The Consul raises his face. “Don’t you recognize me? I was Hegemony Consul to Hyperion for years.”

“Hey, don’t bey fuckin’ with us…” begins the man with the knife, but the other interrupts. “Yeah, man, I remember your face on the camp holie when I bey kid-like. So why you carryin’ gold upriver now when the sky bey fallin’, Hegemony-man?”

“We were heading for the shelter… Chronos Keep,” says the Consul, trying not to sound too eager but at the same time grateful for each second he is allowed to live. Why? part of him thinks. You were tired of living. Ready to die. Not like this. Not while Sol and Rachel and the others need his help.

“Several of Hyperion’s most wealthy citizens,” he says. “The evacuation authorities wouldn’t allow them to transfer the bullion, so I agreed to help them store it in vaults in Chronos Keep, the old castle north of the Bridle Range. For a commission.”

“You bey fuckin’ crazy!” sneers the man with the knife. “Everything north of here bey Shrike country now.”

The Consul lowers his head. There is no need to simulate the fatigue and sense of defeat he projects. “So we discovered. The android crew deserted last week. Several of the passengers were killed by the Shrike. I was coming downriver by myself.”

“This bey shit,” says the man with the knife. His eyes have that sick, distracted look again.

“Just a second,” says his partner. He slaps the Consul once, hard. “So where bey this so-called gold ship, old man?”

The Consul tastes blood. “Upriver. Not on the river, but hidden in one of the tributaries.”

“Yeah,” says the knife-man, setting the zero-edge blade flat against the side of the Consul’s neck. He will not need to slash in order to sever the Consul’s throat, merely rotate the blade. “I say this bey shit. And I say we bey wastin’ time.”

“Just a second,” snaps the other man. “How far upriver?”

The Consul thinks of the tributaries he has passed in the last few hours. It is late. The sun almost touches the line of a copse of trees to the west. “Just above Karia Locks,” he says.

“So why you bey flyin’ down on that toy-like rather than bargin’ it?”

“Trying to get help,” says the Consul. The adrenaline has faded, and now he feels a terminal exhaustion very close to despair. “There were too many… too many bandits along the shore. The barge seemed too risky. The hawking mat was… safer.”

The man called Chez laughs. “Put the knife away, Obem. We bey walkin’ up it a bit, hey?”

Obem leaps to his feet. The knife is still in his hand but now the blade—and the anger—are aimed toward his partner. “Bey you fucked, man, hey? Bey your head bey full of shit between ears, hey? He bey lyin’ to keep from deathwards flyin'.”

Chez neither blinks nor steps back. “Sure, he bey maybe lyin’. Don’t matter, hey? The Locks they bey less'n half-day walk we bey makin’ anyway, hey? No boat, no gold, you cut his throat, hey? Only slowwise, ankles-up like. They bey gold, you still gets the job, bladewise, only bey rich man now, hey?”

Obem teeters a second between rage and reason, turns to the side, and swings the ceramic zero-edge blade at a neville tree eight centimeters thick through the trunk. He has time to turn back and crouch in front of the Consul before gravity informs the tree that it has been severed and the neville falls back toward the river’s edge with a crash of branches.

Obem grabs the Consul’s still-damp shirtfront. “OK, we see what bey there, Hegemony-man. Talk, run, trip, stumble, and I bey slicin’ fingers and ears just for practice, hey?”

The Consul staggers to his feet, and the three of them move back into the cover of brush and low trees, the Consul three meters behind Chez and the same distance in front of Obem, trudging back the way he had come, moving away from the city and the ship and any chance of saving Sol and Rachel.

An hour passes. The Consul can think of no clever scheme once the tributaries are reached, the barge not discovered. Several times Chez waves them into silence and hiding, once at the sound of gossamers fluttering in branches, again at a disturbance across the river, but there is no sign of other human beings. No sign of help. The Consul remembers the burned-out buildings along the river, the empty huts and vacant wharves. Fear of the Shrike, fear of being left behind to the Ousters in the evacuation, and months of plundering by rogue elements of the SDF have turned this area into a no-man’s-land. The Consul concocts excuses and extensions, then discards them. His only hope is that they will walk close to the Locks where he can make a leap for the deep and rapid water there, try to stay afloat with his hands tied behind him until he is hidden in the maze of small islands below that point.

Except that he is too tired to swim, even if his arms were free. And the weapons the two men carry would target him easily, even if he had a ten-minute start among the snags and isles. The Consul is too tired to be clever, too old to be brave. He thinks about his wife and son, dead these many years now, killed in the bombing of Bressia by men with no more honor than these two creatures. The Consul is only sorry that he has broken his word to help the other pilgrims. Sorry about that… and that he will not see how it all comes out.

Obem makes a spitting noise behind him. “Shit with this, Chez, hey? What say we sit him and slit him and help him talk a bit, hey? Then we go lonewise to the barge, if barge they bey?”

Chez turns, rubs sweat out of his eyes, frowns at the Consul speculatively, and says, “Hey, yeah, I think maybe timewise and quietwise you bey right, goyo, but leave it talkable toward the end, hey?”

“Sure,” grins Obem, slinging his weapon and extracting his zero-edge.

“DO NOT MOVE!” booms a voice from above. The Consul drops to his knees and the ex-SDF bandits unsling weapons with practiced swiftness. There is a rush, a roar, a whipping of branches and dust about them, the Consul looks up in time to see a rippling of the cloud-covered evening sky, lower than the clouds, a sense of mass directly above, descending, and then Chez is lifting his flechette rifle and Obem is targeting his launcher and then all three are falling, pitching over, not like soldiers shot, not like recoil elements in some ballistic equation, but dropping like the tree Obem had felled earlier on.

The Consul lands face first in dust and gravel and lies there unblinking, unable to blink.

Stun weapon he thinks through synapses gone sluggish as old oil. A localized cyclone erupts as something large and invisible lands between the three bodies in the dust and the river’s edge. The Consul hears a hatch whine open and the internal tick of repellor turbines dropping below lift-critical. He still cannot blink, much less lift his head, and his vision is limited to several pebbles, a dunescape of sand, a small grass forest, and a single architect ant, huge at this distance, that seems to be taking a sudden interest in the Consul’s moist but unblinking eye.

The ant turns to hurry the half meter between itself and its moist prize, and the Consul thinks Hurry at the unhurried footsteps behind him.

Hands under his arms, grunting, a familiar but strained voice saying, “Damn, you’ve put on weight.”

The Consul’s heels drag in the dirt, bouncing over the randomly twitching fingers of Chez… or perhaps it is Obem… the Consul cannot turn his head to see their faces. Nor can he see his rescuer until he is lifted—with a grunted litany of soft curses near his ear—through the starboard blister-hatch of the decamouflaged skimmer, into the long, soft leather of the reclining passenger seat.

Governor-General Theo Lane appears in the Consul’s field of vision, boyish-looking but slightly demonic-looking too as the hatch lowers and the red interior lamps light his face. The younger man leans over to secure crashweb snaps across the Consul’s chest. “I’m sorry I had to stun you along with those other two.” Theo sits back, snaps his own web in place, and twitches the omni controller. The Consul feels the skimmer shiver and then lift off, hovering a second before spinning left like a plate on frictionless bearings. Acceleration pushes the Consul into his seat.