Another few minutes and we could no longer resist the powerful current in this river of air.

The thermal did not lessen, it just seemed to die away completely, and then we were at the mercy of the jet stream.

“Let’s go!” shouted Aenea, forgetting that her slightest whisper was audible in my hearpatch.

I could see A. Bettik open his eyes and give me a thumbs-up. At the same instant, my own parawing peeled off the thermal and was swept away to the east. Even with the diminished sound, we seemed to be roaring through the air at a speed so incredible that it was audible. Aenea’s yellow delta streaked east like a crossbow dart. A. Bettik’s blue followed. I wrestled with the controls, realized that I did not have the strength to change course one degree, and simply held on while we rifled east and down in the pounding, flowing river of air. T’ai Shan gleamed ahead of us, but we were losing altitude quickly now and the mountain was still very far away. Kilometers beneath us, beneath the monsoon sea of white cloudtops, the greenish phosgene clouds of the acid world ocean churned away unseen but waiting.

The Pax authorities in T’ien Shan System were confused. When Captain Wolmak in the Jibril received the strange pulsed alarm signal from the Pax Enclave at Shivling, he tried hailing Cardinal Mustafa and the others but received no answer. Within minutes he had dispatched a combat dropship with two dozen Pax Marines, including three medics.

The tightline report uplink was confusing. The conference room at their enclave gompa was a gory mess. Human blood and viscera were splashed everywhere, but the only body remaining was that of the Grand Inquisitor, who had been crippled and blinded. They DNA-typed the largest arterial spray and found it to be that of Father Farrell.

Other pools of blood reportedly belonged to Archbishop Breque and his aide, LeBlanc.

But no bodies. No cruciforms. The medics reported that Cardinal Mustafa was comatose, in deep shock, and near death; they stabilized him as best they could using only their fieldkits and asked for orders. Should they let the Grand Inquisitor die and be resurrected, or get him to the dropship doc-in-the-box and try to save him, knowing that it would be several days before he could regain consciousness and describe the attack? Or the medic could get him to life support, use drugs to bring the Cardinal out of the coma, and interrogate him within minutes—all the while with the patient under exquisite pain and on the verge of death.

Wolmak ordered them to wait and tightbeamed Admiral Lempriere, the task force commander. Out in the T’ien Shan System, many AU’s distant, the forty-some ships that had come through the battle with Raphael were rescuing survivors from the terminally damaged archangels and awaiting the arrival of the papal drone and the TechnoCore robot ship that would be putting the planet’s population in suspended animation. Neither had arrived. Lempriere was closer, four light-minutes away, and the tightbeam would take that long to reach him and bring him up to speed, but Wolmak felt he had no other choice. He waited while his message burned out-system. Aboard the flagship Raguel, Lempriere found himself in a ticklish situation, with only minutes to decide about Mustafa. If he allowed the Grand Inquisitor to die, it was likely that a two-day resurrection would be successful. The Cardinal would suffer little pain.

But the cause of the attack—Shrike, indigenies, the Aenea monster’s disciples, Ousters—might remain a mystery until then. Lempriere took ten seconds to decide, but it was a four-minute tightbeam delay out and back. “Have the medics stabilize him,” he tightbeamed Wolmak on the Jibril in orbit around the mountain planet. “Get him to dropship life support. Bring him out of it. Interrogate him. When we know enough, have the autosurgeon give a prognosis. If it’s faster to resurrect him, let him die.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Wolmak four minutes later, and passed word along to the Marines.

Meanwhile, the Marines were widening their search, using EMV reaction paks to search the vertical cliffsides around the Phallus of Shiva. They deep-radared Rhan Tso, the so-called Otter Lake, finding neither otters nor the bodies of the missing priests. There had been an honor guard of twelve Marines in the enclave with the Grand Inquisitor’s party—plus the pilot of the dropship—but these men and women were also missing.

Blood and viscera were found and DNA-typed—most of the missing thus accounted for—but their bodies were not found.

“Shall we spread the search to the Winter Palace?” questioned the Marine lieutenant in charge of the party. All of the Marines had specific orders not to disturb the locals—especially the Dalai Lama and his people—before the TechnoCore ship arrived to put the population asleep.

“Just a minute,” said Wolmak. He saw that Admiral Lempriere’s monitor telltale was on. The com diskey on his command web was also blinking. Jibril’s intelligence officer down in the sensor bubble. “Yes?”

“Captain, we’ve been visually monitoring the palace area. Something terrible has happened there.”

“What?” snapped Wolmak. It was not like any member of his crew to be so vague. “We missed it, sir,” said the Intel officer. She was a young woman, but smart, Lempriere knew. “We were using the optics to check the area around the Enclave. But look at this…”

Wolmak turned his head slightly to watch the holopit fill with an image, knowing that it was being tightbeamed out to the Admiral. The east side of the Winter Palace, Potala, as if seen from a few hundred meters above the Kyi Chu Bridge. The roadway of the bridge was gone, retracted. But on the steps and terraces between the palace and the bridge, and on some of the narrow ledges in the chasm between the palace and the Drepung Monastery on the east side, were scores of bodies—hundreds of bodies—bloodied and dismembered.

“Dear Lord,” said Captain Wolmak and crossed himself.

“We’ve identified the head of Regent Tokra Reting there among the body parts,” came the Intel officer’s calm voice.

“The head?” repeated Wolmak, realizing that his useless remark was being sent to the Admiral along with all the rest of this transmission. In four minutes, Admiral Lempriere would know that Wolmak made stupid comments. No matter.

“Anyone else important there?” he queried Intel.

“Negative, sir,” came the young officer’s voice. “But they’re broadcasting on various radio frequencies now.”

Wolmak raised an eyebrow. So far, the Winter Palace had maintained radio and tightbeam silence. “What are they saying?”

“It’s in Mandarin and post-Hegira Tibetan, sir,” said the officer. But then, quickly, “They’re in a panic, Captain. The Dalai Lama is missing. So is the head of the boy lama’s security team. General Surkhang Sewon Chempo, leader of the Palace Guard, is dead, sir… they’ve confirmed that his headless body was found there.”

Wolmak glanced at the clock. The tightbeam broadcast was halfway to the Admiral’s ship. “Who did this, Intel? The Shrike?”

“Don’t know, sir. As I said, the lenses and cameras were elsewhere. We’ll check the discs.”

“Do that,” said Wolmak. He could not wait any longer. He tightbeamed the Marine lieutenant. “Get to the palace, Lieutenant. See what the hell is going on. I’m sending down five more dropships, combat EMV’s, and a thopter gunship. Search for any sign of Archbishop Breque, Father Farrell, or Father LeBlanc. And the pilot and honor guard, of course.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The tightbeam link went green. The Admiral was receiving the latest transmission. Too late to wait for his command. Wolmak tightbeamed the two closest Pax ships—torchships just beyond the outer moon—and ordered them on battle alert and to drop into matching orbit with the Jibril. He might need the firepower. Wolmak had seen the Shrike’s work before, and the thought of that creature suddenly appearing on his ship made his skin go cold. He tightbeamed Captain Samuels on the torchship H.H.S. St. Bonaventure.