The engine caught under him and suddenly Hayden had a new sense of up and down: down was behind the bike, up ahead of it—and it was all he could do to dangle from its side as it accelerated straight into the nearby cloud.
His nose banged painfully against the bike's saddle. Icy mist roared down his body, threatening to strip his clothes away. A second later he was in clear air again. He squinted up over the nose of the jet, trying to get a sense of where he was.
Glittering arcs of crystal flickered in the light of rocket-trails: Aerie's new sun loomed dead ahead. Jet contrails had spun a thick web around the translucent sphere and its flanks were already holed in several places. Its delicate central machinery could not be replaced; those systems came from the principalities of Candesce, thousands of miles away, and used technologies that no one alive could replicate. Yet two Slipstream cruisers had stopped directly over the sun and were veiling themselves in smoke as they launched broadside after broadside into it.
Mother would have been topping up the fuel preparatory to evacuating her team. Nobody could enter the sun while it was running; you had to give it just enough fuel for its prescribed burn. The engineers had planned a two minute test for today, providing there was enough cloud to block the light in the direction of Slipstream.
A body tumbled past Hayden, red spheres of blood following it. He noticed abstractly that the man wore the now-banned, green uniform of Aerie. That was all he had time for, because any second now he was going to hit the sun himself.
Bike Number Two had never been designed to operate in open air. It was a heavy-duty fanjet, powerful enough to pull the whole town into a faster spin. It had handlebars because they were required by law, not because anybody had ever expected to use them. And it was quickly accelerating to a point where Hayden was going to be ripped off of it by the airstream.
He kicked out his legs, using them to turn his whole body in the pounding wind. That in turn ratcheted the handlebars a notch to the left; then another. Inside the bike, vanes turned in the exhaust stream. The bike began—slowly—to bank.
The flashing geodesics of the sun shot past close enough to touch. He had a momentary glimpse of faces, green uniforms and rifles, and then he looked up past the bike again and saw the formation of Slipstream jets even as he shot straight through them. A few belated shots followed him but he barely heard them over the roar of the engine.
And now dead ahead was another obstacle, a spindle-shaped battleship this time. Behind it was another bank of clouds, then the indigo depths of Winter that lurked beyond all civilization.
Hayden couldn't hold on any longer. That was all right, though, he realized. He made sure the jet was aimed directly at the battleship, then pulled up his legs and kicked away from it.
He spun in clear air, weightless again but traveling too fast to breathe the air that tore past his lips. As his vision darkened he turned and saw Bike Number Two impact the side of the battleship, crumpling its hull and spreading a mushroom of flame against the metal plates. He couldn't tell whether it had penetrated the ship's armor.
With the last of his strength Hayden went spread-eagled to maximize his wind resistance. The world disappeared in silvery gray as he punched his way into the cloud behind the battleship. A flock of surprised fish flapped away from his plummeting fall. He waited to freeze, lose consciousness from lack of air, or hit something.
None of that happened, though his fingers and toes were going numb as he gradually slowed. The problem now was that he was soon going to be stranded inside a cloud, where nobody could see him. With the din of the battle going on, nobody would hear him either. People had been known to die of thirst after being stranded in empty air. If he'd been thinking, he'd have brought a pair of flapper fins at least.
He was just realizing that anything like that would have been torn off his body by the airstream, when the cloud lit up like the inside of a flame.
He put a hand up and spun away from the light but it was everywhere, diffused through the whole cloud. In seconds a pulse of intense heat welled up and to Hayden's astonishment, the cloud simply vanished, rolling away like a finished dream.
The heat continued to mount. Hayden peered past his fingers, glimpsing a silhouetted shape between him and a blaze of impossible light. The Slipstream battleship was dissolving, the flames enfolding it too dim to be seen next to the light of Aerie's new sun.
Though he was slowing, Hayden was still falling away from the battle. This fact saved his life, as everything else in the vicinity of the sun was immolated in the next few seconds. That wouldn't matter to his mother: she and all the other defenders were already dead, killed in the first seconds of the sun's new light. They must have lit the sun rather than let Slipstream have it as a prize.
The light reached a peak of agony and abruptly faded. Hayden had time to realize that the spherical blur flicking out of the orange afterglow was a shockwave, before it hit him like a wall.
As he blacked out he spun away into the blue-gray infinity of Winter, beyond all civilization or hope.
* * * *
2
How miserable, how abandoned.
The feelings lit again as Lady Venera Fanning entered the tiled gallery separating her chambers from the offices of Slipstream's admiralty. The headache wasn't so bad today but her fingers still sought out the small scar on her jaw as she entered the echoing room. A lofty, pillared space, the hall ran almost the entire width of the palace townwheel; she couldn't avoid traversing it several times a day. Every time she did she relived the endless time after the bullet hit, when she'd lain here on the floor expecting to die. How miserable, how abandoned.
This was a cold place. The moaning of the wind from outside was the only sound except for her clicking footsteps, and that of the man behind her.
She would never enter the hall alone again. She knew it signaled weakness to everyone around her, but she needed to hear the servant's footsteps behind her here, even if she wouldn't look him in the eye and admit her feelings.
While that damnable hall brought back the memories whenever she entered it, Venera hadn't had the place demolished and replaced as her sisters would have. At least, she would not do that until the pain that radiated up her temples morning, noon, and night was ended. And the doctors merely exchanged their heavy-lidded glances whenever she demanded to know when that would be.
Venera flung back the double doors to the admiralty and was assailed by noise and the smells of tobacco, sweat, and leather. Right in the doorway four pages of mixed gender were rifling a file cabinet, their ceremonial swords thrust out and clashing in unconscious battle. Venera stepped adroitly around them and sidled past two red-faced officers who were bellowing at one another over a limp sheet of paper. She dodged a book trolley, its driver invisible behind the stacks of volumes teetering atop it, and in three more steps she entered the admiralty's antechamber, there to behold the bedlam of an office gearing up for war.
The antechamber was separated into two domains by a low wooden barrier. On the left was a waiting area, bare except for several armchairs reserved for elderly patrons. On the right, rows of polished wooden tables were manned by clerks who processed incoming reports. The clerks passed updates to a small army of pages engaged in rolling steep ladders up and down between the desks. They would periodically stop, crane their necks upwards, then one would clamber up a ladder to adjust the height or relative position of one of the models that hung like a frozen flock of fish over the clerks’ heads. Two ship's captains and an admiral stood among the clerks, as immobile as if stranded by the hazard of the whizzing ladders.
Venera strolled up to the rail and rapped on it smartly. It took a while before she was noticed, but when she was, a page abandoned his ladder and raced over to bow.
“May I have the key to the lady's lounge, please?” she asked. The page ducked his head and ran to a nearby cabinet, returning with a large and ornate key.
Venera smiled sweetly at him; the smile slipped as a pulse of
agony shot up from her jaw to wrap around her eyes. Turning quickly, she stalked past the crowding couriers and down a rosewood-paneled corridor that led off the far side of the antechamber. At its end stood an oak door carved with bluejays and finches, heavily polished but its silver door-handle tarnished with disuse.
The servant made to follow her as she unlocked the door. “Do you mind?” she asked with a glower. He flushed a deep pink, and only now did Venera really notice him; he was quite young, and handsome. But, a servant.
She shut the door in his face and turned with her hands on her hips. “Well?” she said to the three men who awaited her, “what have you learned?"
“It seems you were right,” said one. “Capper, show the mistress the photos."
The lounge's floors were smothered in deep crimson carpet, its walls of paneled oak so deeply varnished as to be almost black. There were no windows, only gaslights in peach-colored sconces here and there. While there were enough chairs and benches for a dozen ladies to wait in while others used the two privies, Venera had never encountered another here. It seemed she was the only wife in the admiralty who ever visited her husband at work.
The place smelled of blood. A high-backed chair had been dragged into the center of the room and in it a young man in flying leathers was now weakly rifling through an inner pocket of his jacket. His right leg was thickly bandaged, but blood was seeping through and dripping on the carpet, where it disappeared in the red pile.
“That looks like a main line you've cut there,” said Venera with a professional narrowing of the eyes. The youth grinned weakly at her. The second man scowled as he tightened a tourniquet high on the flyer's thigh. The third man watched this all indifferently. He was a mild-looking fellow with a balding head and the slightly pursed lips of someone more used to facing down sheets of paper than other people. When he smiled at all, Venera knew, Lyle Carrier lifted his lips and eyebrows in a manner that suggested bewilderment more than humor. She had decided that this was because other people's emotions were meaningless abstractions to him.
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 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. The leather-suited spy was unconscious and his attendant was looking worried.
“Get him out of here,” she said, gesturing to the servant's door at the back of the lounge. “We'll need to get a full deposition from him later.” Capper was roused enough to lean on the shoulder of his attendant and they staggered out of the room. Venera perched 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 me, 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 shado
ws, 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 thing. They should be more professional.
A page jostled Venera and the photos fell out of her purse. She laid a back-handed 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 way towards the stairs. Cold air wafted down from the stairs leading 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.
Analog SFF, November 2005 Page 2
