earphones. We were within fifty meters of the stairs. As if called, an acolyte or priest of some sort appeared at the ten-meter door of the Temple and watched us approach. Thirty meters. If anyone was going to intercept us, they would have done it before this.
I turned toward Johnny to say something funny. At least twenty beams and half that many projectiles hit us at once. The outer layer of the titan-poly exploded outward, deflecting most of the projectile energy in the counterblast. The mirrored surface beneath bounced most of the killing light. Most of it.