Analog SFF, March 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  —And everything spun and hit at him, walls furniture the men rebounding with the shock of a tremendous explosion. Half deafened, Chaison shook himself and grabbed for a handhold, abstractly noticing that the bridge doors were twisted, half ajar. Slew's not going to fix this one, he thought.

  He struggled back to the commander's chair. The pilot was unconscious and Travis was shoving him aside to reach the controls. Chaison grabbed the speaking tube and shouted “Report, report!”

  A thin voice on the other end said, “They're dead.”

  “Who's dead?”

  “The ... everybody that was in the hangar, sir.”

  “Is this Martor? What about the cutters?”

  “One's intact, sir.” There was a pause. “I'll take it out, sir.”

  Chaison turned away for a moment, unable to speak. “Son,” he said, “just aim it and jump clear. Make sure you've got a pair of wings and just get out of here. That's an order.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Travis had the ship under control and was banking tightly to avoid a fusillade of shells from the dreadnaught. “Sir, here comes the rest of Falcon,” he said tightly. Chaison glanced at the portholes and saw a white sky crowded with ships. Just then a large shape obscured the view: the explosives-laden cutter had soared ahead of the Rook and was curving down towards the iron monstrosity.

  Chaison couldn't look away. Tracer rounds and the shocked air of shell fire outlined the cutter; he saw pieces of its armor shattering and flying away. Then it was suddenly not there, and Chaison blinked away after-images of a flash that must have been visible for miles.

  The roar overtook the Rook, shaking the hull and starring another porthole. Chaison simply stared at the absence and coiling serpents of smoke. He felt a crush of grief and for a few moments was paralyzed, unable to think.

  But everything rested on his decision. He shook off his feelings and turned to Travis.

  “Prepare to scuttle the ship,” he said.

  19

  Hayden tied the last of the sun components into the cargo net. His hands were shaking. As he fumbled with the cords, he noticed his shadow, hunched and vague, wavering against the grey wall of the visitor's station. He looked over in time to see the metal flowers of Candesce's strange garden closing. Silhouetting one of them was an orange glow that hadn't been there a minute ago.

  “Oh no.” He finished the knot hastily and climbed back along the cargo net's cables to the open entrance to the station. The bike was tethered there; it too had a shadow—no, two shadows. He looked down and saw that a second sun was opening its glowing eye.

  He'd thrown Carrier's body into the open air. His story was going to be that the Gehellens had come back and there'd been a fight at the entrance. The attackers had been driven off but Carrier was killed. He had rehearsed his story over and over during the past hour, while he struggled against the pain of his wounds to fill the nets with sun parts. As he'd done so he'd found himself crying.

  He no longer wondered at such tears. As he rehearsed the lie about the Gehellens, Hayden found himself wondering whether he was reluctant to tell the truth to Venera, or Aubri, or himself. Either way, he felt no satisfaction at Carrier's death. The only thing he was proud of was his attempt to talk the man out of attacking him.

  So in his head he began to rehearse a second story. This one would not be told until he was an old man, if he got things right. It began and ended with, “Carrier was the last man I killed, or ever wanted to kill.”

  Once inside the station he climbed quickly from strap to strap, heading for the inner chambers. “We have to go!” he called as he went. “Come on, the suns are waking up!”

  Nobody answered. What were Venera and Aubri up to? From his own experience with the wish-mirror, he'd seen that once you set something in motion here, you could pretty much ignore it and go on about your business. Aubri shouldn't have had to nurse Candesce after shutting down its defenses against Artificial Nature.

  “Aubri! Venera! Where are you? We have to leave, now!”

  He heard a thump from somewhere ahead. Hayden ducked under and over walls, passing through several rooms that seemed familiar. Then, as he was gliding across a half-lit room filled with hammocks and rest nooks, he heard a woman's voice growl a single word:

  “Bitch!”

  More thumps and a gasp from the other side of this wall. Hayden perched there for a moment, blinking, then swung down to climb into the next room. He stopped, straddling the wall.

  Aubri Mahallan and Venera Fanning clung to straps on opposite walls. Both women had swords in their hands, and those swords were pointed at one another. Venera's face was twisted into a rictus of fury, muscles jumping in her famous jaw.

  “Turn it on!” Venera screamed. “Turn it back on!”

  Aubri silently shook her head.

  Hayden somersaulted into the room. “What's going on?” He made to join Aubri, but she dove out of his way.

  “Stay back,” she murmured.

  “Stay...? What's going on?” By now, he was too tired and in too much pain to catch her.

  Venera pointed to where her special indicator lamp tumbled in mid-air, its light glowing steadily. “She won't turn it back on. Candesce's defenses! She was willing to turn them off all right, but she won't bring them back. She's opened the gates to her friends from beyond Virga.”

  “Aubri?” He stared at her, but she wouldn't return his gaze.

  He should have figured this out. He realized now that she had given him enough clues over the past week—but he'd been so consumed with the idea of finding components for a new Aerie sun that he hadn't thought through the things Aubri had told him. She had told him that she had not been sent to Virga to enter Candesce; but in the same breath she had told him that the assassin-thing coiled inside her was listening for any hint that she might reveal her true mission. Her denial should have tipped him off; but he hadn't been smart enough to see it.

  “I'm sorry,” she said in a low, shaking voice. “If I turn it back on, I'll die.”

  “You were sent to bring Artificial Nature to Virga,” he said. “That's what you couldn't tell me.” She nodded.

  Hayden's thoughts were racing. Should he try to stop this? Or should he side with Aubri? “What happens now?” he asked her. “When you let them in ... What are you letting in?”

  Now she looked at him, her expressive features crumpled into sadness. “A trillion ghosts will come first,” she said. “The disembodied AIs and post-humans will flood into Virga, make it their playground. They're hungry for resources. They'll transform everything they touch—and everybody. When that transformation happens, your reality will fade away. The walls of Virga will disappear. The suns, the darkness, the towns and ships ... They'll be erased by virtual realms. Glorious beauty, places like Heaven brought into being around every man, woman and child. Whatever you imagine will come to pass. Everything and anything, except Virga itself. Everything you knew will be gone, replaced by fantasies made real.”

  Venera shuddered. “We won't survive it,” she said.

  Aubri shook her head. “Not as you are now,” she said. “Whatever your hopes and dreams were, they're obsolete now. You'll need new ones. New reasons to live.” He mouth twisted in grief. “And that's the one thing the system can't make for you.”

  “No!” Venera launched herself across the room. Before Hayden could reach them the two women were twisting in the air, Venera slashing madly at Aubri who tried to parry. Hayden cried out as he saw Venera's sword slide into the muscle under Aubri's left shoulder.

  Hayden's lover, the Rook's armorer, tumbled backwards streaming blood.

  He screamed and jumped, too late, as Venera cursed and kicked off from Aubri's limp body. Venera reached a corner and ducked around the offset panels with one wide-eyed look back at Hayden.

  He wrapped his arms around Aubri and turned so his own back took their impact on the far wall. She was jerking in his grasp, twists of blood reaching out of her with each breath.r />
  “I'm—sorry,” she gasped. “I was too afraid.”

  “Hush,” he said, smoothing back her hair. “It's not your fault. It's theirs for making you and then condemning you for being who you are.”

  She closed her eyes and whimpered. “Hush,” he said again, holding her close.

  “No.” She pushed against him. “No! Let me go. Get me to the, the wish-mirror.” She pointed at a glassy rectangle on the ceiling.

  “Stay still.”

  “No. Let—” She writhed in his arms, turning to glare at him.

  “Let me beat them.”

  * * * *

  The bridge was full of drifting grit and the stench of smoke. Deafening explosions rattled the beams; all the portholes had shattered. Chaison clung to the arms of his chair and glared out into gleaming sunlight as the Rook came apart around him.

  “Ready, sir!” Travis was holding onto a pipe with his toes, one-armed as he was with his hand in a sling; his free hand was poised over the scuttling console.

  Chaison felt infinitely weary. It wasn't as though it mattered whether Falcon Formation got its hands on the radar sets. There wasn't anything they could do with them. Assuming, of course, that Aubri Mahallan did her job. The idea that she might not seemed distantly worrying, but he couldn't bring himself to focus on abstractions. Instead, he frowned past the jagged glass rimming the porthole, at the obstinately solid silhouette of the dreadnaught that was even now turning to aim its biggest guns at the Rook.

  All I wanted, he thought with an ironic smile, was to get rid of that thing.

  As the dreadnaught turned it exposed the dented portion of hull where something had collided with it. Sunlight angled around the dark hull and Chaison saw that the ship's armor had split at the bottom of that dent; there was a three-sided hole there.

  “Wait a second, Travis,” he said. Chaison frowned, then reached for the speaking tube.

  “Rocket batteries one and two, are you there?” he shouted.

  “Y-yes, sir. What do you want us to do, sir?”

  “Don't bail out,” he said. “You'll be shot to pieces in open air. I have a plan. Load the racks and get ready.”

  “Sir!”

  He turned to Travis, who was watching him with a raised eyebrow. The radar man and the semaphore team were also staring. “Get to the helm,” he told Travis. “We've still got power. We're going to ram her.”

  “Ah. I see.” Travis looked faintly disappointed. Chaison had to laugh.

  “No, you don't see,” he said. “We're going to ram her there.” He pointed. Travis began to smile.

  The Rook ducked out of the path of the big guns, angling up and shooting straight at the line of Falcon Formation battleships that was bearing down on her. They were momentarily safe since the ships would not want to miss Rook and hit the dreadnaught.

  The Rook groaned as Travis spun them around and lined up on the dreadnaught. “They're going to get at least one good shot at us, sir,” he said.

  Chaison shrugged. “Have you got a better idea?”

  Travis didn't answer, but merely pushed the control levers forward. Chaison heard the distant engines whine towards full power.

  “If you do want to bail out,” he said to the semaphore team and the radar man, “now would be the time to do it.”

  Nobody moved.

  “All right then.”

  Holed, dripping splinters and chunks of armor, the Rook accelerated for the last time. The air it crossed was layered with smoke and debris, the bodies of men, and unexploded ordnance. Chaison watched it all pass in disgust. How pointless. He wasn't sure whether it was Falcon's invasion that he meant, or his own attempt to stop it.

  “Brace for impact!” He strapped himself in and spun the chair around. It was designed to handle collisions like this; the Rook, like her sister ships, had a substantial ram on her prow. She never intended to ram something as big as a town, though. This whole gambit might just provide a good laugh to the Falconers, if Rook simply splatted against the dreadnaught's skin like a bug on a porthole.

  He closed his eyes, and thought of the home he would never see again.

  The impact, when it came, was surprisingly gentle. A vast grinding sound filled Chaison's ears and the ship shuddered and bucked. Then it eased to a stop. In the swaying light of the gas lamp, he met Travis's eyes and grinned.

  “Let's see where we are.” The portholes were blocked by wreckage. Both men jumped over to the bridge doors and Travis flung them open. Chaison gasped at what he saw.

  The Rook was holed in dozens of places. Its interior was a shambles, with dead men and parts of men, tangled coils of rope, broken bulkheads and spars thrusting every which way. Way down past where the hangar had been, streams of sunlight made bluish shafts across the space. Nearer, the holes in the hull revealed only darkness.

  “We're jammed inside it,” Travis said wonderingly. “More than half way.”

  Chaison nodded. “That's what I had in mind.” He clambered through the wreckage, heading for the rocketeers who huddled next to their bent racks. “Ready to fire, men?” They stared at him.

  Chaison laughed recklessly. “Come on!” he shouted. “This is the stuff of legends! We're going to rake this bastard of a ship with a barrage that'll tear it to pieces—and we're going to do it from the inside! ”

  Still they hesitated—and then a loud voice burst out, "What are you waiting for? “

  It was Slew, smoke stained and trailing a broken chain from his wrist as he flew up from the aft. Beside him, helping him maneuver past the wreckage, was Ambassador Reiss. Both men had swords in their hands; both looked grimly determined.

  “You heard the admiral!” yelled Slew. The men looked at each other, then leaped to their posts. Already Chaison could hear gunshots, and just behind Slew soldiers in Falcon Formation uniforms began pushing their way through gaps in the hull. The irate crew. Well, they were too late.

  “Reiss, Slew, behind you. You men—fire!”

  The port and starboard racks unleashed their rockets and the Rook's hull tried to collapse as everything outside blew up. Some of the rockets must have found their way down long passageways, exploding hundreds of yards away. Some didn't get ten feet. But the dreadnaught had never been designed to withstand this kind of attack. As the rocketeers cleared their tubes and made to load another round, the Rook was hammered by new explosions, much bigger than those they had caused. Now the hull really was collapsing, Travis grabbing at a stanchion, Reiss and Slew's faces lit with surprise and all of them disappearing into bright sunlight as the ship sheared in two and the sky filled with gouts of smoke and flying darkness.

  Somehow, Chaison had caught a rope and found himself dangling over the infinite airs of Virga, watching while the aft half of the dreadnaught fell away and wrenched itself to pieces with explosion after explosion. Mesmerized, he didn't look away from the sight until he felt the rope being tugged from the other end. He glanced up.

  The shattered half hull of the Rook still stuck out of the fore half of the dreadnaught, right at the spot where the great ship had been torn in two. Smoke billowed out of the forward section but it hadn't exploded. Three Falcon airmen were hauling in the rope Chaison held, murder in their eyes. Of the rest of his crew, there was no sign.

  “Gentlemen,” Chaison said as he held out his hand, “meet the man who beat you.”

  * * * *

  Venera watched Hayden Griffin weep. A fluttering sense of disquiet plucked at her; she fought against it fiercely.

  Aubri Mahallan moved feebly in the young man's arms, gesturing at the wish-mirror in front of which they floated. Venera clutched her sword in sweating hands and wondered why Lyle had not shown up yet.

  The indicator light for Candesce's defenses still spun lazily in the air. Without fanfare, it suddenly went out. Venera frowned at it. Had its little battery died, or ... She looked at Aubri Mahallan.

  The woman's limbs drifted free now, and her head slowly tilted forward. Griffin gave one last
wracking sob and then spun to look at the wish-mirror. It was a rectangle of white light now, all details washed away by the awakening suns.

  Griffin turned again, and now he looked straight at Venera. Despite herself, she flinched from his glare. But all he said was, “We have to go.”

  The words made no sense at all; Venera could barely believe she'd heard them. “I killed your woman,” she said. “If I come near you, you'll kill me.”

  “No,” he said.

  She sneered. “Oh? Where's Lyle?” Griffin looked away, and Venera's heart sank. “He's not coming, is he? You boys finally settled your little dispute, whatever it was?”

  He gathered Mahallan's body in his arms again, and kicked off towards an open corner. “What choice did I have?” she called out after him. “You know what she tried to do!”

  “Shut up,” he said without looking back. “Just shut up.”

  Venera was furious and, yes, scared; but she wasn't going to back down. Not to this servant. “So strand me, or shoot me,” she cried. “I did what I had to do.”

  Now, just before disappearing around the corner, he did look back. He looked sad, and puzzled. “Venera, I'm not going to kill you,” he said. “There's room on the bike. Come with me.”

  “That would mean trusting you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Venera laughed, and hunkered down a little more in the shadows. “I've never done that in my life,” she said. “I'm not about to start now.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said with broken weariness. Then he was gone.

  Venera remained where she was for long seconds. Outside, Candesce was rousing itself to full power. She couldn't feel the rain of invisible particles that Mahallan had said would flood this place during the day, but she imagined them like virulent poison seeping through the walls. Even if the heat didn't kill her...

  But trust a man whose lover she had just killed? The idea was insane. Trust Griffin? Trust anyone? There were fools who did it and survived somehow. She could not be so lucky, she knew.

  Venera fingered her jaw angrily. She would die here, miserable, abandoned.