Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

by Dan Simmons

There came the watermelon-carving sound of blades piercing flesh, of hooks being pulled free of tendon and bone. Sira’s head went back, her mouth opened impossibly wide, and her body exploded from the breastbone down. Flesh separated as if an invisible ax were chopping Sira Rob for kindling. Unseen scalpels completed the job of opening her, lateral incisions appearing like obscene time-lapse footage of a mad surgeon’s favorite operation. It was a brutal autopsy performed on a living person. On a once living person, rather, for when the blood stopped flying and the body ceased spasming, Sira’s limbs relaxed in death, legs opening again in an echo of the obscene display of viscera above. And then—for the briefest second—there was a blur of red and chrome near the bed. “Freeze, expand, and augment,” King Billy told the house computer. The blur resolved itself into a head out of a jolt addict’s nightmare: a face part steel, part chrome, and part skull, teeth like a mechanized wolf’s crossed with a steam shovel, eyes like ruby lasers burning through blood-filled gems, forehead penetrated by a curved spike-blade rising thirty centimeters from a quicksilver skull, and a neck ringed with similar thorns. “The Shrike?” I asked.