Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

24

"YOUR BELOVED ADMIRAL is moving to save his ass," observed Inshiri Ferance. "Panic's never a pretty sight."

Antaea thought she was going to be sick. Since they were hanging well back from the main battle, Inshiri had come out to stand on the prow of the Thistle, holding on to its needle-shaped ram with one hand. The rest of her team was scattered in the air around her, all clutching binoculars and telescopes. While Antaea had tried to stay inside and out of Inshiri's way, Remoran had insisted she be present to observe whenever he was off the bridge. And Inshiri had decided to torment Antaea in tiny ways, apparently to blow off steam.

It was hard to make out the details through a hundred miles of smoke and debris-laden air, but it was clear that the First Line fleet was pulling itself together, returning to the threatening thunderhead shape it had held before Chaison's attack. The flickering orange of combat that had been distributed evenly through that distant smear was collapsing into a ball. Fanning's brave fleet was being routed.

"Just in time," said Jacoby. Candesce's spectrum was lengthening as its component suns shut down.

Some of the delegates who'd been selected to enter Candesce were climbing out of the ship to observe the mayhem for themselves. Remoran himself was here, and other Home Guard leaders; the surprise to Antaea had been the arrival of the outsider, Holon, and some of his compatriots, just prior to the battle. Inshiri was usually careful to behave herself in front of these officials, but her patience--and manners--was wearing thin. "Tell your people to stop messing around and get down here," she said to Remoran. "It's time for us to make our move."

Holon raised a perfect eyebrow. "The Last Line's still in our way," he pointed out. "We don't have a safe corridor."

"Why, my dear Holon, you disappoint me. This was never going to be safe." Inshiri scowled at the sparkling of the exclusion-zone battle. "More importantly, we're all going to run out of fuel or clean air soon. Isn't that true, General Secretary?"

Remoran nodded. "Signal the rest of the insertion group," he told her. "We're going in as soon as the First Line starts to move our way."

The signals were sent, and as Antaea went to reenter the sloop with the others, she could feel the air trembling with the noise of jet engines spinning up. She was one of the last to enter, and found the square of shadow in the hatch a black absence compared with the light of a hundred suns that radiated from the hull.

As she grabbed the edge of the hatch, something tickled the back of her hand. She flicked absentmindedly at it, heard multiple slapping sounds, and looked over to see a bright-spalled bullet hole right next to her index finger. A line of them wandered away across the Thistle's hull. They hadn't been there a moment ago--

Somebody reached out of the hatch and grabbed the lapel of her jacket, hauling her inside, where somebody else was screaming. Little droplets of blood, gorgeous red in the light from the door, spun through the shaft of daylight like minor planets.

Antaea blinked and looked back, in time to catch the head-on view of an incoming missile. It looked just like one of the ones she'd seen in the siege of Stonecloud ...

"Damn it, move!" Jacoby Sarto shifted his grip to her shoulder and pushed her out of the doorway just as another line of bullet holes danced across the wall beside him. He grunted and jerked a foot to his left, while outside, the missile sighed past just a few feet below the sloop.

"Jacoby!" It was her turn to seize him as he drifted toward the starboard bulkhead. The screaming behind them had stopped. Jacoby pawed at his right shoulder with his left hand, wincing. "Wouldn't move, ya damn fool..."

Somebody slammed the hatch just in time as an explosion flashed outside and the portholes all starred. The sloop lurched to port and then began accelerating. Suddenly Antaea and Jacoby were falling aft with a cloud of men, crates, and blood drops. They landed atop one another and none could move for long minutes as the ship jigged and swerved crazily. More explosions chased them.

When the acceleration eased off a bit Antaea got to her knees to find Jacoby unconscious, two dead men next to him, and utter bedlam as crew and Home Guard officials tried to patch the freely bleeding wounds of two more.

"Help us here!" she demanded, but their attention was on their own. With a curse she dragged Jacoby over to the aft hatch and undogged it just as the acceleration finally let up. She bundled him through and closed the door against the noise.

"Venera! Are you okay?"

"Why?" came the dry reply. "Were you taking bets?"

"It's Jacoby, he's been hit."

"Untie me!"

Antaea hesitated for just a second, but Venera said, "Really, where am I going to go?" Antaea quickly unwove the rope and they turned their attention to Jacoby.

As they worked Candesce's light faded from the portholes, but it was still bright: fire and the glow of distant cities competed with the amber of more-distant suns to turn the skies lemon yellow. The Thistle ran ahead of pursuing Last Line gunboats, with a ragged swarm of bikes and light cruisers as escort. The task of every other ship in the armada was now to keep those pursuers from stopping the Thistle's run at Candesce; so as they soared and ducked and powered past debris clouds and tumbling mines, explosions lit the sky to all sides as attackers and defenders formed a vast cylinder around their trajectory. When Antaea had time to notice what was happening, she found herself thinking of the Thistle as a needle, aimed at the arm of a man who was twisting and turning to get out of its way. At any second one of the questing enemy missiles might find them, or a cloud of bullets, or they might hit a shrapnel cloud at three hundred miles per hour. If that happened, they'd be dead before she knew it; so, she kept her eyes on Jacoby, and her hands pressed against the site where the bullet had pierced his shoulder.

* * *

LEAL COULD SEE the ship approaching them in the wavering projection; but so could everybody else. It seemed pointless to throw out her arm and shout "Look out!" when this crash was inevitable. She reached for Keir, though, and he wrapped his arms around the back of her chair as the flame-gouting battleship loomed too large for the projection and the bridge went black.

Nothing happened. Then, just as she was about to relax, a tremendous shuddering took them and she was thrown from side to side like a rag doll. It was like the brief trip from Brink to Serenity, but a hundred times worse.

Light returned and the shuddering stopped. The projection screen showed an orange sky full of tumbling ships. Chaison Fanning leaned forward and said, "Damage report" into a speaking tube.

"Too damned crowded," muttered an admiral. The fleet was being forced into a smaller and smaller volume of air by the First Line fleet, which surrounded them on all sides. The problem was, any ship that stopped moving became an instant target, so they swirled around and around one another, like a school of trapped fish circled by sharks. The sharks had only to dart in and out again, leaving ever more wreckage in their wakes, and that--like the disabled battleship that had just struck the Surgeon a glancing blow--became a further hazard to the defenders.

"Best I can make out," one of the semaphore men was saying, "is that the larger part of the First Line is moving to join Ferance's fleet."

"We held them as long as we could. Come on, Travis," hissed Chaison. "Where's that damned surprise?"

"Any minute now, sir."

"And you," Chaison said to Keir. "You're sure these will give us a miracle?" He held up a piece of paper Keir had brought with him. It was, he'd explained, a gift from the oaks.

"If every ship follows them to the letter, without exception," said Keir. He spoke with complete self-assurance: adult self-assurance. The man whose arm Leal held now bore no resemblance to the boy she'd met in Brink. The change was uncanny.

Chaison chewed his lip as he stared at the paper for the tenth time. Finally he gave a deep sigh, committing himself. "Send this out, coded, with a repeat order. I want every ship in the fleet to have received and be rebroadcasting it in ten minutes. They're to wait for our confirmation to proceed."

Keir grinned and slapped the back of the chair. "You won't regret this, Admiral." Chaison grunted wearily, and Keir turned to Leal. "I have to see if we lost it," he said. She shook her head at him, not in denial, but simply half-drunk with terror and the pounding they were taking.

"Griffin, I'll need you," Keir went on. "If that impact damaged the device--"

Hayden Griffin shook his head distractedly. "Why me? It's your baby."

"No, it's not," Keir insisted. "It's half yours. Admiral?" He looked to Chaison, who waved a hand.

"See to it," he said, and the two made to leave the room. Fanning returned to watching the semaphore men puzzle over the sheet he'd given them. Leal undid her straps and jumped after Keir.

"Where are you going?" she shouted over a sudden shriek of unexpected wind from the opening door. Keir and Hayden both stopped, gaping in unison at the vista that faced them.

A giant bite had been taken out of the ship just aft of the bridge. Where before the hatch had led to a tangle of corridors and boxlike metal rooms, now there was gnarled sparking wreckage to the left, and open sky to the right. Hot air stinking of jet fuel and metal battered at them.

"Close the damned door!" bellowed the admiral, and the two men swung through it. Leal followed them and they slammed and sealed it.

The presence of an open and apparently infinite drop at one hand didn't intimidate Leal, since this was freefall; it was what was in that air that was frightening. Prudence dictated that she collect three pairs of foot-fins from the locker next to the bridge door; then she followed her men along the treacherous wreckage, not looking outward.

"Don't say we lost it, we couldn't have lost it," Keir mumbled as they climbed from one razor-sharp blade of scrap to the next. They passed half a water closet, where an airman with his pants around his knees still sat strapped onto the toilet. Hayden saluted him on the way past, and he returned the salute without turning his eyes from the vista of sky that had unexpectedly interrupted his meditations.

"There!" Hayden pointed ahead, to a curled-in bulkhead surrounding a clutch of catamarans and bombers. It took Leal a minute to recognize the hangar for what it was, and not just because of the turning light and overlapping shadow from hundreds of passing ships. It seemed impossible that the Surgeon could still maneuver, but way down past the peeled-back skin she could see the engines turning on their masts; and airmen were starting to cast lines and netting to one another, making temporary bridges and ladders between fore and aft. She saw a semaphore man take up position by the split hangar, as another one climbed, jacket flapping, toward the bridge.

She finally spared a glance outward, and nearly froze. The sky was jammed with ships, explosions, and spinning bits of metal. The Surgeon's helmsman was sending commands to the engine nacelles by semaphore; somehow, they had miraculously avoided another collision so far, but that luck couldn't last. The First Line was crushing them.

Up ahead, Keir and Hayden had reached something that she at first took to be just another piece of wreckage. Teetering on the edge of open air was a great iron ball, about ten feet across, that had been married by thick cables and two awkward metal girders to an equal-sized blue box that looked like it had been half-melted by a drunken designer. Her boys began clambering over the contraption, shouting questions and answers to one another over the noise of the headwind.

Engineers, she thought, and crawled over to them.

Hayden turned to her, grinning. "Recognize it?" She could barely make out the words over a shattering drone that must have been coming from the engines.

"What, this?" He nodded, expectant. Puzzled, Leal turned to look at the combined devices again. The box looked a lot like things she'd seen in Brink, but it was generic. The ball, on the other hand, was riveted together, dented in places, and streaked with iridescent discolorations, as though it had been put through a fire.

Then she got it. "Your weapon!" The last time she'd seen this sphere, Hayden had been towing it behind a small airship. It had smoked and buzzed, and apparently produced a wall of fierce radio waves that had interfered with the thoughts of the emissary.

The drone was so loud now that she could only catch every second word as he nodded and slapped its side: "Rejigged ... generator ... hundred megawatt..."

He froze suddenly, a look of astonishment on his face. "--Sound!" Keir and Leal looked at him; she had to put her hands over her ears, but leaned close as he yelled, "Heard! Before!"

She and Keir exchanged a glance. Hayden tried one more time.

"Capital! Bug!"

* * *

IT EMERGED FROM a cloud bank bit by bit, something too big to take in without a turn of the head, too distant as yet for its details to be resolved. Candesce was dimming rapidly, and in the smoke and chaos the First Line simply hadn't seen it coming. No capital bug had ever penetrated this close to the sun, after all--but this was no random encounter. Chaison's ships had stolen it from Abyss weeks before; in the run-up to war, nobody had noticed its absence.

It was miles long. An entire ecosystem sheltered behind its vast curving flanks, safe from sharks or any kind of bird--or even Man. The towering horns that festooned its carapace guaranteed that, because the sound they poured out could kill a man from a mile away.

The bug's skin was pockmarked with holes. Ropes trailed from its trumpets, and one or two were still stuffed with foliage and moss. Spiraling around it were the six vessels that had jammed the horns and used rockets and machine guns to herd the beast through the dense skies of the principalities.

It wasn't fast, but it was unstoppable. The bug plowed into the First Line ships surrounding the alliance fleet, scattering them like startled fish. A few battleships tried to shoot out the horns, but they were too far away to be accurate; one that held fast also fell ominously quiet once it got close enough to take its shot. It drifted, touched the skin of the bug, and tore through it like a pen through paper.

The First Line concentrated their fire on the bug, but its Slipstream herders had put enough volleys into its back that it was maddened now. It would not turn away.

Keir caught glimpses of this carnage as the Surgeon maneuvered. The bug was running tangent to the alliance fleet, so the noise stabilized after a few minutes, then began to fall. He was able to listen as Hayden described his one encounter with a bug, years before, on the first occasion when he'd traveled with Chaison Fanning. "But it was finding out that the key to Candesce had been hidden in a bug that reminded us of this one," he explained. "The boy who found it was with a group of treasure hunters who'd figured out how to enter a bug. They shot off half its horns, and it repaired them but not fast enough to keep them from getting in and out. But it could repair them. So why not bring this one back and let it heal in the warm air? Fanning sent Travis to try. I guess it worked."

A heavy cruiser thundered past, less than a hundred feet away. Keir coughed in its choking wake and shouted, "Now if he would only give the flocking order..."

Leal was wide-eyed, and her hair coiled and writhed around her in medusoid tangles. She clung to Griffin's generator, but was clearly paying attention. "What order?"

"That paper I brought the admiral. It--" He blinked at the suddenly changing sky. "I think he gave it."

Far down the bullet-pocked hull of the Surgeon, the great engine nacelles swiveled on their arms and roared into full power. A ripple of stress raced up the skin of the ship and Hayden yelled "Hang on!" as the whole vessel wrenched itself onto a new heading.

With a metallic shriek the generator and his device fell into the shrapnel-ridden sky.

Keir dove after it.

* * *

"SOMETHING'S GONE WRONG." Inshiri had poked her head out the hatch, and as she came back in she had a puzzled expression on her face. "Where's the goddamn First Line?"

She slammed the hatch and turned her best glower on the semaphore team. "Aren't you getting anything?"

The semaphore captain shook his head. "There's too much clutter, sir. It's not just the smoke and wreckage--there's signaling flags floating everywhere. They're pretty much the first thing to get shot off a ship in a firefight."

"What about flares?"

The officer shrugged. "Same problem. The enemy's look just like ours."

Antaea was listening from the aft chamber. Now she felt Jacoby cough weakly and try to sit forward. He was pale, but he was awake, and she and Venera had at least stopped the bleeding. "What's happening?" he asked.

Through the porthole behind her, Antaea could see tracer fire stitching the air from behind. "Another one's on our tail," she pointed out. "Where's the rear guns?"

They all listened for the clatter of the machine gun, but there was only silence. Inshiri also noticed, and came back to point at Antaea. "You, you're a good shot, aren't you? Get back there and take over."

"I don't take orders from you," Antaea replied coolly.

Something pinged through the cabin, making the guardsmen jump in surprise. Jacoby pushed at her weakly. "Probably a good idea," he muttered.

"Oh, hell." Rear gunners always died first. But if somebody didn't go back there, they would get their engines shot off. Then they'd be picked off by whoever happened by.

She clambered back through the hold, cursing the ineptitude of their escort ships. They'd lost more than half already, and the rest were distracted by some heavy Last Line cruisers that had noticed them and fallen into pursuit. It was probably one fanatic on a bike chasing the Thistle now--but if he had a machine gun in his hands, one would be enough.

"Need a hand?" Venera said from right behind her. Antaea jerked and bit off a sharp retort. She shook her head and opened the tail blister.

"Eh, maybe I do after all." Venera looked over her shoulder and whistled softly. It was going to take them a few minutes to get that man out of there.

He'd been good-looking, and he'd had a nice laugh. Antaea felt heartsick as she and Venera hauled his body into the hold. She took the last of their bandages and began wiping down the grips on the machine gun, then the supposedly bulletproof glass of the blister. It stank of sweat and iron in here, but hot air from outside was whistling through the three holes that starred her view.

She swiveled the blister about and squeezed the gun's trigger experimentally. One bullet discharged, then the mechanism froze. "What the--"

"You've got a jam in the feeder," said Venera. "I'll get it." The former princess of Hale kicked the lid off the ammo mechanism under Antaea's feet and began rummaging around in it with bloody fingers. All the while, the Thistle was weaving back and forth in a sickening way, dodging the intermittent stutter of tracers that chased them.

While she waited, Antaea stared at the fading purple backdrop to all the local carnage. "Where's the First Line? And what the hell is that?" A black silhouette, impossibly big, was cutting off the light from one of the principalities' suns. And those sparkles and speckles around it: Could they be ships?

Venera glanced up. "Sometimes, when night falls, Candesce goes walking," she said.

"Shut up."

"It's true. It curls its way through the blackness until it finds some sleeping town or farm. And then it feeds..."

"I'd believe anything at this point," Antaea conceded.

"Try now."

She aimed the guns at the source of the tracer rounds and opened fire. The blast of the weapon was a physical shock, numbing her hands as it leaped about, and deafening her.

She gave Venera the thumbs-up signal and turned her attention to killing their pursuer.

* * *

ADMIRAL FANNING'S SIGNAL had gone out, and for a few minutes, chaos had reigned among the alliance fleet. The ships had been settling into uneasy patterns, barely avoiding one another while dodging missiles from the circling First Line. In the bedlam caused by the capital bug's arrival the bombardment had eased up a bit, and in clean, daylit air, this might have given the alliance a chance to regroup. But it was dark, the air was full of smoke; nobody could see more than half a mile in any direction.

Yet suddenly the ships surrounding Keir and his machine were accelerating, turning--blindly, at first, then in increasingly coordinated patterns. He couldn't see the full fleet, but he could hear the change. Somehow, even with the failure of the semaphore, hundreds of ships' headlamps were beginning to turn as one thing.

"Hey!" He turned and saw two figures, black on black in this light, kicking slowly toward him. "You forgot your fins!" shouted Leal.

He laughed crazily. Keir had never been stranded like this, weightless, yet in hot air and surrounded by infinite possibility in all directions. It was terrifying and intoxicating, yet as they slowly flapped their way up to his machine, Leal Maspeth and Hayden Griffin looked quite at home.

Stretching out, he touched Leal's fingertips, then drew her to him. They kissed, and then she reached to hold one of the loose straps attached to the machine. "Look at them go!" she said in awe. "It reminds me of the fleet leaving Abyss."

"I guess this is just like home for you?" he asked.

"Yes, except for the smoke and heat and the burning ships and all those suns out there like monsters' eyes. Just like home." The fleet's lamps suddenly turned as one, as though from some silent signal. Then they surged into life, pouring intense fire into one flank of the encircling First Line. Cruisers, battleships, bikes, and catamarans surged past the three people clinging to their little island, and for a while they couldn't speak for the thud of explosions and whine of passing jets.

Then, astonishingly, the fleet was accelerating out of the trap the First Line had held them in. A giant hole full of drifting hulks was all that was left of the enemy's inner divisions.

It wasn't exactly silent. The capital bug still screamed its discordant song, but many miles away; and the sound of explosions no longer came with a body-blow of shocked air as emphasis. Compared to what they'd endured for hours now, this air seemed peaceful to Leal.

"Do you think they'll stop them from getting in?" Hayden asked after a while. Keir shrugged.

"If they don't, it's going to be up to us."

Leal watched the retreating flashes and silhouetted gray of the fleet's headlamps. "How did they do that?" she mused.

"The oaks' gift," said Keir. "A set of flocking rules for the fleet. All you have to do is watch what your neighbors are doing, and follow this or that rule depending on the situation. It's an emergent system--creates ordered behavior on the macro scale."

"They're acting like they're all controlled by one mind."

"In a way, they are. But there's nothing magical about it--nothing technological, either, which is the point. Those rules will work here, where all the machineries of the virtuals won't."

"So you're saying we have a chance."

He shrugged, and then, realizing she couldn't see the gesture in the dark, said, "We wait now. If it's all been for nothing, I'll feel it."

"How?" asked Hayden.

He wondered how to describe the sensation of scry turning itself on.

"I'll wake up," he said.

* * *

WHETHER SHE'D KILLED its pilot or disabled its engines, Antaea didn't know; but whatever had been firing on them was gone. It was small comfort to her, because right now it looked like the entire universe was collapsing in on their exact spot.

Venera had crammed herself in next to Antaea and, companionably, they were pointing out this or that feature of the approaching apocalypse. "Those ones look like a hawk's head," said Venera, indicating a formation of carriers visible only as glittering running lights.

The sky was full of such constellations, some superimposed on purple-, orange-, or green-colored cloudscapes backlit by distant suns. Most were maneuvering in darkness, and they were drawing closer, both to each other and to the Thistle. The little sloop was running flat-out now, its two remaining escorts straining to keep up. All the while, four fleets whirled and coalesced behind them, like flotsam in their wake.

"Haven't seen any trash for a while now," Antaea said. Venera nodded.

"We're nearly there. Anything that fell this far in during the day would have been incinerated."

Even as she said this, something flickered past--not from behind them, as a missile would have done, but from in front. Antaea stared in shock as she realized what she'd seen was just a highlight gleaming off something so big that she'd completely missed it. It was like a vast crystal spike, miles long. Others began to cut off portions of the view above and below.

"Refractors and reflectors," Venera explained. "They're what give Candesce the illusion of being a single object."

The engines slowed, then their scream lowered to an idling grumble. An airman pounded on the hatch behind them and both Antaea and Venera turned. The man thrust his head in.

"You," he said to Venera. "You're to guide us in to the dock."

"There's no dock, you silly boy." Venera stretched luxuriously. When he didn't move she sighed and said, "All right, I'm coming. But fetch me some food, will you? I'm tired from all this excitement."

He backed away. Antaea hid a grin as Venera began to climb out of the blister.

Five minutes later, with none of the preamble or pomp and ceremony she had expected, she found herself hanging in the stifling air outside the sloop. Venera had planted both feet against the smooth pale wall of a gigantic cube, and had done something with a white wand that Nicolas Remoran had given her.

As the door to Candesce's control room slid silently open, Venera turned, pouting, and held out the key.

"Really, you didn't need me," she said. "A child could have done it."