Pirate Sun (15 page)

“I’m not talking about the beauty,” she said. “Think about Corbus and his volunteers. A self-styled mayor, army veterans whose glory days are long past—all these unexpected heroes who were, well, clowns! and servants yesterday. These people have been given a tiny glimpse of a new world, one in which they are masters of their own fate, and now the Gretels are going to come in and take it all away from them.
That’s
why they’re fighting.”

“That’s crazy,” said Chaison with a shake of his head. “If they beat back the Gretels, the pols will return in a week and they’ll be back where they started. It’s either Falcon or the Gretels for them.”

“I don’t think they believe that,” she mused, staring out the ever-changing window at distant city lights. “I’m not sure I do either.”

He looked surprised. “You’re more of an idealist than I thought.”

“Idealist? You don’t have to be an idealist to see that our world is frozen in midnightmare. It’s a world of despots and tyrannies, full of premature death and lifelong misery. And why? Because the energy field Candesce uses to keep alien forces from invading Virga, this field also suppresses the very technologies that might pull us out of the barbarism we’re sunk in!

“
You
had in your hands the means to change things. And what did you do? You frittered it away to win one trifling battle in the name of one trifling little pirate state out on the edge of nowhere. How pathetic!”

That was her frustration talking, but she couldn’t stop herself. Chaison seemed unmoved, however. He leaned back in his chair and rested his hands on its arms. “You’re obviously not used to having power,” he said mildly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You think I didn’t know what I could do with the key?” He gazed at her coolly. “Or, more precisely, what it
looked like
I could do?” He shook his head. “Using power and controlling outcomes—those are two different things. You learn that when you lead something like a navy. You can aim it, you can let it fly, but after that it’s all up to the gods. The one thing you can be sure of is that you’ll cause chaos.

“The key to Candesce unlocks absolute power over every man, woman, and child in Virga. With it, you can heat or cool the whole world, change the winds, still them completely; freeze your neighbors and let your own country bloom. Or you can—” He paused, squinted at her—“Cause another outage. Let artificial nature into our world.

“You can unleash Candesce; but you can’t
control
it.”

Silence hung momentarily.

Antaea pushed down on her anger. She made herself smile. “Oh, but you can.” She sat down again, leaning forward and clasping her hands. “You wielded Candesce like a hammer to smash your enemies. But the sun of suns is a much more subtle instrument than you know. It’s true it wreaks havoc with electrical devices; you probably don’t know that it also limits the amount of data that can be processed per cubic centimeter in Virga. The way you used it, I’ll bet you think the suppression field is a kind of switch that is either
on
or
off.
But it’s not like that at all. It can be dialed up or down. It’s just that right now, it’s dialed all the way
up.
”

Chaison steepled his hands and leaned back. He gazed at her over his fingertips (and a brief up-and-down flick of his eyes told her that he’d finally noticed how she was dressed). “How do you know this?” he said.

“Because I work for the guard. They have knowledge of things everyone else in Virga has forgotten. I’ve seen Candesce’s design.”

His eyes remained fixed on her from behind the peak of his fingers. If he was impressed, he gave no sign. “This is all very interesting,” he said slowly, “but beside the point. Let me summarize our situation. You want me to tell you where the key to Candesce is, so that you—
you,
not the home guard—can use it to dial back the barrier that prevents artificial nature from infecting Virga. Not to the point that A.N. can enter Virga, but to some point near that.”

“Well. Yes,” she said. “And you think my motives are selfish, and everybody’s selfish until the unthinkable happens to them. And when that happens, some of them stay selfish—but some come to realize that they’re just like everybody else. What happens to others matters as much as what happens to them.”

“So what unthinkable thing happened to you, Antaea, to make you so unselfish as to risk your life for this?”

He was too close to it. She had to put him back on the defensive, and quickly, so she leaped to her feet and stood over him, hands on her hips. “I might ask you the same thing, Admiral Fanning. Why are you risking your life for these people? And don’t give me that noble claptrap about responsibility. You don’t believe it any more than I do.

“This is about fear, isn’t it? About you being afraid to go home.”

He sputtered and half-stood and Antaea knew she had struck home. “You’re afraid that you have no home to return to. No house, no position, no wife—”

Chaison was on his feet now, standing nose to nose with her, his fists bunched. She could smell him, feel the heat rising off his body. Suddenly Antaea didn’t know what to say.

They stood like that for seconds too long, neither speaking. He moved; and she had a moment of anxious anticipation—and then realized he was sitting down, looking away.

Angry, she sat as well. The awkward silence lengthened; it had to be broken somehow, so she said, “Have you looked out there? Thousands of those people—the people behind those windows you see now—are going to
die.
” She didn’t want to continue this argument, but it was all she could think of right now. “And why?” she rolled on. “Oh sure, because the Gretels are going to attack the city, that’s the surface reason. But the real reason is that the people have no control over their own destinies. Yet they could. They could!”

He glanced back at her—and damn him, was he smiling? “Yes I want the damned key to Candesce!” Antaea said desperately. “So does the guard, but they just want to lock it away somewhere, against the day. They’re afraid of its power. I want to give that power to the people. So that they can save themselves.”

Now for some reason her face felt hot. Antaea threw up a hand up in frustration, stood, and stalked toward the little bedroom. “Why am I even talking to you? You don’t want things to change. You’re an aristocrat!”

He was on his feet in a second, his hand clamped around her upper arm. “I don’t want to be here,” he hissed. “But I don’t have the luxury of making choices, Antaea. All my choices were made for me the day I was born. Which boys would be my friends; where I would go to school. Who I could talk to, who I had to ignore. What I would become. Even the decision to go against the pilot’s orders, even that had to be done. The only time I ever did anything for myself—on my own—was when I married—”

He let go of her arm.

He stepped back, his expression troubled.

Here was her only chance, Antaea realized. Persuasion had failed. He had faced down the torturers. She was left with seduction, which had been on her mind anyway since the moment she met him; and so she rallied her courage, moved close and started to raise her mouth to his—then saw his face.

It held an expression of defeated resignation. She saw infinite patience there, the look of a man who has long ago abandoned himself to his role in life. It came to her that he knew what was coming, had plotted out each of her moves as on a chessboard, long before she spoke or acted. He knew what she intended, and thought he knew why she would be doing it. If he responded, it would only be as a countermove in a game he obviously took no pleasure in playing.

“Fuck it,” she said, stepping away from him. “Listen, Chaison, it’s late, we’re both exhausted…”

He watched her, eyes wide.

“I was going to demand the bed, but let’s be fair about this, why not?” She went to the table and rummaged in one of the belt pouches lying there.

Antaea turned and held up a bronze coin. “I’ll flip you for it,” she said lightly. “Loser gets the couch.”

He laughed.

They flipped.

She lost.

DAWN FOUND THE
city transformed. Antaea couldn’t believe what she saw from the spinning windows of the circus dormitory; she went outside and stood in the air, and it was still there.

Work gangs coordinated by Chaison’s lieutenants had spent the previous day and all of last night sawing Stonecloud apart. Now the city was in pieces, each a neighborhood a thousand or more feet across comprised of green forest, gray stone, and flashing glass. Straining jets and propellers on all manner of tugs, taxis, trucks, and buses struggled to rearrange the blocks in a new order. Stonecloud had been a bowl-shaped city before, in keeping with the theatrical style of architecture. Now that bowl was exploded, transforming over the hours into an expanding, medusa-shaped cloud. Its farthest reaches were made up of bikes, catamarans, market craft, and anything else that had its own engine; inside this were individual buildings, then whole blocks, and at the center of it all the majestically turning town-wheels. These at first appeared untouched. As Antaea looked more closely, she realized they had slowed their rotation. Over the hours they slowly edged to a stop, and then thousands of odd objects, never made for freefall or intended to be tied down, rose up and drifted into a cloud in the wheels’ centers. Chairs, ornamental pots, statues, bookcases, books, and whole wardrobes full of clothing lofted out of windows and doors, exhaled into the air like mist in winter.

“That’s deliberate,” said Chaison when he returned from the planning session he’d attended before daybreak. He sat on her bike in some bizarre circus outfit/dress uniform they’d cobbled together for him (“it’s not meant to be pretty, just visible,” he’d said with a grimace) and pointed to different features of the shattered city with the rifle he held.

“The airspace inside the town-wheels is full of hazards to stop bikes or missiles—or battleshops—getting in there. If they’re going to fire upon the city, they’ll have to do so from outside.”

“And this…obscene destruction?”

“Move maneuverable items to the periphery. A cloud formation to make it hard for them to surround us. Most delicate objects at the center.” He pointed again. “Semaphore stations to relay orders from the command center. I’m going there now, I came to pick you up.”

She jumped and he grabbed her ankle, lowering her into the seat behind him. They shot into a chaotic airspace filled with contrails, unattached ropes, families pushing huge nets containing their worldly possessions; under, over, and around zipping bikes, undulant dolphins, and bewildered, winged people. Shafts of sunlight lit the turbulent flocks unpredictably as forests and buildings drifted about.

A shrill siren cut the air and vessels and people darted away from something happening just ahead. Chaison brought the bike to a stop, turning it so she could watch.

They hovered near what had once been a beautiful park. Spherical, its outer shell a delicate filigree of intertwined tree limbs, it held a water drop two hundred feet across—a small lake. The park had been peeled like an orange, and the work gang who had done that work were fleeing. The only man left near the lake was a burly hard-hatted laborer hiding behind a metal shield. Wires trailed from something in his hand through the air and into the water. Just as Antaea realized what he was going to do, he twisted the thing he held.

The lake exploded.

First, a sphere of white appeared at the very center of the greenish ball, then the sphere expanded with lightning speed and the surface disappeared into an expanding cloud of mist.

Chaison twisted the throttle and they raced ahead of whirling, shuddering drops. “What the hell was that for?” shouted Antaea over the noise of the engine.

“They’ll tow the water to the outskirts to make a missile barrier,” he said. He pointed as they shot past another gang that was stripping the branches off some beautiful, ancient oaks. “Those will be sharpened and tied into a wall formation. We’ll put riflemen behind it.”

A catamaran—two spindle-shaped hulls connected by an engine nacelle—pulled next to the bike. One of the men aboard waved his arms frantically. Chaison pulled over and cut his engine.

“—Barricaded inside their mansions!” the man yelled. “They’re firing on our people!”

“Just for the hell of it?” asked Chaison. “Or are we doing something to provoke them?”

“Well, we did turn off their gravity.”

It emerged that some of the wealthier citizens had stayed behind when the apparatchiks and industrialists bailed out of the city. They were hunkered down in their estates, with private security forces patrolling their perimeters. Having little contact with the rest of the city, they doubtless assumed that Stonecloud had fallen into some state of mad anarchy. After all, the whole place was being torn apart around them, and the wheels themselves had stopped turning. They were shooting at any work gang that came near.

“They’re terrified,” said Chaison. “Leave them alone.”

They sped on. “There
is
a lot of looting going on,” Chaison commented, “but it can’t be helped. I need every able-bodied man and woman on the barricades.”

“Then it really is anarchy!”

He shrugged angrily. “I have a couple of photographers moving through the city. They’re taking pictures of the looters. There’ll be a reckoning—just not today.”

They pulled up next to Corbus’s “command bunker”—which was actually just the circus ball, towed from its position at the focus of the amphitheater to a place where most of the exploded city was visible. A number of semaphore men hung from the wicker now, some waving their bright flags, others watching distant precincts for incoming messages.

Antaea didn’t know whether to be impressed by the energy of it all, or laugh at the absurdity. “You did all this overnight?”

Chaison laughed as he reached for a mooring rope. “It’s the circus, believe it or not. They were organized on paramilitary lines and travel as an independent unit. They’re used to putting up and striking sets on deadline.”

Antaea wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting in the command bunker—salutes, at least. What she found as she climbed into the building after Chaison was pandemonium. Men and women flew to and fro, or argued in midair, clipboards flapping. The circus ball was a maze of little chambers, most of them crammed with brightly colored circus gear. Somebody had strung painted ropes through the place in an attempt to organize it; little signs were tied to these every thirty feet or so. Chaison and Antaea followed a blue rope that was marked
COMMAND CENTRAL
by various hands and in various creative misspellings.

The central sphere was one big room that had until recently contained machines, if the unpainted squares of wall, rivet holes, and bent stantions were anything to go on. Most of the room was now taken up by a passable model of the two cities, made up of little wooden blocks that slowly rotated like a madman’s mobile in the middle of the chamber. Any blank spot on the walls was festooned with photos, many annotated in red pen or flagged with brightly feathered darts. Corbus’s new defense staff tumbled slowly through the air, most cross-legged and writing furiously on their lap-desks.

Corbus himself sat overflowing a metal chair that was mounted above the floating map. She’d been hearing more about him, not all of it good. For years now, he had been a kind of ghost figure at the circus, despite his place at top billing. The other performers only saw him during his shows; in between times he hid away in his little cabin, which was walled, ceilinged, and carpeted with books. He was unfailingly polite when he spoke to people, but terribly quiet as though he didn’t quite believe he had the right to speak.

He was nothing like that now. “We need sixteen of those, not eight!” he roared at an elderly looking man who had been showing him something. “My God, I made a simple request, how is anything going to get done around here?” He looked up and saw Chaison and Antaea. “Admiral, how does it look out there?”

“Good,” said Chaison. “Things are coming together.”

“Coming apart, I hope you mean.” Corbus beetled his brows expressively and turned his attention to Antaea. “Our home guard ally. I trust you slept well while the pirate admiral here took apart our city around you?”

She smiled. “Pirate?”

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” He hesitated—for an instant she saw a hint of the reticent, shy man who’d been described to her. Then he plunged on. “This fellow conquered a country! His people took over Aerie, now they’re plundering it, and when they’re done they’ll drop it behind them like a gnawed fruit. Slipstream’s a pirate nation, and this here’s the chief pirate.” He grinned wolfishly at Chaison. “Which is why I’m glad he’s on our side.”

Chaison looked like he wanted to argue and had even opened his mouth when Antaea cut in with, “I’m sure he’s just what the city needs. But how about you, have you had any sleep?”

“Me?” Corbus looked surprised at the question. “I…don’t recall. Don’t think so.” Then, before her eyes, he seemed to crumple in on himself as if he’d suddenly lost a hundred pounds. He squinted, rubbed at his eyes. “It’s hard,” he said quietly, “keeping the brave face on hour after hour. How do you do it?” She realized he was addressing Chaison now.

Chaison frowned. “I delegate.”

Corbus gave a gravelly laugh. “Yes, well, as you can see there’s little chance of that happening here.” He blew out a sigh. “I feel like a prisoner, can’t take a damned crap without somebody knocking on the door. The people put me here and I’ll be damned if I do anything to disappoint them, but it’s hard.

“Which brings me to your plans to fire incendiaries at Neverland’s suburbs.” He waggled a sheet of paper accusingly at Chaison.

“I have to consider all scenarios,” Chaison said. “It’s not a choice I would make lightly—”

“Enough!” Corbus splayed his great, muscled arms. “I know all about hard choices. Just look at me. I took orders once and I gave them; and afterward, I ran and hid from the world for twenty years.” He glowered at Chaison. “You know, Fanning, I’d rather do without you entirely. Your kind brought us to this point. I’m not ungrateful for your help, it’s just…this isn’t really your fight, is it?”

“I’m interested in the safety of the people who live here,” said Chaison. He didn’t sound particularly defensive, merely matter-of-fact.

“I’m sure you are, but you’re not trained to
protect
people, are you? You’re trained to slam ships and soldiers together until so many people on the other side have died that their commanders’ nerves break.”

“Isn’t that what you need me to do?”

Corbus shook his head. “No, because ultimately it’s not going to be the navies or their commanders who decide how this siege ends, nor aristocrats like you. It’ll be the people.”

Chaison blinked, opened his mouth, then closed it again. That was all Antaea saw of his dismay, but it was enough. “Your job—and your
only
job,” said Corbus in an intense, almost strangled voice, “is to checkmate the Gretels’ ships. The cities you must leave to me.”

Now Chaison looked puzzled. “What are you going to do?”

“You won’t understand it,” said Corbus. “But you’ll see.”

He rubbed at his eyes again, then pushed himself back in his seat, looking cornered and haunted. “So forget your incendiaries—come talk to me about your plan to stymie their ships. Explain these darts to me again.”

THE CITIES CIRCLED
warily. Stonecloud had transformed from a green bowl cupping spinning town-wheels, into something like a giant claw, smudged with diesel and jet smoke, its shattered fingers made of buildings and tipped with the sharp prows of ships. It made slow grabs for the nebulous suburbs of Neverland, which reared back and soughed around it.

Neverland was fully disarticulated, a nimble armada of buildings and ships. Its own town-wheels waited miles behind the main body, a nervous baggage train that presented Chaison with a tempting target. He might be able to get a few missiles past the nets and gravel clouds in the intervening space, but it probably wasn’t worth the effort. Attacking Neverland’s wheels would not slow the assault.

A steady stream of reports and fresh, sulfur-smelling photographs poured into Command Central (or Command Centril, as it said on the sign outside the door). Despite the chaos, the level of competence in the room was actually pretty high, because Stonecloud, like any large city, boasted its share of veterans as citizens. Some of these were elderly, but some were young and many were stubbornly loyal to Falcon Formation. Chaison had no idea how they were reconciling their situation with that patriotism—since the government they believed in had shamelessly abandoned them—but he didn’t care all that much as long as they did their jobs. Chaison scanned reports, talked to people, pointed to this or that part of the drifting cloud of buildings, asked questions, and occasionally issued orders. Mostly, he sent suggestions to Corbus and the former Atlas did the actual commanding. This was fine by Chaison.

None of it was going to do any good anyway. Neverland’s strategy was clear: the best way to take a city was to absorb it, and Neverland was simply bigger than Stonecloud. However beautiful the Falcon regional capital was, its identity would not survive. Its neighborhoods would be dissolved into Neverland like grains of salt in a glass of water—and if they couldn’t be, they could be split up and distributed throughout the rest of the Gretels’ cities.

As night fell, a new set of photographs came in. “What does it mean?” asked the boy who handed Chaison the prints. He had obviously been rifling through them as he flew up here. Chaison ignored the lax discipline and held up one picture, then another.

Half-hidden behind the swarming buildings of Neverland was a huge cloud of people, all in the open in a three-quarter’s sphere formation. There must have been twenty thousand or more bodies in that cloud. At its center, bright lights silhouetted several tiny dots.

“It’s a rally,” he said absently. “A public rally. Those aren’t soldiers.”
I hope those aren’t soldiers.