“Second, where is the TechnoCore? I must know if we are to fight them. Have the Ousters forgotten our common enemy, the Core?

“Third, what are their demands for a cease-fire? I am willing to sacrifice much to rid us of the Core’s domination. But the killing must stop!

“Fourth, would the Leader of the Swarm Aggregate be willing to meet with me in person? I will farcast to Hyperion system if this is necessary. Most of our fleet elements have left there, but a JumpShip and its escort craft remain with the singularity sphere. The Swarm Leader must decide soon, because FORCE wants to destroy the sphere, and Hyperion then will be three years time-debt from the Web.

“Finally, the Swarm Leader must know that the Core wishes us to use a form of deathwand explosive device to counter the Ouster invasion. Many of the FORCE leaders agree. Time is short. We will not—repeat, not—allow the Ouster invasion to overrun the Web.

“It is up to you now. Please acknowledge this message and fatline me as soon as negotiations have begun.”

Gladstone looked into the camera disk, willing the force of her personality and sincerity across the light-years. “I beseech you in the bowels of humankind’s history, please accomplish this.”

The fatline message squirt was followed by two minutes of jerky imagery showing the deaths of Heaven’s Gate and God’s Grove. The Consul, Melio Arundez, and Theo Lane sat in silence after the holos faded.

“Response?” queried the ship.

The Consul cleared his throat. “Acknowledge message received,” he said. “Send our coordinates.” He looked across the holopit at the other two. “Gentlemen?”

Arundez shook his head as if clearing it. “It’s obvious you’ve been here before… to the Ouster Swarm.”

“Yes,” said the Consul. “After Bressia… after my wife and son… after Bressia, some time ago, I rendezvoused with this Swarm for extensive negotiations.”

“Representing the Hegemony?” asked Theo. The redhead’s face looked much older and lined with worry.

“Representing Senator Gladstone’s faction,” said the Consul. “It was before she was first elected CEO. Her group explained to me that an internal power struggle within the TechnoCore could be affected by our bringing Hyperion into the Web Protectorate. The easiest way to do that was to allow information to slip to the Ousters… information that would cause them to attack Hyperion, thus bringing the Hegemony fleet here.”

“And you did that?” Arundez’s voice showed no emotion, although his wife and grown children lived on Renaissance Vector, now less than eighty hours away from the invasion wave.

The Consul sat back in the cushions. “No. I told the Ousters about the plan. They sent me back to the Web as a double agent. They planned to seize Hyperion, but at a time of their own choosing.”

Theo sat forward, his hands clasped very tightly. “All those years at the consulate…”

“I was waiting for word from the Ousters,” the Consul said flatly.

“You see, they had a device that would collapse the anti-entropic fields around the Time Tombs. Open them when they were ready. Allow the Shrike to slip its bonds.”

“So the Ousters did that,” said Theo.

“No,” said the Consul, “I did. I betrayed the Ousters just as I betrayed Gladstone and the Hegemony. I shot the Ouster woman who was calibrating the device… her and the technicians with her… and turned it on. The anti-entropic fields collapsed. The final pilgrimage was arranged. The Shrike is free.”

Theo stared at his former mentor. There was more puzzlement than rage in the younger man’s green eyes. “Why? Why did you do all this?”

The Consul told them, briefly and dispassionately, about his grandmother Siri of Maui-Covenant, and about her rebellion against the Hegemony—a rebellion which did not die when she and her lover, the Consul’s grandfather, died.

Arundez rose from the pit and walked to the window opposite the balcony. Sunlight streamed across his legs and the dark blue carpet.

“Do the Ousters know what you did?”

“They do now,” said the Consul. “I told Freeman Vanz and the others when we arrived.”

Theo paced the diameter of the holopit. “So this meeting we’re going to might be a trial?”

The Consul smiled. “Or an execution.”

Theo stopped, both hands clenched in fists. “And Gladstone knew this when she asked you to come here again?”

“Yes.”

Theo turned away. “I don’t know whether I want them to execute you or not.”

“I don’t know either, Theo,” said the Consul.

Melio Arundez turned away from the window. “Didn’t Vanz say they were sending a boat to fetch us?”

Something in his tone brought the other two men to the window.

The world where they had landed was a middle-sized asteroid which had been encircled by a class-ten containment field and terraformed into a sphere by generations of wind and water and careful restructuring.

Hyperion’s sun was setting behind the too-near horizon, and the few kilometers of featureless grass rippled to a vagrant breeze. Below the ship, a wide stream or narrow river ambled across the pastureland, approached the horizon, and then seemed to fly upward into a river turned waterfall, twisting up through the distant containment field and winding through the blackness of space above before dwindling to a line too narrow to see.

A boat was descending that infinitely tall waterfall, approaching the surface of their small world. Humanoid figures could be seen near the bow and stem.

“Christ,” whispered Theo.

“We’d best get ready,” said the Consul. “That’s our escort.”

Outside, the sun set with shocking rapidity, sending its last rays through the curtain of water half a kilometer above the shadowed ground and searing the ultramarine sky with rainbows of almost frightening color and solidity.

It is midmorning when Hunt awakens me. He arrives with breakfast on a tray and a frightened look in his dark eyes.

I ask, “Where did you get the food?”

“There’s some sort of little restaurant in the front room downstairs. Food was waiting there, hot, but no people.”

I nod. “Signora Angeletti’s little trattoria,” I say. “She is not a good cook.” I remember Dr. Clark’s concern about my diet; he felt that the consumption had settled in my stomach and he held me to a starvation regime of milk and bread with the occasional bit of fish. Odd how many suffering members of humankind have faced eternity obsessed with their bowels, their bedsores, or the meagerness of their diets.

I look up at Hunt again. “What is it?”

Gladstone’s aide has moved to the window and seems absorbed in the view of the Piazza below. I can hear Bernini’s accursed fountain trickling. “I was going out for a walk while you slept,” Hunt says slowly, “just in case there might be people out and about. Or a phone or farcaster.”

“Of course,” I say.

“I’d just stepped out…the…” He turns and licks his lips. “There’s something out there, Severn. In the street at the bottom of the stairs. I’m not sure, but I think that it’s…”

“The Shrike,” I say.

Hunt nods. “Did you see it?”

“No, but I am not surprised.”

“It’s… it’s terrible, Severn. There’s something about it that makes my flesh crawl. Here… you can just get a glimpse of it in the shadows on the other side of the staircase.”

I start to rise, but a sudden fit of coughing and the feel of phlegm rising in my chest and throat makes me settle back on the pillows. “I know what it looks like, Hunt. Don’t worry, it’s not here for you.” My voice sounds more confident than I feel.

“For you?”

“I don’t think so,” I say between gasps for air. “I think it’s just here to make sure I don’t try to leave… to find another place to die.”

Hunt returns to the bed. “You’re not going to die, Severn.”