Pirate Sun (12 page)

Antaea was blinking at the spectacle. “Made it!” she croaked. “Where—the bike?”

“Here.” He turned them so she could see it. The truncated spindle-shape jutted up a few feet away. It was a simple matter to wave his feet and bring them over to it. Antaea gripped its saddle with white-knuckled intensity, letting out several sobs before she got her breathing under control.

“You got us out,” she said after a long moment. He shrugged.

“Turned out there was an air bubble inside the bike. Just enough to keep me going the last few yards.”

She nodded, started to say something, then looked away. For the first time he saw something like shyness in her. The impression only lasted a few seconds before her usual brashness returned. She hauled herself into the bike’s saddle and stuck out a leg for him to grab. “Give us a push, Admiral. I’ll see if I can get this old bike to spit up some lake.”

He thrashed his legs in the water, excavating a crater and throwing spheres and jets of it everywhere—but also giving the bike just enough of a push to get it clear. Then he climbed behind Antaea. Wrapping his arms around her he was even more aware than before of her body conforming to his. He was able to feel her trembling, and looked down to see her hand hesitating over the handlebars.

“Do you want me to fly?” he asked.

She nodded. “I…don’t think I’m quite up to it right now.” She swung herself around and he eased forward. It was her turn to wrap herself around him.

It took a while to get the bike going; there was a fair amount of water inside it which wasn’t easy to dislodge. Chaison had to work the manual pedals to spin the fan in order to create a weak current of air to wash it out. He did this for long minutes, and all the time they drifted slowly across the drop-filled sky, drawing closer to the gargantuan arm that jutted out of the flood’s main body.

The engine caught the tenth time he hit the sparker. Suddenly the pedals disengaged, the fan began to whine, and the bike coughed and hacked as it vaporized the last of the water inside it. Then he turned them in a tight circle until he found a fairly clear path through the drops. When he had it, he opened it up and they roared clear of the flood.

“It’s so…localized,” yelled Antaea. He glanced back. As the bike accelerated,
back
felt like
down
—so the sensation was of rising miles above a frozen and impossibly magnified splash of water. There should have been an equally gigantic bathtub behind it, but now that Chaison could see the full extent of the flood he saw only sky beyond.

The flood was a chaotic twist of dense water, roughly cigar-shaped, and about four-by-eight miles in extent. Ahead and behind it were twisting funnels of dense cloud in which lightning still flashed.

“God’s spit,” shouted Antaea over the mad roar of the jet. Chaison had to laugh. It did look almost like a jet of saliva from something transcendently huge. But when he followed the trail of cloud and spray back, it became obvious where it had come from.

The jet had come straight out of the distant, golden sun.

He pointed. “Not Falcon’s?”

She shook her head and leaned close to say one word.

“Gretels.”

Chaison nodded. He didn’t know how they had done it, but somehow Falcon’s neighbor had used one of their suns to evaporate a lake and shoot it into Falcon territory. Probably they had used reflectors and heat baffles to concentrate the fusion device’s heat, creating a long channel of lower-density air. The evaporate from a lake towed next to the sun would seek out that channel and run through it…and reappear as clouds and drops on the border with Falcon.

He forgot the speculation as something bright flashed in the middle distance between the flood and the sun. Chaison squinted, and saw another flash, then another. He swore softly.

“Do you see that?” He pointed. At first she just shrugged and shook her head—then suddenly she grabbed his shoulder.

“Ships!”

He nodded. “Dozens of them, at least.” A whole fleet was massed in the turbulent clouds behind the flood. They were pouring into Falcon Formation’s airspace behind it.

Looking past Antaea, he could see the bike’s contrail was feathering wide behind them. “We’ll be visible,” he said. There would be pickets—bikes like this one, with riflemen on them—running ahead of that fleet. They could pop out of a nearby cloud or use the sun for cover, and Chaison would never see them coming. Anxious again, he turned the bike so that the Gretels’ sun was directly behind them, and opened the throttle wide.

This way lay the heart of Falcon Formation, but beyond it were the skies of Slipstream, and home.

Then Antaea’s hand rose again, pointing. A spray of ships lay across the cloudscape ahead. These were coming from inside Falcon. Chaison swore again—loudly, this time—and turned once more.
Like a sparrow between two hawks,
he thought. He laid down a course at right angles to the incoming fleets, with the flood behind him. The fleets would engage around the flood; it was the perfect wall to keep at your flank.

He glanced at Falcon’s ships and suddenly laughed. Antaea put a questioning hand on his shoulder. “Just wondering,” he shouted back at her, “how many of those ships I put holes in?”

What would the airmen on those vessels do if they found out that Slipstream’s admiral was cutting the air just a few miles ahead of them? He laughed again, then leaned forward to lay on more speed.

The only way to orient yourself in Virga’s skies was by the light of national suns. Within three hundred miles of Slipstream’s capital, Rush, home meant inward toward the light. Outside that zone, all suns began to look the same; confusion was easy, and beyond the light of nations lay the indigo darkness called winter. All that Chaison knew was that he was running parallel to the border between Falcon Formation and the Gretels. But on which axis? Dead ahead could lie some third nation, or just beyond the obscuring clouds, winter. That might be their safest destination right now.

Among dusky skies where the civilized suns were distant smears of rose and crimson, he and Antaea could skirt the nations of Meridian until they found Slipstream. The way would be dangerous, for among the purpled clouds you could easily miss rocks and water drops that could smash a bike or a pilot’s head. There were pirates and madmen, desperate exiles and wily opportunists on the fringes of winter. And, if you strayed too far and lost the light entirely, it would be sheer dumb luck if you found your way back again. You would be adrift in the realm of legends.

Chaison was willing to chance it.

Occasional glances back told him that pickets from the two fleets were engaging each other. Bikes swirled like angry midges, their backdrop the vast hammerhead of the flood. He had no doubt that his contrail had been spotted, but he was clearly a civilian or a deserter. There was no point in chasing him.

He began to relax. At the same time, the air ahead of them was becoming more crowded, so he had to cut back their speed anyway. Many farms and villages on the edge of the flood had managed to see it and dodge out of the way in time. They now formed a donut twenty miles wide with the flood in the central hole. Lots of stuff had come loose as buildings, groves, and fish farms had flapped, jetted, whirled, or undulated from their normal stations. Chaison jigged the bike around loose trees, octahedral sheds, ducked flying hammers and sleeping chickens like feather balls. Contrails from other bikes scored the sky, and here and there flower boats pulsed. He was tempted to approach some of these to see if they were refugees from Songly, but he knew what Antaea would say, and she would be right: trying to find Darius and Richard right now would just expose them all to more risk.

Falcon’s suns began to dim for the night. The clouds cast long gray capes of shadow through the air, and everything became touched with delicate colors. Sunoff should have been a peaceful time, but the jetsam of the flood made it dangerous to stay in the open. Anything—even stray bullets and rockets from the distant battle—might fly in and hit you in the middle of the night. So, Chaison heaved a sigh of relief when he spotted the road.

It was a simple rope, punctuated every half-mile by colorful banners jutting from mirrored buoys. It twisted and spiraled up from below and angled away from the dwindling flood. Traveling beside it in orderly streams were hundreds of vessels. The streams went in opposite directions, but one was much denser than the other. Only a trickle of people were heading toward the battle, though a lot of very fine craft—yachts and cabin cruisers—could be seen striking off into open air in the direction of Falcon’s heart.

Chaison watched a lamplighter tether his bike next to a road buoy. With an economical and well-practiced motion, he leaned in and started the buoy’s engine. The little two-stroke would suck in air for the buoy’s beacon. The lamplighter shot off to the next buoy, and slowly he drew a line of stars across the sky. With relief Chaison fell into the heavier column of traffic where he could see by the light of others’ headlamps.

They moved with a scarf of stars past graying clouds that framed deepening blackness. Behind them the ever-changing sky was lit by white lightning and the orange flashes of a fierce conflict. Chaison could hear nothing over the racket of the bike’s jet, yet the evening seemed strangely watchful; the drone of the engine faded in his consciousness, replaced with nothing but the awesome majesty of the pirouetting clouds.

Those clouds had become black-on-black presences when they parted at last to reveal the road’s destination. It was a city, one of the most beautiful Chaison had ever seen.

Neither he nor Antaea spoke as the traffic merged into a column of lights that drifted down the tunnel of a vast avenue. Windows cast warm amber light from all sides, their glows filtered and cupped by millions of leaves. The houses and mansions of the city were nestled among trees—millions of them—that stretched their branches here and there to clasp their neighbors. That light touch kept the buildings from drifting and, over the years, the city had acquired a stable shape. Chaison flew among green clouds full of lamplight that opened here and there into veins and arteries where flew winged men and women, children with foot-fins, cavorting dolphins, boats and bikes, taxis, birds, darting, huge-finned fish. After a while he cut the bike’s engine and they drifted with the current. They listened to the growl of engines, the singsong of nearby conversations, the laughter and music of a city alive and vibrant.

There were some signs of the distress taking place in the skies outside. Doormen at hotels tiredly turned away families who clutched their few possessions and gazed around themselves bewilderedly. Vehicles were clotted together in darkened cul-de-sacs, their owners sleeping or cooking beside them. But on the whole, war had not yet touched this place.

Antaea touched Chaison’s shoulder. “That sign—this must be Stonecloud.”

He nodded. “You know it? No doubt the guard has a chapterhouse here?”

She said nothing. After a moment he looked around at her. Antaea shrugged, grinning tiredly. “Can we agree not to talk about the guard for a while?” she said.

Chaison squinted in surprise—then remembered Antaea’s confrontation with Ergez, just before Songly’s breakup. “Whatever you want,” he said. He crossed his arms and frowned into the stream of traffic for a moment. “Richard…was in contact with the local black market in Songly. He talked about smugglers in Stonecloud, though we really didn’t intend to go this way.”

She didn’t ask him why Richard had been investigating smuggling routes. “Do you remember how to find them?”

“I think so,” he said. He reached down to start the engine. “Somehow, I’d feel safer with them tonight, than outside.”

She nodded. He turned the bike, and drew them down a side-avenue whose name Richard had mentioned.

THE SMUGGLERS’ ADDRESS
existed, all right, but the eight-sided building was a burnt-out husk wrapped in leathery police tape, no sign of life inside. Antaea and Chaison stared at it for a while; the bike pinged and creaked as it cooled. Finally Chaison said the obvious: “Now what?”

Antaea was hugely relieved by the desolation, though of course she wasn’t about to show him that. “We should wait here for Richard and Darius,” she suggested. “A day…two. There’s only a small chance that they came this way, after all.”
Provided they got out of Songly alive,
she didn’t add.

Chaison’s shoulders slumped. “I suppose so,” he said after a while. His disappointment was palpable, but she steeled herself not to feel guilty. He was her responsibility, and they had been through a lot together, but he was not her friend. This relationship had a definite end.

Antaea couldn’t quite admit to herself that it was getting harder to picture that moment. They had worked well together escaping Songly and, in retrospect, she had taken great comfort in having him at her side. She could think of few other companions she would have wanted in that situation. But
no;
thinking along these lines was futile. This adventure was taking its toll on her nerves, that was all. She had to find out when it would end.

So they tied their belts to hooks in the blackened doorway of the smugglers’ building, and tried to sleep. At first staying here so openly seemed like folly: wouldn’t the pols come looking to sweep up visitors? But watching the streams of people passing by, that seemed less and less likely. In fact, after a while Chaison muttered sleepily, “Where they hell are they?”

“I’m sure they’re all right,” Antaea said reflexively—meaning Richard and Darius.

“No, I mean, where are the police?”

“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “It is strange.”

From here the city appeared as a dense drift of buildings and cloudlike forest, lit by innumerable streetlights and the glow of windows angled in every possible orientation. The perspectives went down and up and across dizzyingly; and everywhere they were filled with people. The whole city was awake and about despite the lateness of the hour, and an electric tension filled the air. But there were no official vehicles in those throngs, no pols interceding in the increasingly common arguments and traffic jams. Stonecloud would have been an assault on the senses at the best of times, so in a way it wasn’t surprising that it took so long for Chaison and Antaea to notice this strange lack. Now that they had, though, the city’s wakefulness took on an extra atmosphere of menace.

They slept with the uneasy mutter of the city in their ears. Both were startled awake sometime late in the night by a nearby argument that had become a screaming match. They blinked at one another, then drew the bike farther into the doorway, sheltering behind it.

“Who’s looking after this city?” muttered Chaison darkly. “It’s dereliction of duty, I’d shoot men who did that under my watch.” He glanced around the dark bowers that crowded their building. “This may not be the safest place after all…”

“We have no choice,” she said. “Your men, remember?” He grimaced and closed his eyes again. “Chaison?” He opened them a slit. “I can’t sleep. I’m going to go find us some food, and maybe some news if I can. You’re all right here?” He nodded blearily. He knew she wasn’t through with him; she’d be back. And she knew he wouldn’t leave this spot until he was sure Richard and Darius weren’t coming.

Antaea got a firm grip on her bike and pushed off. After she’d drifted a dozen yards into the air, she flipped into the saddle and pedaled the bike’s fan up. It lit, and she was away.

Alone and responsible only for herself, her spirits immediately lifted. The adrenaline percolating through the city also affected her. Stonecloud was beautiful, a vast bowl-shaped forest embedded with jewellike buildings unlike any city she had lived in. The millions of trees that formed its skeleton were clustered into balls with their roots entwined in common around clods of earth. Some, notably elm and oak, thrust branches for hundreds of feet in all directions, and the city planners had twined young branches of neighboring trees together, like linked hands. Grown together, they formed walls and shapes far bigger than the individual trees making them up. Nestled among the branches were thousands of glass and stone structures, mostly houses in the theatrical style.

Stonecloud was a tourist city, of course; this beauty was deliberate and an exception among the otherwise drab and uniform cities of Falcon Formation. Stonecloud was a lie—a lure designed to lull visitors into immigrating. To Antaea, this was no objection to the place, because she couldn’t imagine herself settling in any city, unless late in life she drifted back to Pacquaea, her home. She was an outsider everywhere, by choice, though seeing young couples drifting down the arteries of the city, she did feel the occasional wistfulness of envy for their more innocent lives.

Someone had to make those lives possible; that was the problem, and the reason why there was a home guard.

She paused, mind empty of thought, to admire some of the mansions. The theatrical style defined two parts to a free-fall room: an “audience” or area for people to congregate, and opposite that a window or large architectural space that served as the “stage.” She saw houses with glass domes peeking out from frames of forest, wicker and velvet shapes nestled deep behind the glass. Lamplight backlit complex canopies of leaf and branch; she caught glimpses of men and women lounging in the air in some of these bowers.

It was easy, at first, to ignore the fact that many of the mansions were dark.

Presiding over the glowing forest were giant metal town-wheels—six, at least. They filled the bowl, stage to its audience, each wheel turning majestically inside a spherical cage of forested girders. At night they made a glittering galaxy that could bewitch you for hours. Near them was another bowl, a half-spherical amphitheater that cupped a smaller sphere made of wicker. This was floodlit even this late at night, to show the dozens of garish sets and props that had been built into it. A vast sign on the side of the sphere said:

PEOPLE’S CIRCUS HOME OF CORBUS STRONGEST MAN IN VIRGA ATTENDANCE NOT MANDATORY

Stonecloud was entirely different from the cities of Antaea’s home, but the encompassing darkness and the bustle and commerce seemed familiar. Especially when she passed those windows, their glow hinting at intricate interior experiences, Antaea felt a pang for choices not made. She had to remind herself that the life she was living had a purpose, and that she might yet return home once that purpose was fulfilled.

Richard had given Chaison an address. Well, Antaea had one of her own, memorized along with those in a dozen other cities and towns. Ergez had given them to her, dutiful home guard alumnus that he was.

Navigating a city in three-dimensions came naturally to Antaea. She looked for street signs, which here followed the universal convention: they appeared as three arrows, red, yellow, and blue, joined at their tails to indicate the city’s x, y, and z axes. Addresses were always strings of three numbers indicating the location’s distance in yards from the city’s official 0,0,0 point. She followed corkscrewing arteries, flew down parallel sheets of facade and forest, passed the knotted clumps of estates caged in ornate wrought-iron balls hundreds of feet across. She didn’t get lost.

Despite the lateness of the hour, the bar Ergez had told her about was open. She tied up her bike and launched herself at the loops of rope that stuck out of the entrance, narrowly missing a banner that said
LAUGH WITH CORBUS
. Once inside her confidence ebbed, because the place was as crowded as a wasp’s nest and she recognized no one. Then she spotted her contact, over at the bar.

The bar was literally that: a brass pipe festooned with cup holders. Patrons hung in the air on one side of it, and the waitstaff glided back and forth on the other. The baby-faced man she slid next to had about a dozen empty helix glasses in front of him and looked decidedly unfocused. “Raham,” she said, shaking his arm. “I’m here.”

He stared at her for a few seconds before saying, “Damn. I lost that bet.”

“Gonlin,” she said. “Is he around?”

Raham shook his head, which was apparently a mistake. He took half a minute to find Antaea again (she was less than three feet away), then said, “The whole damned pack leffft for Shlipstream yesterday. Do you have him?”

She nodded. Raham brightened. “Great. I’ll…take it from here.” He spun around, missed his footing, and flailed at the bar.

A passing waitress yelled, “Sick bag at fourteen!” The nearby patrons all reoriented themselves so they could keep Raham in sight.

“Sorry,” said Raham. “Sorry. Wasn’t really expecting to see you. Thought I was…left behind.”

“Raham.” She took him by the arm. “I don’t understand. Why did they leave?”

He glanced away, the very picture of shifty discomfort. “Something…something came,” he said. “From winter. We had to bug out before it caught up to us.”

“What? Make sense, Raham, damnit.” Some
thing
had come after them? Not, some
one
had come after them?

Raham hurried on. “Yeah, well, Gonlin said, better chance of rende-, rend-, of meeting you in Slipstream anyway ’cause that’s where Fanning would be going. Also, no war there. So he moved the whole operation, ’xcept me of course I was to watch out for you.” He nodded deeply, his eyes slipping shut.

She shook him. “
Where
in Slipstream? Damnit, Raham, what’s my rendezvous?”

He roused enough to tell her, then drifted asleep. Antaea paid his tab and waved at one of the bouncers. “Get him under gravity so he doesn’t drown in his own puke,” she said. Then she flew back to her bike and, without a backward glance, shot into the light and chaos of the city.

ANTAEA FOUND HERSELF
reluctant to return to Chaison. She needed to regain some sense that she was in control—if only in control of a bike and her own private thoughts—so she flew through the city in a widening spiral, taking in the sights, thinking about what to do next.

The problem was that any time she was idle, her thoughts inevitably drifted to her sister. Telen was the only family Antaea had; she’d taken care of her after their parents had died in an accident. She had learned to fight so she could defend Telen from the bullies who picked on them for being state wards. Telen had always been the thinker, the avid reader, while Antaea was the doer. Ironic, then, that Telen should be the one to decide at age twenty to leave Pacquaea in search of the legendary home guard. “I can’t spend the rest of my life in this squalid little country,” she had cried when Antaea tried to convince her of the foolishness of her plan. “I’d rather freeze or starve in the dark looking, than give up on the chance of finding somewhere better.” And so they had left together. Against all odds, they had found the guard and in doing so, a new life. Even, Antaea had sometimes thought, a new family.

Antaea had trusted Gonlin with her own life. Gonlin had repaid that trust by promising to kill Telen if Antaea told anyone else in the guard what his group was doing.

So much for family.

Near dawn, she found herself on the fringes of Stonecloud, where vistas of open air came upon you suddenly as you turned a corner or looked up. At first everything seemed the same here as deeper inside, but then she rounded a tall cone of forest and glittering glass and nearly ran into a cloud of people.

Antaea swore and spun the bike to brake, nearly falling off in the process. She turned it again and tried to make sense of what she was seeing. There were hundreds of people outside here—thousands, maybe, their voices audible above the tearing noise of the jet. They all seemed to be shouting and talking.

People hung in windows and doorways, in pairs, threes, or gathering crowds at the intersections of the artery. Many were pointing and gesturing; she saw a woman scream but that sound was swallowed by distance. She followed the general gaze with her own.

Something puzzling hung in the sky beyond the city limits. A glow, a shape that, the more she looked at it, could not be what it seemed to be.

Antaea turned the bike to roar out of the city and into open air. She shot up and away, skirting a cloud bank that momentarily obscured the thing she’d seen. Perched atop the cloud for all the world as though it was solid, was another bike, its rider staring at whatever lay on the other side of the mist.

Antaea flew over and cut her engine a dozen or so yards away. Drifting close, she saw that it was a man sitting astride the jet, his hands folded over the handlebars. He was staring out into the night that enfolded the city.

“Hello,” she said. He glanced over, then returned his gaze to whatever it was he saw in the dark. “What is everybody looking at?” she asked.

He said nothing, merely pointed. Antaea passed the last wisp of cloud, saw what he saw, and swore.

Miles high, miles wide, the malevolent face of a bearded god confronted Stonecloud, its mouth wide in a soundless scream.

Antaea felt a flood of cold come over her; her hackles rose and she hissed involuntarily. The moment of superstitious dread passed as she realized that the face—which really was there, and really was that big—was drawn on the night sky in lights. There were thousands of them, swathes and clumps forming the features of the angry god. As she looked closer, the individual twinkles resolved into windows and streetlights, cunningly lit in patterns: this arc of houses making a vast eyebrow against the darkened neighborhoods behind it; that circular pond, ringed by caged streetlamps, making an eye.

“It’s a
city
?”

“It’s called Neverland,” said the man. “The Gretels have sent their regional capital against us. They mean to swallow Stonecloud.”

Antaea looked back at Stonecloud. This apparition must have just appeared, because there had been no talk of it in the bar. People had been speculating about the result of yesterday’s battle, but nobody knew anything—except that the pols were missing and the city’s bureaucrats were nowhere to be found either. The rich and powerful had probably known about Neverland’s approach for many hours, but nobody had seen fit to communicate the news to the public.