But with the reins of true power in his hands at last, Jacoby Sarto had lost his nerve. Now he looked at the blood-soaked bandages wrapped around his left hand and said, "You've got no one to blame but yourself, Jacoby."
Unused to wielding power for his own sake, he'd found he had no idea what to do with the resources he'd acquired. He would never admit it to anyone else, but he'd been terrified to be saddled with the responsibility it all came with.
Inshiri Ferance hadn't had to threaten him. At the first opportunity he'd turned the foreign services back over to her, and he'd flown away from his chance at real power with haste and a terribly unmanning relief.
Inshiri knew he'd blinked, and though she'd allowed him back into her inner circle, she treated him with contempt. The guarantee she'd taken from him tonight was minor for her, but calculated to make him aware, every day for the rest of his life, that he was and would always remain a servant.
He put his good hand on the railing and stared down the stairwell, which seemed to be tipping slowly over--whether due to this wheel's rotation, or the delirium of pain he was in, he couldn't have said.
"Sane people put their docks up top," he said, then laughed at himself. He was talking to no one! Anyway, it was true; at the axis of a wheel there was no gravity and you could moor or unmoor at leisure. The engineers at Kaleidogig were stupid barbarians, though, and they liked to live dangerously. He slowly descended the steps, leaning on the wall to guarantee that he knew up from down.
When he entered the Kaleidogig docking galleries he shook his head in fury: how was he going to make it across this jumble of half-built jet bikes, stolen taxis, and decommissioned military catamarans, all of them swinging off hooks like fresh-caught game? The floor under them was a minefield of big hatches that could be thrown open by the pull of a lever--and might fall out from under you if you stepped on them. Even as he leaned there trying to pick out a safe route, the lamps in the long, upward-curving room flickered as one of the hatches banged down and a puff of wind rushed through the place. A courier who sat astride his bike above this hatch reached up, casually unclipped the chain suspending him, and he and the bike fell through the opening and into the hundred-mile-per-hour headwind made by the town wheel's spin.
A dockhand approached, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. "Yer all right, sar?"
"Fine. I'm fine." He hid his left hand behind himself, and wiped away the sweat on his forehead with his palm. "I'm expecting someone," he added curtly.
"If yer say so. Just don't go near the cats." The hand nodded at the bigger military craft, which hung nodding behind a yellow rope.
Jacoby pulled himself into a more dignified posture and forced himself to walk steadily over to the entrance hatches. These looked similar to the exits, but he knew that below, on the outside of the town's hull, each was partially sheltered by a ramp-shaped windbreak. There were lookouts down there waiting to open the hatches for incoming craft. That must be cold and lonely shift work, he thought, and he felt a momentary kinship with the men down there.
A hatch thirty feet away fell open without warning, and a small tornado of air blasted Jacoby, making him stagger. Like a strange jack-in-the-box, an airman on a bike popped up out of the hatch. He was standing up in his stirrups, holding up a hook, and at the top of his bounce into the hangar, he clanged the hook over one of the overhead rods. Then he sat down heavily as the bike swung, engine roaring, in the vortex of air that was howling through the hatch below him.
He cut the engine as the doors to the hatch laboriously inched shut. When the last crack had been sealed, leaving only the ominous whistle that all the closed hatches made, he pulled off his leather flyer's helmet and dismounted the bike.
Jacoby recognized him. They met just in front of the bike, whose round maw showed a still-spinning maze of teeth. "Sarto," said the man with a barely respectful duck of the head.
Jacoby took a shuddering breath and said, "Were you seen? Did anyone question you?"
"Naw, it's black air out there, I took the last fifty miles at a hundred 'n fifty miles an hour. Have to be crazy to follow me." He grinned, obviously still exhilarated at his daredevil stunt.
"Good, but you'll have to leave the same way." Jacoby couldn't help but glance around to see if there was anyone but the dockhand working here. If he were Inshiri, he'd put a watch on Jacoby Sarto--and maybe she was about to do that very thing. He had to put his plan in motion before it became impossible for him to contact his own men without her noticing.
He fumbled one-handed in his jacket, then held out a thick envelope. "Here's the orders. Are the ships ready? Fueled and armed?"
His man nodded as he took the package and shoved it into his jacket. He clearly hadn't noticed Jacoby's distress; good. "What's the target?" he asked with a grin. "I might go myself, if it's somewhere nice."
"It's not." Jacoby looked him in the eye. "It's Hell, actually."
"Oh, you've been there?"
"I have. Now on your way before somebody comes." He turned away as the airman hopped back into his saddle; but he was careful to watch and make sure that the jet roared to life, and that the courier rose and unclipped his line and fell into the night.
It was all in the hands of fate now, but he felt a little better at having finally done something decisive.
On the way back upstairs he became dizzy and nearly fell down. He sat in a broad windowsill and leaned his head against the rippled glass. A mile away, the giant can shape of Inshiri's observatory spun slowly in the black air. The structure was turned now so that Jacoby could see down its length. At its core glowed a tiny, human-shaped spark of crimson.
He smiled in angry satisfaction. Inshiri thought she was punishing him by giving him the Fracas operation. It was menial, after all; but she didn't know everything that was going on, nor did she suspect he might have a minor, but effective, fleet of his own.
Once it did what he'd just commanded it to do, he'd have one very big playing piece in his hands. With Fracas, he already had another; and if the bait he'd hung out worked (and he thought he knew the psychology of the person it was aimed at well enough) he would soon have the third.
There was only one more piece in play that mattered, and he didn't yet know how he would get possession of that.
He glared at the tiny figure playing goddess at the focus of her telescope. She thought the little sacrifice he'd given her tonight would make him a falcon on her glove. She was in for a surprise.
But not just yet. He levered himself back to his feet and grimly plodded up the last steps to his floor. In a few moments he could collapse on his room's tattered little bed, and tomorrow he'd send one of his men to locate a good source of painkillers.
Inshiri knew the game board, but he knew which pieces owned the game. With luck, in a few days he would have them all, and then Inshiri would become his pawn.
14
LEAL WAS LOOKING out one of the yacht's portholes when the ship began braking heavily. She braced her hands on the bulkhead in front of her, as fore suddenly became down.
Her reverie was broken. Leal wasn't even sure what she'd been daydreaming about, but she knew her shattered ambitions had been in there somewhere. Her dream of being a university professor, of achieving tenure and spending her twilight years surrounded by ancient books ... it was all so far from here and now as to constitute a separate life. Once this was all over, could she return to those daydreams? It seemed so unlikely.
The braking eased up, and now she saw the running lights of some sort of way station up ahead. Several ships hulked in the twilight air. Stations and caravansaries weren't unusual in the zones where the light of different suns overlapped. It was too dim here for agriculture, but destinations were clearly visible. You could hang out a shingle and sell fuel and food, and make out pretty well. This particular station seemed even more prosperous than most.
It would be good to get out and stretch, even if there was no gravity to be had here. She climbed out of her narrow stateroo
m and nearly collided with Keir Chen, who was sailing down the yacht's spinal corridor. "Rest stop?" she said to him.
He shook his head. "Two of those ships are Slipstream cruisers, and I'm not the expert here, but they look pretty banged up."
She went back to her window to look. Sure enough, there were black scars and holes in the hulls of two of the vessels parked by the stop. Returning to the corridor she found Venera already undogging the main hatch. The admiral's wife wore functional leathers and a bandolier, with pistols at her belt. This must be serious.
"What's going on?"
Venera spared her a quick glance. "Those are two of the ships we sent to Serenity."
"Oh!" They all waited impatiently for the dockhands to catch their ropes and haul them in. Before they were even tied down, Venera had hopped off the ship and was pulling herself hand over hand along a rope that led to the station's main building. Leal and Keir followed as quickly as they could.
The station building was a wooden sphere about a hundred feet across, with various blocky buildings crowding its inside surface. There was an administrative shed, two stores, a hotel, a bar, and something that might actually be a brothel, based on the apparel of the women drifting in front of it. The center of the space held a bank of crude electrical lamps, whose flickering light was competing with a bright glow from the bar. Loud music and raucous voices could be heard coming from there.
Venera, Leal, and Keir looked at one another, then sailed in that direction.
Venera perched on the lip of the door and looked in; Keir did so opposite her. Windup lamps in colored paper balls were bouncing around the bar's main room, and all the wicker half-spheres where you could nestle with your drinks and friends were full. Men and women were leaping between the bar itself and various loud conversations; clearly, whatever was going on here was at its height.
One laugh wormed its way through the noise of all the others, and Leal found herself rearing back in confusion. "It can't be--"
She grabbed the doorframe and flipped herself into the room--and there he was, large as life and alive, in fact holding a helix glass of beer and cheering something. "Hayden!"
He glanced over, did a double take, and let go of the glass. "Leal!" Leaving his drink twirling in midair, Hayden Griffin launched himself across the bar, nearly colliding with another man who'd chosen the same moment to head for the toilets. Hayden opened his arms and docked with Leal, crushing her in his embrace. "There you are!"
She returned the hug, only now aware of how dangerously thin he was. Pushing him back, she gave him a once-over. He was dressed in an ill-fitting airman's uniform in Slipstream colors. His cheeks were hollow, his face and hands sunburnt. But he was alive, and he looked happy.
He looked past Leal and grew suddenly serious. "Lady Fanning."
"Griffin." Venera nodded coolly to him. They had a history, these two, Leal remembered, and not a romantic one. There was blood between them.
"Did all of your men make it?" Venera went on. She was looking around the room, taking in what was now clearly a strange mix of ill-sized Slipstream uniforms and ragged black ones that must belong to Home Guard members.
Hayden shook his head. "We lost ten. Four on the plains, six yesterday."
Venera looked startled. "What happened yesterday?"
"Your secret city was attacked!" The speaker was a lean Home Guard officer, his uniform stained and torn. He hopped over to perch by the door. "They looked like pirate ships, but there were eight of them and they were packed with men. They jumped us just as we were ferrying the last of our men out of Brink."
"Venera Fanning, Niels Lacerta of the Home Guard," said Hayden. "Without Niels and his men, we wouldn't have survived long in Aethyr."
"I remember you," said Leal. "You came to sit by our fire that first night after the crash. We talked about my message."
He nodded. "We've talked about little else since you left us, ma'am. --Whether you were right; whether your 'emissary' is a devil or an angel."
"But..." Hayden looked from Leal to Venera and back. He ignored Keir, whom he'd after all never met. "What are you doing here?"
Venera shrugged. "A courier found us six hours ago, said there were damaged Slipstream ships at one of our designated rendezvous. Tell me more about this attack."
"They definitely knew where to find the city, and they knew we were there," said Hayden. "It was a coordinated assault. They meant to capture Serenity, I'm sure of it. We managed to beat them back, but they may return. The base commander sent two frigates to Rush for reinforcements."
"But who could it be?" Keir burst out. "Nobody knows about the city but us!"
"Us, and Jacoby Sarto," said Venera.
There was a momentary silence. Leal was confused. "I thought he was a friend of yours?"
Venera appeared to consider this concept for a time. Finally, she held one hand out, and waggled it from side to side. "Even odds," she said. "I'm going to say it was him."
"The commander had planned to send Niels and his men straight back to the Guard, and us directly to Rush," Hayden went on. "But we were attacked again on the way out of the city. One of the cruisers was holed; we've been leaving a trail of fuel all the way across winter. The captain pulled us in here to patch us up and buy enough fuel to get us home. We were just..." He glanced around, grinning. "... celebrating being back."
He shook his head impatiently. "But anyway, what I meant was--Leal, we met your friends in the city and they told us a little of what happened. Is it true about Tarvey?"
"Ah," she said, suddenly stabbed by deep sadness. Tarvey had been Hayden's loyal servant and friend. Loyalty had brought him to Aethyr, had led to him risking his life for Hayden more than once. Ultimately, it had cost him everything.
"Hayden, I don't know what to say."
"Say what happened," advised Venera. "And I suggest you be quick about it. The admiralty's not going to like this tab we're running up."
* * *
THEY REMAINED AT the way station for a day, while final repairs were completed on the cruiser. Venera spent much of that time as the queen of a buzzing hive of courier bikes, who zipped in from all six points of the compass to drop off and pick up dispatches. She was planning something, that was obvious, and it was equally obvious that she didn't want her husband to know about it until it was too late for him to veto her. At one point as Keir flew by the main room in her yacht, he heard her telling one of the cruiser's captains, "We're on the far side of the world from Slipstream. I have no time to send home for orders! No, we do this now, or the opportunity is lost."
Later, Hayden Griffin and the Home Guard commander Lacerta came by. After an intensive grilling from Venera, they stayed to sample her liquor cabinet and talk. Keir was finally introduced to the famous sun lighter, and after some initial caution, found that he quite liked Griffin. They had something in common, after all: they both loved machines.
Maybe that was the trigger--thinking about machinery--because late that night, Keir began to remember.
There was a storm that night, and even though the Judgment was lashed to the station's dock, the winds howled past and shook it like a child's toy. Slotted into his bunk like a wasp in its hive, Keir found himself in total darkness, and weightless except when a gust caught the ship. The close walls of the sleeping closet would tap him unexpectedly, and he'd jolt awake to the sounds of flight or the strange rumble of thunder in an echoless sky. He had no idea how long this went on; and while it did, his mind drifted from Hayden's description of sun-building to jumbled images of things he'd built in Brink--and then beyond.
At first, yes, it was just Brink, and Maerta and the others, though Leal appeared to him, too, more than once. Something about his changing feelings for her reminded him of other memories--but he couldn't find them, he couldn't find them. He kept groping for scry's emblems, but scry didn't work in Virga.
That was Candesce's fault. Right now he hated the sun of suns, and its dark influence on technologies it didn
't approve of. He resented its secretive mystery; how it hid itself in wreaths of flame at the heart of Virga, while its vast invisible wings unfurled to the very walls of the world and beyond.
So good, then, that he'd plucked one of its feathers--turned, triumphant, to wave it to Maerta except, no, hadn't it been Sita? Sita all along?
--And suddenly there he was, perched on a bench in a garden whose hedge mazes and flower-dewed trellises draped like the skirts of a seated woman around a round-towered, coral-hued house. The white sun Vega blazed in the zenith, and heat haze and the buzzing of insects complicated the air around him.
The planet's name was Revelation; the continent's, Aegeas, and the city whose floating aerostats peppered the horizon was Atavus. He'd grown up here.
His wife, Sita, was humming as she aerated the roots of some little yellow flowers with her long fingers, lovingly tending the little lives. She was also standing on a ladder and frowning at the gutters of the house, where stalks of grass were poking up. One of her was a proxy, but it would never have occurred to Keir to wonder which one. Sita inhabited both bodies simultaneously and with equal ease.
"Sandrine introduced me to this man the other day," her Self in the garden was saying. The glyphs around her head indicated she was talking to Fethe, one of her oldest friends, who was a thousand kilometers south of them today. "She said you know him a little?"
Keir watched her closely, as if he could learn something this time that he hadn't been able to perceive the last hundred times he'd visited this record within his scry.
"Yes, she said you thought I should meet him." Sita laughed. "His name is Keir Chen..." Her expression grew troubled, and she looked around herself, and spotted him.
Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Page 19