The Shrike (continued):
First, I neglected a description. This comes from
Endymion, page 508.
Close up, the Shrike was even more terrifying than when seen from a distance. I used the word "sculpture" earlier, and there was something sculpted about the creature - if one can imagine a sculpture done in chromed spikes, razor wire, blades, thorns, and smooth metal carapace. It was large - more than a meter taller than I, and I am not short. The actual form of the thing was complicated - solid legs with joints sheathed in thorn-studded bands; a flat foot with curved blades where the toes should be and a long spoon-shaped blade at the heel, which might be a perfect utensil for disemboweling; a complicated upper carapace of smooth chromed shell interspersed with bands of razor wire; arms that were too long, too jointed, and too many - there was an extra pair tucked under the longer, upper set of arms; and four huge bladed hands hanging limply by the thing's side.
The skull was mostly smooth and strangely elongated, with a steam-shovel jaw set in with row upon row of metal teeth. There was a curved blade on the creature's forehead and another high up on the armored skull. The eyes were large, deep-set, and dull red.
The Shrike is almost three meters tall (see
Endymion, page 257, among many other places.) On page 256 of
Endymion, the Consul's ship is able to determine the Shrike's weight after it appears in the Hawking-drive accumulator. According to the ship, the Shrike displaced a mass of 1.063 metric tons. A Bettik speculates that the Shrike may be very dense, and may also vary its mass as required since the footprints it leaves on the beach nearby do not seem to reflect such a weight. The Shrike can also open something resembling a farcaster portal which others can step through (
The Fall of Hyperion, pages 142-143.)
Page 153 of
The Rise of Endymion gives us another example of the Shrike at work. The Shrike attacked the Palestinian capital of Arafat-Kaffiyeh on Mars while the Pax was rendering the population lifeless for storage and transport, killing the entire Pax force of 362 people. A 38 second security holo of the event seems to show a dozen Shrikes, but close inspection confirms that there is only one moving so quickly as to appear to be in several places at once. Despite the fact that the bodies are relatively intact, none can be resurrected: the Shrike has removed their cruciforms, including the five hundred meters of microfiber in the "cellular node extensions." The Opus Dei freighter
Saigon Maru is found floating dead in space in the same system, its crew of 51 all killed by the Shrike and their cruciforms torn from their bodies in the same fashion (page 248 of
The Rise of Endymion.)
Beginning on page 166 of
Hyperion, Colonel Kassad has the oppotunity to see the Shrike in battle at something approaching the Shrike's speed. The account follows.
Kassad approved of the way the Ousters had prepared their defenses. The two assault boats were grounded less than half a kilometer apart, their guns, projectors, and missile turrets covering each other and a full three hundred and sixty degrees of fire. Ouster ground troops had been busy digging revetments a hundred meters out from the boats and Kassad could see at least two EM tanks hull down, their projection arrays and launch tubes commanding the wide, empty moor between the Poets' City and the boats. Kassad's vision had been altered; he could see the overlapping ship containment fields as ribbons of yellow haze, the motion sensors and antipersonnel mines as eggs of pulsing red light.
He blinked, realizing that something was wrong with the image. Then it came to him: besides the thickness of the light and his enhanced perception of energy fields, nothing was moving. The Ouster troops, even those set in attitudes of motion, were as stiff as the toy soldiers he had played with as a boy in the Tharsis slums. The EM tanks were dug into their hull-down positions, but Kassad noticed that now even their acquisition radars - visible to him as concentric purple arcs - were motionless. He glanced skyward and saw some sort of large bird hanging in the sky, as unmoving as an insect frozen in amber. He passed a cloud of windblown dust hanging suspended, extended one chrome hand, and flicked spirals of particles to the ground.
Ahead of them, the Shrike strode casually through the red maze of sensor-mines, stepped over the blue lines of tripbeams, ducked under the violet pulses of the autofire scanners, passed through the yellow containment field and the green wall of the sonic defense perimeter, and walked into the assault boat's shadow. Moneta and Kassad followed.
-How is this possible? Kassad realized that he had posed the question through a medium that was something less than telepathy but something far more sophisticated than implant conduction.
-He controls time.
-The Pain Lord?
-Of course.
-Why are we here?
Moneta gestured toward the motionless Ousters. -They are your enemies.
Kassad felt that he was finally awaking from a long dream. This was real. The Ouster trooper's eyes, unblinking behind his helmet, were real. The Ouster assault boat, rising like a bronze tombstone to his left, was real.
Fedmahn Kassad realized that he could kill them all - commandos, assault boat crew, all of them - and they could do nothing about it. He knew that time had not stopped - any more than it stopped while a ship was under Hawking drive - it was merely a matter of varying rates. The bird frozen above them would complete the flap of its wings given enough minutes or hours. The Ouster in front of him would close his eyes in a blink if Kassad had the patience to watch long enough. Meanwhile, Kassad and Moneta and the Shrike could kill all of them without the Ousters realizing they were under attack.
It was not fair, Kassad realized. It was wrong. It was the ultimate violation of the New Bushido, worse in its way than the wanton murder of civilians. The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals. He was about to communicate this to Moneta when she said/thought - Watch.
Time began again with an explosion of sounds not unlike the rush of air into an airlock. The bird soared and circled overhead. A desert breeze threw dust across the static-charged containment field. An Ouster commando rose from one knee, saw the Shrike and the two human shapes, screamed something over his tactical comm channel, and raised his energy weapon.
The Shrike did not seem to move - to Kassad it merely ceased being here and appeared there. The Ouster commando emitted a second, shorter scream, and then looked down in disbelief as the Shrike's arm withdrew with the man's heart in its bladed fist. The Ouster stared, opened his mouth as if to speak, and collapsed.
Kassad turned to his right and found himself face to face with an armored Ouster. The commando ponderously lifted a weapon. Kassad swung his arm, felt the chrome forcefield hum, and saw the flat of his hand cut through body armor, helmet, and neck. The Ouster's head rolled in the dust.
Kassad leaped into a low trench and saw several troopers begin to turn. Time was still out of joint; the enemy moved in extreme slow motion one second, jerked like a damaged holo to four-fifths speed in the next instant. They were never as quick as Kassad. Gone were his thoughts of the New Bushido. These were the barbarians who had tried to kill him. He broke one man's back, stepped aside, jabbed rigid, chrome fingers through the body armor of a second man, crushed the larynx of a third, dodged a knife blade moving in slow motion and kicked the spine out of the knife wielder. He leaped up out of the ditch.
-Kassad!
Kassad ducked as the laser beam crept past his shoulder, burning its way through the air like a slow fuse of ruby light. Kassad smelled ozone as it crackled past. Impossible. I've dodged a laser! He picked up a stone and flung it at the Ouster manning the tank-mounted hellwhip. A sonic boom cracked; the gunner exploded backward. Kassad pulled a plasma grenade from a corpse's bandolier, leaped up to the tank hatch, was thirty meters away before the explosion geysered flame as high as the assault boat's bow.
Kassad paused in the eye of the storm to see Moneta in the center of her own circle of carnage. Blood splashed her but did not adhere, flowing like oil on water across the rainbow curves of chin, shoulder, breast, and belly. She looked at him across the battlefield and Kassad felt a renewed surge of bloodlust in himself.
Behind her, the Shrike moved slowly through the chaos, choosing victims as if he were harvesting. Kassad watched the creature wink in and out of existence and realized that to the Pain Lord he and Moneta would appear to be moving as slowly as the Ousters did to Kassad.
Time jumped, moved to four-fifths speed. The surviving troops were panicking now, firing into one another, deserting their posts, and fighting to get aboard the assault boat. Kassad tried to realize what the past minute or two had been like for them: blurs moving through their defensive positions, comrades dying in great gouts of blood. Kassad watched Moneta moving through their ranks, killing at her leisure. To his amazement, he discovered that he had some control of time: blink and his opponents slowed to one-third speed, blink and events moved at nearly their normal pace. Kassad's sense of honor and sanity called out for him to stop the slaughter but his almost sexual bloodlust overpowered any objections.
Someone in the assault boat had sealed the airlock and now a terrified commando used a shaped plasma charge to blow the portal open. The mob pressed in, trampling the wounded in their flight from unseen killers. Kassad followed them in.
The phrase "fight like a cornered rat" is an extremely apt description. Throughout the history of military encounters, human combatants have been known to fight at their fiercest when challenged in enclosed spaces where flight is not an option. Whether in the passageways of La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont at Waterloo or in the Hive tunnels of Lusus, some of the most terrible hand-to-hand battles in history have been fought in cramped spaces where no retreat is possible. It was true this day. The Ousters fought... and died... like cornered rats.
The Shrike had disabled the assault boat. Moneta remained outside to kill the threescore commandos who had stayed at their posts. Kassad killed those within.
In the end, the final assault boat fired on its doomed counterpart. Kassad was outside by then and he watched the particle beams and high-intensity lasers creep towards him, followed an eternity later by missiles which seemed to move so slowly that he could have written his name on them in flight. By that time all of the Ousters were dead in and around the overrun boat, but its containment field held. Energy dispersion and impact explosions tossed corpses around on the outer perimeter, set fire to equipment, and glazed the sand to glass, but Kassad and Moneta watched from inside a dome of orange flame as the remaining assault boat retreated to space.
-Can we stop them? Kassad was panting, pouring sweat, and literally quivering from excitement.
-We could, replied Moneta, but we do not want to. They will carry the message to the swarm.
Some notes on the skinsuits that Kassad and Moneta are wearing in the above passage. The field can withstand a blow from the killing gauntlet on FORCE powered armor (a blow that would carve through half a meter of stone) without any visible staggering or reaction from the wearer (page 140 of
The Fall of Hyperion.) It enhances the wearer's physical strength: on the same page, Moneta throws Kassad (still clad in his FORCE armor) a distance of 20 meters, jumps the same 20 meters to land next to him, lifts him one-handed, and rips his impact armor down the front with her other hand. It does not, however, prevent the Shrike from cutting the wearer (page 142 of
The Fall of Hyperion, among other places.) Aside from the visual capabilities in the above passage, the skinsuit also allows the wearer to zoom in on distance objects. Kassad uses this to watch a group of FORCE soldiers 5 kilometers away, and has no trouble making them out despite their camoflage polymer and minimal heat signiture. He can even see faces (
The Fall of Hyperion, page 182.) It also serves in a first aid role, managing the wearer's pain while serving as both compress and tourniquet (
The Fall of Hyperion, page 332.)
