Carrier was a deeply dangerous man. He was as close to a kindred spirit as she'd been able to find in this forsaken country. He was, in fact, the one man Venera could never completely trust. She liked that about him.
The young man hauled a sheaf of prints out of his jacket with a grimace. He held it up for Venera to take, his hand trembling as though it were lead weights he was handing her and not paper. Venera snatched up the pictures eagerly and held them to the light one by one.
"Ah…" The fifth photo was the one she'd been waiting to see. It showed a cloudy volume of air filled with spidery wooden dock armatures. Tied up to the docks was a row of stubby metal cylinders bristling with jets. Venera recognized the design: they were heavy cruisers, each bearing dozens of rocket ports and crewed by no less than three hundred men.
"They built the docks in a sargasso, just like you said," said the young spy. "The bottled air let me breathe on the way through. They're pumping oxygen to the work site using these big hoses…"
Venera nodded absently. "It was one of your colleagues who discovered that. He saw the pumps being installed outside the sargasso, and put two and two together." She riffled through the rest of the pictures to see if there was a better shot of the cruisers.
"Clearly another secret project," murmured Carrier with prim disapproval. "It seems nobody learned from the lesson we gave Aerie."
"That was eight years ago," said Venera as she held up a picture. "People forget… What's this?"
Capper jerked awake in his chair and with a visible effort, sat up to look. "Ah, that… I don't know."
The image showed a misty, dim silhouette partly obscured behind the wheel of a town. The gray spindle shape suggested a ship, but that was impossible: the thing dwarfed the town. Venera held the print up to her nose under one of the gaslights. Now she could see little dots scattered around the gray shape. "What are these specks?"
"Bikes," whispered the spy. "See the contrails?"
Now she did, and with that the picture seemed to open out for a second, like a window. Venera glimpsed a vast chamber of air, walled by cloud and full of dock complexes, towns, and ships. Lurking at its edge was a monstrous whale, a ship so big that it could swallow the pinwheels of Rush.
But it must be a trick of the light. "How big is this thing? Did you get a good look at it? How long were you there?"
"Not long…" The spy waved his hand indifferently. "Took another shot…"
"He's not going to last if I don't get him to the doctor," said the man who was tending the spy's leg. "He needs blood."
Venera found the other photo and held it up beside the first. They were almost identical, evidently taken seconds apart. The only difference was in the length of some of the contrails.
"It's not enough." Frustration made hot waves of pain radiate up from her jaw and she unconsciously snarled. Venera turned to find only Carrier looking at her; his face expressed nothing, as always. l The leather-suited spy was unconscious and his attendant was looking worried.
"Get him out of here," she said, gesturing to the servants' door at the back of the lounge. "We'll need to get a full deposition from i him later." Capper was roused enough to lean on the shoulder of his attendant and they staggered out of the room. Venera perched j on one of the benches and scowled at Carrier.
"This dispute with the pilot of Mavery is a distraction," she said. "It's intended to draw the bulk of our navy away from Rush. Then, these cruisers and that… thing, whatever it is, will invade from Falcon Formation. The Formation must have made a pact of some kind with Mavery."
Carrier nodded. "It seems likely. That is—it seems likely to my lady. The difficulty is going to be convincing your husband and the pilot that the threat is real."
"I'll worry about my husband," she said. "But the pilot… could be a problem."
"I will of course do whatever is in the best interest of the nation," said Carrier. Venera almost laughed.
"It won't come to that," she said. "All right. Go. I need to take these to my husband."
Carrier raised an eyebrow. "You're going to tell him about the organization?"
"It's time he knew we have extra resources," she said with-a shrug. "But I have no intention of revealing our extent just yet… or that it's my organization. Nor will I be telling him about you."
Carrier bowed, and retreated to the servants' door. Venera remained standing in the center of the room for a long time after he left.
A thousand miles away, it would be night right now around her father's sun. Doubtless the pilot of Hale would be sleeping uneasily, as he always did under the wrought-iron canopy of his heavily guarded bed. His royal intuition told him that the governing principle of the world was conspiracy—his subjects were conspiring against him, their farm animals conspired against them, and even the very atoms of the air must have some plan or other. It was inconceivable to him that anyone should act from motives of true loyalty or love and he ran the country accordingly. He had raised his three daughters by this theory. Venera had fully expected that she would be disposed of by being married off to some inbred lout; at sixteen she had taken matters into her own hands and extorted a better match from her father. Her first attempt at blackmail had been wildly successful, and had netted her the man of her choice, a young admiral of powerful Slipstream. Of course, Slipstream was moving away from Hale, rapidly enough that by the time she consolidated her position here she would be no threat to the old man.
She hated it here in Rush, Slipstream's capital. The people were friendly, cordial, and blandly superior. Scheming was not in fashion. The young nobles insulted one another directly by pulling hat-feathers or making outrageous accusations in public. They fought their duels immediately, letting no insult fester for more than a day. Everything political was done in bright halls or council chambers and if there were darker entanglements in the shadows, she couldn't find them. Even now, with war approaching, the Pilot of Slipstream refused to beef up the secret service in any way.
It was intolerable. So Venera had taken it upon herself to correct the situation. These photos were the first concrete validation of her own deliberately cultivated paranoia.
She resolutely jammed the pictures into her belt purse—they stuck out conspicuously but who would look?—and left by the front door.
Her servant waited innocently a good yard from the door. Venera was instantly suspicious that he'd been peering through the keyhole. She shot him a nasty look. "I don't believe I've used you before."
"No, ma'am. I'm new."
"You've had a background check, I trust?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well, you're going to have another." She stalked back to the admiralty with him following silently.
Bedlam continued in the admiralty antechamber, but it all seemed a bit silly to her now—they were in a fever of anticipation over a tiny border dispute with Mavery, while farther out a much bigger threat loomed. Nobody liked migratory nations, least of all Slipstream. They should be ready for this sort of tiling. They should be more professional.
A page jostled Venera and the photos fell out of her purse. She laid a backhanded slap across the boy's head and stooped to grab them—to find that her servant had already picked them up.
He glanced at two that he held, apparently by accident, then did a double-take. Venera wondered whether he'd tripped the page behind her back just so he could do this.
"Give me those!" She snatched them back, noting as she did that it was the mysterious photos of the great, dim gray object that he'd looked at. She decided on the spot to have him arrested on some sort of trumped-up charge as soon as she reached the Fanning estate.
Blazing with anger, Venera elbowed her way through the crowd of couriers and minor functionaries, and took a side exit. Cold air wafted up from the stairs that led up to the cable cars connecting the other towns in this quartet. Fury and cold made her jaw flare with pain so that she wanted to turn and strike the insolent young man. with a great effort she restrained herself,
and gradually calmed down. She was pleased at her own forbearance. I can be a good person, she reminded herself.
"Fifteen hundred feet," murmured the servant, almost inaudibly.
Venera whirled. He was trailing a few yards behind her, his expression distracted and wondering. "What did you say?" she hissed.
"That ship in the picture… was fifteen hundred feet long," he said, looking apologetic.
"How do you know mat? Tell me!"
"By me contrails, ma'am."
She stared at him for a few seconds. He was young, certainly, and his high-cheeked face would have seemed innocent but for the weatherbeaten skin that reddened his brow and nose. He had a mop of black hair that fell like a raven's wing across his forehead and his eyes were framed with fine lines in an airman's perpetual squint.
He was either far more cunning than she'd given him credit for, or he was an idiot.
Or, she reluctantly admitted to herself, maybe he really had no idea that she'd met with someone in the lathes' room, and didn't expect a lady like herself to be carrying sensitive information. In which case the photos, to him, were just photos.
"Show me." She fished out the two shots of the behemoth and handed them to him.
Now he looked doubtful. "I can't be sure."
"Just show me how you reached that conclusion!"
He pointed to the first picture. "You see in the near space here, there's a bike passing.That's a standard Gray forty-five, and it's running at optimum speed, which is a hundred twenty-five knots. See the shape of its contrail? It only gets that feathered look under optimum burn. It's passing close by the docks so you can tell…" he flipped to the second picture, "that here it's gone about six hundred feet, if that dock is the size it looks to be. It means the second picture was taken about two seconds after the first.
"Now look at the contrails around the big ship. Lady, I can't see any bikes that aren't Gray forty-fives in the picture. So if we assume that the ones in the distance are Grays too, and that they're going at optimum speed, then these ones skimming the surface of the big ship have traveled a little less than half its length since the first picture. That makes it a bit over twelve hundred feet long."
"Mother of Virga." Venera stared at the picture, then at him. She noticed now that he was missing the tips of several fingers: frostbite?
She took back the pictures. "You're a flyer."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Then what are you doing working as a body servant in my household?"
"Flying bikes is a dead-end career," he said with a shrug.
They resumed walking. Venera was mulling things over. As they reached the broad clattering galleries of the cable car station, she nodded sharply and said, "Don't tell anybody about these, if you value your job. They're sensitive."
"Yes, ma'am." He looked past her. "Uh-oh."
Venera followed his gaze, and frowned. The long cable car gallery was full of people, all of whom were crowding in a grumbling mass under the rusty cable stays and iron-work beams that formed the chamber's ceiling. Six green cable cars hung swaying and empty in the midst of the throng. "What's the holdup?" she demanded of a nearby naval officer.
"Cable snapped," he said with a sigh. "Wind shear pulled the towns apart and the springs couldn't compensate."
"Don't drown me in details, when will it be fixed?"
"You'd have to ask the cable monkeys, and they're all out there now."
"I have to get to the palace!"
"I'm sure the monkeys sympathize, ma'am."
She was about to erupt in a tirade against the man, when the servant touched her arm. "This way," he murmured.
With a furious hmmph, Venera followed him out of the crowd. He was heading for an innocuous side entrance. "What's down there?" she asked.
"Bike berths," he said as he opened the door to another windy gallery. This one was nearly empty. It curved up and out of sight, its right wall full of small offices with frosted-glass doors, its left wall opening out in a series of floor-to-ceiling arched windows. Beyond the windows was a braveway and then open turning air.
The gallery floor was full of hatches. About half had bikes suspended over them. The place smelled of engine oil, a masculine smell Venera found simultaneously rank and intriguing. Men in coveralls were rebuilding a bike nearby. Its parts were laid out in a neat line across a tarpaulin, their clean order betraying the apparent chaos of the opened chassis.
She was in a place of men; she liked that. "You have your own bike?" she asked the servant.
"Yes. It's right over there." He took a chit to the dock master and traded it in for a key and a worn learner jacket. They went over to the bike and he knelt to unlock the hatch beneath the gently swaying machine.
"Let me guess," she said. "A Gray forty-five?"
He laughed. "Those are work-haulers. This is a racer. It's a Can-field Arrow, Model fourteen. I bought it with my first paycheck from your household."
"There's a passenger seat," she said, suddenly thrilled at the prospect of riding the thing.
He squinted at her. "Have you never flown a bike, lady?"
"No. Does that surprise you?"
"I guess it's always been nice covered taxis for you," he said with a shrug. "Makes sense." He winched open the hatch and she took an apprehensive step back. Venera had no fear of the open air; it was speed that frightened her. Right now the air below the hatch was whipping by at gale force.
"We'll get blown off!"
He shook his head. "The dock master's lowering a shield ahead of the hatch. It'll give us several seconds of slipstream to cruise in. Just hunker down behind me—the windscreen's big—and you'll be fine. Besides, I won't take us flat out, too dangerous inside city limits."
He straddled the bike and held out his hand. Venera suppressed her grin until she was seated behind him. There were foot straps but she had nothing to hold on to with her hands except him. She wrapped her arms tightly around his waist.
He pushed the starter and she felt the engine rumble into life beneath her. Then he said, "All set?" and reached up to unclip the winch.
They fell into the air and for a few seconds the curve of the town's undersurface formed a ceiling. There was the shield, a long tongue of metal hanging down but pulling up quickly. "Head down!" he shouted and she buried her face in his back. Then the engine was roaring to drown all thought, the vibration rattling up through her spine, and they were free in the air between the city cylinders. The wind wasn't tearing her from this man's grasp, so Venera cautiously leaned back and looked around. She gave an involuntary gasp of delight.
Contrails like spikes and ropes stood still in the air around them. Tethers with gay flags on them slung here and there, and everywhere taxies, winged humans, and other bikes shot through the air. The quartet of towns that included the admiralty was already receding behind them; she turned to look back and saw that the cable car system, whose independent loop touched the axle of the vast spinning cylinder, was indeed slack. Men floated in open air around the break, their tools arrayed in constellations about them as they argued over what to do. Venera turned forward again, laughing giddily at the sensation of power that pulled her up and up toward the next quartet.
They passed heavy steel cables and then the broad cross-shaped spokes of a town's pinwheel. Up close the brightly colored sails were torn and patched. In far too little time the bike was rising under another town, the long slot of a jet entrance visible overhead. Venera's flyer expertly inched them into a perfect tangent course, and it seemed as if the town's curving underside simply reached out and settled around them. Her flyer shut down the engine and held up a hook, clipping it to an overhead cable just as they began to fall again. And there they were, hanging in a gallery almost identical to the one they just left. A palace footman ran up and began winching them away from the slot. They had arrived.
Venera dismounted and staggered back a few steps. Her legs had turned to jelly. Her servant swung off the back of the bike as though nothing had
just happened. He grinned happily at her. "It's a good beast," he said.
"Well." She cast about for something to say. "I'm glad we're paying you enough that you can afford it."
"Oh, I never said I could afford it."
She frowned, and led the way out of me gallery. From here she knew the stairs and corridors to take to reach Slipstream's strategic command office. Her husband, Admiral Fanning, was tied up in meetings there, but he would see her, she knew. She thought about how much she would tell him regarding her spy network. As little as possible, she decided.
At the entrance to the office she turned and looked frankly at the servant. "This is as far as you can go. Wait down at the docks, you can run me back home the same way you brought me."
He looked disappointed. "Yes, ma'am."
"Hmm. What's your name, anyway?"
"Griffin, ma'am. Hayden Griffin."
"All right. Remember what I said, Griffin. Don't talk about the photos to anyone." She waggled a finger at him, but even though her head was pounding she couldn't summon any anger at the moment. She turned and gestured for the armed palace guard to open the giant teak doors.
As she walked away she thought of the beautiful freedom Griffin must have in those moments when he flew alone. She'd caught a glimpse of it when she rode with him. But entangled as she was in a life of obligation and conspiracy, it could never be hers.
* * * * *
HAYDEN WATCHED HER go in frustration. So close! He'd gotten to within a few yards of his target today. And then to be thwarted at the very entrance to the command center. He eyed the palace guard, but he knew he couldn't take the man and the guard was eyeing him back. Reluctantly, Hayden turned and headed back toward the docks.
He'd nearly blown it picking up those pictures. Obviously he'd underestimated Lady Fanning. He wouldn't do it again. But since he had been assigned to her, he hadn't been able to get anywhere near Fanning himself. If she liked him, though…
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