Analog SFF, March 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

The way to the treasure lies through the inner shell of nations that surround Candesce, the giant, self-maintaining artificial sun at the center of Virga. The expeditionary force is stopped at the dusky border of one such nation by powerful battle cruisers. Foreign warships are not accepted lightly into the ancient, decadent societies that bask in the undying light of the sun of suns. The ships are escorted—as “guests"—to the capital of the nation of Gehellen. The place seems strange and repellant to the people of the outer nations; there are few town wheels here. Most of the people appear to live in perpetual weightlessness and consequently have developed into impossibly delicate, spidery beings that scuttle along the ropes holding the thousands of buildings of the city together. Only the military, and the rich and powerful can afford gravity here.

  While their petition to travel through the nation is considered, the captains and officers of the expeditionary force are invited to attend a ball hosted by the local Slipstream ambassador, Richard Reiss. Aubri begs off, claiming that she needs to visit the local library to research Anetene. As a foreigner from beyond Virga, hence something of a curiosity, she is allowed to wander as she pleases. Reluctantly, she employs Hayden to transport her in his sidecar.

  At the library Aubri and Hayden learn that Anetene's treasure is hidden somewhere in a sargasso called Leaf's Choir. Sargassos are forests that have hyper-oxygenated their interiors and subsequently caught fire. Leaf's Choir was one of the largest forests in Virga; all that is left now, after the holocaust several centuries ago, is a sphere of charred wood and ash fifty miles across.

  That black ball is now tethered at the edge of Gehellen's territory; they are slowly mining it for its charcoal and other resources, but it's slow work. There is no breathable air inside the sphere. But Aubri's map says that deep inside it somewhere is the hidden treasure of the pirate king.

  Since they have been forced together and are away from the Rook, Hayden and Aubri start talking again. He decides he can trust her, and tells her his story—the complete story this time, including why he came to work in the Fanning household. Aubri is appalled at his nihilism and tries to tell him that the world is a better place, that there's much to live for. But her own conviction seems weak, and at last she admits that she herself is in Virga against her will. She committed crimes against the systems of Artificial Nature, and in penance she has been sent into Virga on a mission whose details she is afraid—or ashamed—to reveal. This mission is separate from the one the Fannings are on, but is connected. She and they have one goal in common: to find a way into the protected, automated heart of Candesce.

  As they are talking, Aubri realizes that someone is following them. It's one of the pirates who boarded the Rook, and when he realizes they've spotted him, he calls for the police. A chase ensues—pirates and constables after Aubri and Hayden, who nevertheless succeed in getting back to Hayden's bike. Realizing that the pirates—who know about Anetene—have made some sort of deal with the Gehellen government to share Anetene's treasure, they burst in on Admiral and Lady Fanning's cocktail party, just as the Gehellen secret service are closing in on the Slipstream officers.

  The officers now find that they must fight their way back to their ships. Hayden takes up a sword along side Admiral Fanning and they make their way back to the Rook, and cast off. Pursued by Gehellen's navy as well as the remnants of the pirate fleet, they strike out at a dangerous velocity through the crowded air of Gehellen. Great piloting skill is needed to get them to the black claw-like fronds of Leaf's Choir but once there, they plunge into the dead air without hesitation. The six ships of the expeditionary force were refitted as Winter ships—each has an internal oxygen supply, which should last several days.

  Using the map that Venera retrieved from the tourist station, they make their way through the nightmarish environment of the sargasso of Leaf's Choir. Nothing lives here except fungi and bacteria; the dead charred branches of the trees make an impenetrable veil over the light of Candesce. Here and there in the darkness they glimpse the ghostly outlines of former towns or farms, burned in place and now tombs for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people. It is dangerous to linger here; even someone who knew that the treasure trove lay within the sargasso could never find it unless they knew exactly where it was.

  In the dark tension of the journey, Hayden and Aubri come together in her quarters. They make love; but though she obviously finds his presence healing, she will still not tell Hayden what her mission in Virga is. She only reveals that unless she fulfils her part of the bargain, she will be killed by the authorities that sent her here.

  After two days inching through the black ruins, the lookout spots something gleaming in the Rook's headlight. Nestled among the autumnal leaves of the sargasso's unburnt heart is their goal: the treasure of Anetene.

  And now the conclusion...

  * * * *

  15

  The ancient ship hung in the center of a cave of leaves six hundred feet in diameter. In the dancing light of lanterns waved by the gang of red-suited sargasso specialists, Venera could see occasional flashes of the ropes that suspended the old corsair like a fly in a spider's web.

  “They're taking too long,” she grated. “What's the hold-up?”

  Her husband rested his hand lightly on her shoulder and peered out the porthole. “They're testing for booby-traps, dear. On my orders.”

  “And then we go over?”

  “I go over. To find the box.”

  “We go. This expedition was my idea. The box was my discovery. You can't let me miss out on the final moment.”

  He sighed. “Have you ever worn a sargasso suit?”

  “Have you?”

  One of the little figures out there was waving its lantern in a strange pattern. The others were clustered around a dark opening in the side of the ship. The craft was smaller than the Rook, and unornamented; but the lines seemed archaic, even to Venera's untrained eye. “What's he doing?” She pointed.

  “Signaling the all-clear. Apparently Anetene decided the sargasso was a big enough booby-trap all by itself.” The little figures began disappearing one by one into the dark hatch. Little glints of light on the hull revealed portholes hidden in shadow around the curve of the ship.

  “It'll be there,” she said confidently. Either that, or she'd have to find a new home. Rush would no longer be a suitable dwelling once Falcon Formation took over.

  Venera tried to pretend that this would be a mere matter of convenience. But she kept imagining herself returning to her father's court with her exiled husband. They would eat him alive, those back-biting courtiers, the kohl-painted ladies with their poisoned hairpins, the gimlet-eyed men with their ready poniards. Chaison would be used as sport by the jaded or the marginalized, and he would have no one to defend him.

  It would surely be a personal humiliation for her, if he were killed.

  “Well, if it's safe, let's go then,” she said; but a commotion from the chart room distracted Chaison. Venera scowled at him as he turned away.

  “It's Gridde!” Travis was waving frantically at the admiral. “He's collapsed.”

  Chaison dove for the doorway. “Was it bad air?”

  “I don't think so. Exhaustion, more like.”

  Venera followed the whole bridge staff back to the map room. This was a tiresome interruption, but she had to be supportive of her husband. She affected a look of concern as she entered the room. The air in here was close, stinking, but then so was the rest of the ship by now. Gridde hung limply in midair, tendrils of white hair haloing his head.

  “I got you there,” he whispered as Chaison moved to hold him by the shoulders. The old man's face quirked into a half-smile, though his eyes were half-closed. “Rest now.”

  “Slipstream will survive, because of you,” said Chaison.

  Gridde's head rose and his eyes focused on the admiral. He managed a weak laugh. “Don't give me platitudes, boy. Just make sure those damn fools in the academy hear about this. I proved it.” He beg
an to gasp. “Old ways—better than—gel charts...”

  “Get the surgeon!” cried Chaison, but it was too late. Gridde shook and sighed, and then went still.

  Some of the bridge staff began to weep. Venera crossed her arms impatiently, but there was nothing she could do but wait. The brief agony of military grief would burn itself out in a few minutes and then everyone would get back to work.

  They had come too far to let one more death stop them now.

  * * * *

  Her breath and the suit pumps roared in Venera's ears. Every few minutes a loud bell sounded and she had to reach down to wind the clockwork mechanism that ran the pumps. She could barely see out the brass helmet's little window. The unfamiliar oilcloth sack of the suit felt like prison walls against her skin, its chafing creating a subliminal anxiety that fed back with weightlessness and the dark to make her jaw throb.

  She didn't care. Venera was in a state of rapture, gazing into the most wondrous place she had ever seen.

  The others’ bull's-eye lanterns sent visible shafts of blue light up and down, flicking from side to side—each darting motion lifting a cascade of sparkling reflections and refractions from the contents of Anetene's treasure trove.

  Venera had seen clouds rub past one another and throw up a cyclone; at either end these looked like tubes full of turbulent snatches of vapor. The interior of the treasure ship was like that—except that here, it wasn't clouds that formed the spiral down which she gazed. It was jewelry, gold coin, faience, and ivory figurines by the thousand.

  The nets that had once held the treasure to the walls had decayed over the centuries, and so every week or two a gem or coin would disengage from its neighbors and drift into the ship's central space. Once there, it would be caught up in the almost imperceptible rotation in which everything inside Virga participated—something to do with orbits and tides, that was all she knew of that. But the vortex had grown and remained stable for centuries, the drift of its objects slower than a minute hand but inexorable. The spiral pattern, so delicate, was now being erased by the blundering passage of treasure seekers.

  For the moment, though, garnets, emeralds, and rubies made in the fires of Candesce trailed in lines and arcs through the air. Here and there gleamed dry-amber from sargassos on the other side of the world; chains of diamond like runnels of light flashed in her lantern's beam. The currency of two dozen nations sat fixed in air as though in solid glass (the stamped profiles of pilots and kings layered into shadow like a history lesson) among clouds of platinum and buttons of silver. Beneath the ragged netting the hull was still plated with paintings, skyscapes half covering formal portraits whose eyes awoke like a sleeping ghost's when her light touched them. One painting, only one, had broken free, and so it was that at the center of the cyclone stood a tall stern man in dark dress, his black eyes those of a contemptuous father gazing accusingly at the looters. Only the gilt frame surrounding him spoiled the illusion of reality. There was a fresh bullet hole in his chest, put there by the first man of Slipstream to enter the ship.

  They'd be joking about that startled shot for weeks, she was sure.

  Chaison had swum indifferently through the shining constellations and disappeared into the ship's bridge. Venera followed, not without plucking a few choice items from the air on the way.

  Chaison's hand-light floated free in the air, slowly turning to illuminate the fixtures of the old-style, cramped bridge. Venera kept expecting to see skeletons, but there was no evidence of violence here; apparently Anetene had been compulsively neat. In the center of the room was a chart pedestal, and clipped to the top of this was an ivory box, its sides inlaid with fantastical scenes out of mythology: men and women under gravity, riding beasts she remembered were called horses. Chaison's hand hovered over the lid of the box.

  “Oh, just open it!” Of course he couldn't hear her; even to herself, Venera's voice sounded muffled in the suit. She bounced over to grab the box just as Chaison reached down and flipped back the lid. Both of their lanterns lit the contents through the blue air.

  The object was simple, a white cylinder a little longer than her hand with a single black band around its center, and a loop for grasping at one end. It was made of some translucent crystal that made it gather the light mistily. Chaison hesitated again, then grasped the handle and pulled it out.

  He leaned his helmet against hers. “The key to Candesce,” she heard, the distorted words barely audible through the metal. “Just as the old books described.”

  “Let's hope it works,” she said.

  “Candesce still works. Why shouldn't this?” He put it back in the case and closed it. Then he hung there in the air for a while, head down, as if praying.

  Puzzled, Venera touched her helmet to his again. “What's wrong?”

  Did she imagine the sigh or was it real? “I'm just trying to figure out what to do next,” he said. “The Gehellens will be circling Leaf's Choir waiting for us to come out. How are we going to get to Candesce?”

  “You're not one to live in the moment, are you?” she said. It was true she hadn't thought that far ahead, herself. Maybe she should have—for he was right, this was a problem.

  A wide moat of empty air lay between the principalities of Candesce and the sun of suns itself. Venera knew they would have to cross two or three hundred miles of open space to reach the ancient sun. Candesce was so hot that no clouds could persist in this zone, and no living thing nor habitation within a hundred miles. As the battered ships of the expeditionary force crossed this span they would be easy targets for the Gehellen navy.

  “If we send the others out as decoys again, and just take the Rook...”

  His helmet grated against hers as he shook his head. “We'll be seen. Not even a bike could get to Candesce right now.”

  “We'll have to hide, then. Wait them out.”

  “But there's another problem,” he said. “We're almost out of time.”

  “What?”

  “That dreadnought ... Based on the progress your photos showed, it'll be ready to fly by now. And in a few days the Slipstream fleet is going to be thoroughly entangled in the fight with Mavery. If Falcon Formation intends to invade Slipstream, they will be amassing their forces as we speak.”

  Venera scowled at the little box. Their original plan had been to visit Candesce during its night cycle and let Aubri Mahallan work the magic she swore she could perform with the sun of suns. Then they would take the most direct possible course at full speed to Falcon Formation, and the secret shipyard there. Mahallan claimed that she could set a timer on the mechanisms of Candesce that would trigger the correct action after a predetermined number of days and hours.

  “Someone's going to have to stay behind,” she said. “Wait until after our ships have left and the Gehellens have given chase. Then go into the sun.”

  “That's what I'm thinking,” he said. “Mahallan, of course. And someone to keep her in line. Your man Carrier is the natural choice there.”

  “Me,” she said quickly.

  “No, dear, I absolutely—”

  “Why? You think I'm going to be safer on board the Rook when you go into battle against Falcon? Besides, love, this is our plan, yours and mine. Who are we to trust to see it through, if not one another? When you go up against that dreadnought, you need to focus on the task at hand and not worry about whether Mahallan's done her job, or whether Lyle Carrier really is loyal. You need someone you can trust.”

  “And I can trust you.”

  “Why Chaison, that almost sounded like a question.” She laughed and punched him in the arm. “It's the best plan, admit it.”

  He admitted it and they turned to go. As Chaison pulled the ivory box away from its moorings, something small tumbled out. He didn't notice. Venera waved her lamp around until the thing flashed; there it was, twirling away towards a forward porthole. She reached out and snatched it out of the air, then held it up between two fingers.

  It was a ring, a signet made for a ma
n's hand. The stone was opaque blood red and the design was of a horse standing on its back legs. The horse had wings.

  She slipped the ring over the bulky glove of her suit and followed her husband out of the bridge.

  * * * *

  Howls of childish delight echoed through the Rook as a spew of gold and jewelry flew from the wooden airlock door. Moments later a man in a red sargasso suit squeezed out waving his hands over his head. A muffled “unh, unh” sounded from inside his round brass helmet; but nobody was paying any attention to him. Crewmen and officers, the press-ganged and the volunteers, all abandoned civility and leaped on the ricocheting treasure. The man in the suit finally levered off his helmet and yelled, “This is just the dregs, boys! There's tons of it there! Tons!”

  A light hand descended on Hayden's shoulder. “Hey,” said Aubri in his ear. Hayden felt himself flushing, and his heart beat a bit faster.

  “Admiral wants to see you,” she continued. Peering past him, she said, “They look happy, don't they?”

  He had to laugh at the absurd understatement. The men were weeping, fighting over trinkets, screaming, and bouncing off the walls.

  Then her previous words penetrated his consciousness. “Fanning wants to see me?”

  “Yes, he's in the chart room.” She gave him a little push in the lower back and he began to glide through the center of the rioting crewmen.

  He bounced off several people and ducked around the worst of the fighting—just in time, as the airlock opened again and another bag of gold was dumped into the air.

  The forward section of the ship was relatively empty by the time Hayden reached the chart room. He knocked and Fanning's muffled voice said, “Come in.”

  The presence of numerous lanterns did nothing to brighten the can-shaped chamber. To Hayden's surprise, Fanning was alone, hovering with one foot in a strap near the map table. In the dim light he was a study in muted shades, his eyes and the folds of his uniform blended into shadow. He had his arms crossed and seemed to have acquired new lines of care around his eyes and mouth.