Queen of Candesce (19 page)

Corinne nodded violently; her hair followed her head's motion a fraction of a second late. “We can get into the Grey Infirmary,” she brayed. “And out again safely.”

There was another chorus of protests and again Venera held up her hand. “I could tell you,” she said, “but it might be more convincing to
show
you. Come.” And she headed for the doors.

 

The roar from the airfall was more visceral than audible here in the lowest of Buridan's pipes. Bryce's people had lowered ladders down here when they came to cut away the maddening random organ that had been created accidentally in Buridan's destruction. The corroded metal surface gleamed wetly, and as Venera stepped off the ladder she slipped and almost fell. She stared up at the ring of faces twenty feet above her.

“Well, come on,” she said. “If I'm brave enough to come down here, you can be too.”

Thinblood ignored the ladder and vaulted down, landing beside her with a smug thump. Instantly the surface under their feet began swaying and little flakes of rust showered down. “The ladder's here to save the pipe, not your feet,” Venera said loudly. Thinblood looked abashed; the others clambered down the ladder meekly.

The ladder descended the vertical part of the pipe and they now stood where it bent into a horizontal direction. This tunnel was ten feet wide and who knew what it might originally have carried—horse manure, Venera suspected. Whatever the case, it now ended twenty feet away. Late afternoon sunlight hurried shadows across the jagged circle of torn metal. It was from there that the roar originated.

“Come.” Without hesitation Venera walked to within five feet of the opening, then went down on one knee. She pointed. “There! Sacrus!”

They could barely have heard her over the roar of the thin air; it didn't matter. It was clear what she was pointing at.

The pipe they stood in thrust forty or fifty feet into the airstream below the curve of Spyre's hull. Luckily this opening faced away from the headwind, though suction pulled at Venera relentlessly and the air was so thin she was starting to pant already. The pipe hung low enough to provide a vantage point from which a long stretch of Spyre's hull was visible—miles of it, in fact. Way out there, near the little world's upside-down horizon, a cluster of pipes much like this one—but intact—jutted into the airflow. Nestled among them was a glassed-in machine-gun blister, similar to the one Venera had first visited underneath Garth Diamandis's hovel.

“That's the underside of the Grey Infirmary,” she yelled at the motley collection of generals and revolutionaries crowding at her shoulder. Someone cupped hand to ear and looked quizzical. “Infirmary! In!
Firm!
” She jabbed her finger at the distant pipes. The quizzical person smiled and nodded.

Venera backed up cautiously and the others scuttled ahead of her. At the pipe's bend where breathing was a bit easier and the noise and vibration not so mind-numbing, she braced her rump against the wall and her feet in the mulch of rust lining the bottom of the pipe. “We brought down telescopes and checked out that machine-gun post. It's abandoned, like most of the hull positions. The entrance is probably bricked up, most likely forgotten. It's been hundreds of years since anybody tried to assault Spyre from the outside.”

She could barely make out the buzzing words of Carasthant's general. “You propose to get in through that? How? By jumping off the world and grabbing the pipes as they pass?”

Venera nodded. When they all stared back uncomprehending, she sighed and turned to Princess Corinne. “Show them,” she said.

Corinne was carrying a bulky backpack. She wrestled this off and plunked it down in the rust. “This,” she said with a dramatic flourish, “is how we will get to Sacrus.

“It is called a
parachute.
”

 

She had to focus on her jaw. Venera's face was buried in the voluminous shoulder of her leather coat; her hands clutched the rope that twisted and shuddered in her grip. In the chattering roar of a four-hundred-mile-per-hour wind there was no room for distractions, or even thought.

Her teeth were clenched around a mouthpiece of Fin design. A rubber hose led from this to a metal bottle that, Corinne had explained, held a large quantity of squashed air. It was that ingredient of the air the
Rook
'
s
engineers had called
oxygen
; Venera's first breath of it had made her giddy.

Every now and then the wind flipped her over or dragged her head to the side and Venera saw where she was: wrapped in leathers, goggled and masked, and hanging from a thin rope inches below the underside of Spyre.

All she had to do was keep her body arrow-straight and keep that mouthpiece in. Venera was tied to the line, which was being let out quite rapidly from the edge of the airfall. Ten soldiers had already gone this way before her so it must be possible.

It was night, but distant cities and even more distant suns cast enough light to silver the misty clouds that approached Spyre like curious fish. She saw how the clouds would nuzzle Spyre cautiously only to be rebuffed by its whirling rotation. They recoiled, formed cautious spirals, and danced around the great cylinder as if trying to find a way in. Dark speckles—flocks of piranhawks and sharks—browsed among them, and there in great black formations were the barbed wire and blockhouses of the sentries.

To be among the clouds with nothing above or below seemed perfectly normal to Venera. If she fell she only had to open her parachute and she'd come to a stop long before hitting the barbed wire. It wasn't the prospect of falling that made her heart pound—it was the savage headwind that was trying to snatch her breath away.

The rope shuddered and she grabbed it spasmodically. Then she felt a hand grab her ankle.

The soldiers hauled her through a curtain of speed ivy and into a narrow gun emplacement. This one was dry and empty, its tidiness somehow in keeping with Sacrus's fastidious attention to detail. Bryce was already here and he unceremoniously yanked the air line from Venera's mouth.—Or tried; she bit down on it tenaciously for a second, glaring at him, before relenting and opening her mouth. He shot her a look of annoyance and tied it and her unopened parachute to the line. This he let out through the speed ivy, to be reeled back to Buridan for its next user.

Princess Corinne's idea had sounded insane, but she merely shrugged, saying, “We do this sort of thing all the time.” Of course, she was from Fin, which explained much. That pocket nation inhabited one of Spyre's gigantic ailerons, a wing hundreds of feet in length that jutted straight down into the airstream. Originally colonized by escaped criminals, Fin had grown over the centuries from a cold and dark subbasement complex into a bright and independent—if strange—realm. The Fins didn't really consider themselves citizens of Spyre at all. They were creatures of the air.

Over the years they had installed hundreds of windows in the giant metal vane as well as hatches and winches. They were suspected of being smugglers, and Corinne had proudly confirmed that. “We alone are able to slip in and out of Spyre at will,” she'd told Venera. And, as their population expanded, they had colonized five of the other twelve fins by the same means they were using to break into Sacrus.

To reach Sacrus, one of Corinne's men had donned a parachute and taken hold of a rope that had a big three-barbed hook on its end. He had unceremoniously stepped into the howling airfall and was snatched down and away like a fleck of dust.

Venera had been watching from the tower and saw his parachute balloon open a second later. Instantly, he stopped falling away from Spyre and began curving back toward the hull.
Down
only operated as long as you were part of the spinning structure, after all; freed of the high speed imparted by Spyre's rotation, he'd come to a stop in the air. He could have hovered there, scant feet from the hull, for hours. The only problem was the rope he held, which was still connected to Buridan.

The big wooden spool that was unreeling it was starting to smoke. Any second now it would reach its end and the snap would probably take his hands off. Yet he calmly stood there on the dark air, waiting for Sacrus to shoot past.

As the pipes and machine-gun nest leaped toward him he lifted the hook and, with anticlimactic ease, tossed it ahead of the rushing metal. The hook caught, the rope whipped up and into the envelope of speeding air surrounding the hull, and Corinne's man saluted before disappearing over Spyre's horizon. They'd recovered him when he came around again.

Now, brilliant light etched the cramped gun emplacement with the caustic sharpness of a black-and-white photograph. One of the men was employing a welding torch on the hatch at the top of the steps. “Sealed ages ago, like we thought,” shouted Bryce, jabbing a thumb at the ceiling. “Judging from the pipes, we're under the sewage stacks. There's probably toilets above us.”

“Perfect.” They needed a staging ground from which to assault the tower. “Do you think they'll hear us?”

Bryce grimaced. “Well, there could be fifty guys sitting around up there taking bets on how long it'll take us to burn the hatch open. We'll find out soon enough.”

Suddenly the ceiling blew out around the welder. He retreated in a shower of sparks, cursing, and a new wind filled the little space. Before anybody else could move Thinblood leaped over to the hole and jammed some sort of contraption up it. He folded, pulled—and the wind stopped. The hole the welder had made was now blocked by something.

“Patch hatch,” said Thinblood, wiping dust off his face. “We'd better go up. They might have heard the pop or felt the pressure drop.”

Without waiting he pressed against his temporary hatch, which gave way with a rubbery slapping sound. Thinblood pushed his way up and out of sight. Bryce was right behind him.

Both were standing with their guns drawn when Venera fought her way past the suction to sprawl on a filthy floor. She stood up, brushing herself off, and looked around. “It is indeed a men's room.”

Or was it? In the weak light of Thinblood's lantern she could see that the chamber was lined in tiles that had once been white but which had long since taken on the color of rust and dirt. Long streaks ran down the wall to dark pools on the floor. Venera expected to see the usual washroom fixtures along the walls, but other than a metal sink there was nothing. She had an uneasy feeling that she knew what sort of room this was, but it didn't come to her until Thinblood said, “Operating theater. Disused.”

Bryce was prying at a metal chute mounted in one wall. It creaked open and he stared down into darkness for a second. “A convenient method of disposal for body parts or even whole people,” he said. “I'm thinking more like an autopsy room.”

“Vivisectionist's lounge?” Thinblood was getting into the game.

“Shut up,” said Venera. She'd gone over to the room's one door and was listening at it. “It seems quiet.”

“Well, it
is
the middle of the night,” the preservationist commented. More members of their team were meanwhile popping up out of the floor like Jacks-in-the-box.
Minus the windup music,
Venera mused.

Soon there were twenty of them crowded together in the ominous little room. Venera cracked the door and peered out into a larger, dark space full of pipes, boilers, and metal tanks. This was the maintenance level for the tower, it seemed. That was logical.

“Is everyone clear on what we're doing?” she asked.

Thinblood shook his head. “Not even remotely.”

“We are after my man Flance,” she said, “as well as information about what Sacrus is up to. If we have to fight, we cause enough mayhem to make Sacrus rethink its strategy. Hence the charges.” She nodded at the heavy canvas bag one of the Liris soldiers was toting. “Our first order of business is to secure this level, then set some of those charges. Let's do it.”

She led the soldiers of half a dozen nations as they stepped out of their bridgehead and into the dark of enemy territory.

Everything in the Grey Infirmary seemed designed to promote a feeling of paranoia. The corridors were hung with huge black felt drapes that swayed and twitched slightly in the moving air, giving the constant impression that there was someone hiding behind them. The halls were lit by lanterns fixed on metal posts; you could swivel the post and aim the light here and there, but there was no way to illuminate your entire surroundings at any point. The floors were muffled under deep crimson carpeting. You could sneak up on anybody here. There were no signs, doors were hidden behind the drapery, and all the corridors looked alike.

It reminded Venera unpleasantly of the palace at Hale. Her father's own madness had been deepening in the days before she succeeded in escaping to a life with Chaison. The Pilot had all the paintings in the palace covered, the mirrors likewise. He took to walking the hallways at night, a sword in his hand, convinced as he was that conspirators waited around every corner. These nocturnal strolls were great for the actual conspirators, who knew exactly where he was and so could avoid him easily. Those conspirators—almost entirely comprising members of his own family—would bring him down one day soon. Venera had not received any letters bragging of his downfall while she lived in Rush; but there could well be one waiting when or if she ever returned to Slipstream.

That was the madness of one man. Sacrus, though, had done more than generalize such paranoia: it had institutionalized it. The Grey Infirmary was a monument to suspicion and a testament to the idea that distrust was to be encouraged. “Don't pull on the curtains to look for doors,” Venera cautioned the men as they rounded a corner and lost sight of the stairs to the basement. “They may be rigged to an alarm.”

Thinblood scoffed. “Why do something like that?”

“So only the people who know where the doors are can find them,” she said. “People trying to escape—or interlopers like us—set off the bells. Luckily there's another way to find them.” She pointed at the carpet. “Look for worn patches. They signify higher traffic.”

The corridor they were in seemed to circle some large inner area. Opposite the basement stairs they found the broad steps of an exit, and next to it stairs going up. It wasn't until they had nearly circled back to the basement stairs that they found a door letting into the interior. Next to a patch of slightly worn carpet, Venera eased the curtains to the side and laid her hand on a cold iron door with a simple latch. She eased the door open a crack—it made no sound—and peered in.

The room was as big as an auditorium, but there was no stage. Instead, dozens of long glass tanks stood on tables under small electric lights. The lights flickered slightly, their power no doubt influenced by the jamming signal that emanated from Candesce.

Each tank was filled with water, and lying prone in them were men—handcuffed, blindfolded, and with their noses and mouths just poking out of the water. Next to each tank was a stool and perched on several of these were women who appeared to be reading books.

“What is it?” Thinblood was asking. Venera waved at him impatiently and tried to get a better sense of what was going on here. After a moment she realized that the women's lips were moving. They were reading to the men in the tanks.

“…I am the angel that fills your sky. Can you see me? I come to you naked, my breasts are full and straining for your touch.”

Bryce put a hand on her shoulder and his head above hers. “What are they doing?”

“They seem to be reading pornography,” she whispered, shaking her head.

“…Touch me, oh touch me, exalted one. I need you. You are my only hope.

“Yet who am I, this trembling bird in your hand. I am more than one woman, I am a multitude, all dependent on you…. I am Falcon Formation, and I need you in all ways that a man can be needed…”

Venera fell back, landing on her elbows on the deep carpet. “Shut it!” Bryce raised an eyebrow at her reaction but eased the door closed. He twitched the curtain back into place.

“What was that all about?” asked Thinblood.

Venera got to her feet. “I just found out who one of Sacrus's clients is,” she said. She felt nauseated.

“Can we seal off this door?” she asked. “Prevent anyone getting out and coming at us from behind?”

Bryce frowned. “That presents its own dangers. We could as easily trap ourselves.”

She shrugged. “But we have
grenades,
and we're not afraid to use them.” She squinted at him. “Are we?”

Thinblood laughed. “Would a welding torch applied to the hinges do the trick? We'll have to leave a tiny team behind to do that.”

“Two men, then.”

They went back to the upward-leading stairs. The second level presented a corridor identical to the one below. The same muffled silence hung over everything here. “Ah,” said Venera, “such delicate decorative instincts they have.”

Thinblood was pacing along bent over, hands behind his back. He stared at the floor mumbling “hmmm, hmmm.” After a few seconds he pointed. “Door here.”

Venera twitched back the curtain to reveal an ironbound door with a barred window. She had to stand on her tiptoes to see through it to the long corridor full of similar doors beyond. “This looks like a cell block.” She rattled the door handle. “Locked.”

“
Hello?
” The voice had come from the other side of the door. Venera motioned for the others to get out of sight, then summoned a laconic, sugary voice and said, “Is this where I can find my little captain?” She giggled.

“Wha—?” Two eyes appeared at the door, blinking in surprise at her. Just in time, Venera had yanked off her black jacket and shirt, revealing the strategic strappery that maximized her figure. “Who the hell are you?” said the man on the other side of the door.

“I'm your present,” whispered Venera. “That is, if you're Captain Sendriks…. I'd like it if you were,” she added petulantly. “I'm tired of tromping around these stupid corridors in nothing but my assets. I could catch a cold.”

A moment later the latch clicked and seconds after that Venera was inside with a pistol under the chin of the surprised guard. Her men flowed around her like water filling a pipe; as she gestured for her new prisoner to kneel Thinblood said, “It's clear on this end, but there's another man around the corner yonder.”

“Level a pistol at him and he'll fall into line.” She watched one of the soldiers from Liris tying up her man, then said, “It
is
cold in here. Bryce, where's my jacket?”

“Haven't seen it,” he said innocently. Venera glared at him, then went to collect it herself.

The corridor held a faint undertone of coughing and quizzical voices, which came from behind the other doors. This was indeed a cell block. Venera raced from door to door. “Up! Yes, you! Who are you? How long have you been here?”

There were men and women here. There were children as well. They wore a wide mix of clothing, some familiar from her days in Spyre, some foreign, perhaps of the principalities. Their accents, when they answered her hesitantly, were similarly diverse. All seemed well fed but they were haggard with fear and lack of sleep.

Garth Diamandis was not among them.

Venera didn't hide her disappointment. “Tell me where the rest of the prisoners are or I'll blow your head off,” she told the guard. She had him on his knees with his face pressed against the wall, her pistol against the back of his head. “Bear in mind,” she added, “that we'll find them ourselves if we have to, it'll just take longer. What do you say?”

He proceeded to give a detailed account of the layout of the tower, including where the night watch were stationed and when their rounds were. So far Venera hadn't seen any sign of watchmen; for a nation gearing up for war, Sacrus seemed extremely lax. She said so and her prisoner laughed, a tad hysterically.

“Nobody's ever gotten in or out of here,” he mumbled against the plaster. “Who would break in? And from where?” He tried unsuccessfully to shake his head. “You people are insane.”

“A common enough trait in Spyre,” she sniffed. “Your mistake, then.”

“You don't understand,” he croaked. “But you will.”

She had already noted that he wore armor that was light and utilitarian, and his holstered weapons had been similarly simple. This functionalism, which contrasted dramatically with the outlandish costumes of most of her people, made her more uneasy about Sacrus's abilities than anything he'd said.

They spent some time trying to get more out of him and his companion. Neither they nor the prisoners they spoke to knew what Sacrus's plan was—only that a general mobilization was underway. The prisoners themselves were from all over the principalities; some had recently gone missing within Spyre itself.

“They're enough evidence to haul Sacrus before the high court on crimes against the polity,” crowed Bryce. “If we can just get some of these people out of here.”

Venera shook her head. “They may be enough to get the rest of Spyre up in arms. But until we can come up with a decent plan for getting them out alive, they're safer where they are. Let them loose now and they'll give us away, and probably try to run the gauntlet of machine guns and barbed wire on their way to the outer walls. At least let's find them some weapons and a direction to run in.”

Bryce and Thinblood exchanged glances. Then Bryce quirked his irritating smile. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let's strike a compromise…”

 

There were plenty of cells in the block, but Garth was in none of them. While Venera searched for him, Thinblood took the bulk of the team to look for the night watch. Nearly fifteen minutes had passed before he reappeared.

Thinblood was jubilant. “Both floors are secure,” he said. “We left the watchmen in a closet we found. And my welder has sealed off the main doors and a side entrance. He's a model of efficiency, that one.”

Bryce put a hand on Venera's arm. “Your man doesn't seem to be here. We have to look to our other objectives.”

She shrugged him off, gritting her teeth so as not to snap some withering retort. “All right, then,” she said. “There's more to this tower upstairs. Let's find out what Sacrus is up to.”

The next floor was different. Here the velvet-covered walls and darkness gave way to marble and bright, annoyingly uneven electric light. Venera heard the sound of voices and chatter of a mechanical typewriter coming from an open door about thirty feet to the left. Crouching under the lee of the steps with the others, she scowled and said, “The time for subtlety may be past.”

“Wait.” Thinblood pointed the other way. Venera craned her neck and saw the heavy vault-style door even as Thinblood said, “Sacrus is reputed to keep their most secret weapons in this place. Do you think…?”

“I think I saw some of those weapons being made downstairs,” she said, thinking of the fish-tank room. “But you're right. It's just too tempting.” The door was surrounded by big signs saying
VALID PERSONNEL ONLY
, and two men with rifles slouched in front of it. “How do we get past them?”

One of Corinne's men cleared his throat quietly. He drew something from his backpack and after a moment his companions did likewise. They strung the small compound bows with quick economical movements. Seeing this, Venera and the other leaders climbed back down and out of the way.

“Count of three,” said the man at the top. “You take the one on the right, we'll do the one on the left. One, two—”

All four of Corinne's soldiers jumped out of the stairwell and rolled into crouches. Their shoulder muscles creased in unison as they drew back and Venera heard an intake of breath and “What the—” from off to the right and then they let loose.

There was a grunt, a thud, then another. The archers whirled around, looking for another target.

The sound of typing continued.

“Take out that office,” Venera instructed the archers as she stepped into the hallway. “We'll go for the vault.”

The heavy door had a thick glass window in it. Venera shaded her eyes with her hands and stared through for a few seconds. She whistled. “I think we've found the mother lode.”

The chamber beyond was large—it took up most of this level. There were no windows and its distant walls were draped in black like the corridors downstairs. Its brick floor was crisscrossed by red carpets; in the squares they defined, pedestals large and small stood under cones of light. Each pedestal supported some device—brass canisters here, a fluted riflelike weapon there. Large jars full of thick brown fluid gleamed near things like bushes made of knives. There was nothing in there that looked innocuous, nothing Venera would have willingly wanted to touch. But all were on display as if they were treasures.

She supposed they were that; this might be the vault that held Sacrus's dearest assets.

The view was obscured suddenly. Venera found herself staring into the cold gray eyes of a soldier, who mouthed something she couldn't hear through the glass.

Deception wasn't going to work this time. “We've been seen,” she said even as a loud alarm bell suddenly filled the corridor with jangling echoes.

“Can we blow this?” Thinblood was asking one of his men. The soldier shook his head.

“Not without taking time to figure out the vulnerable points…maybe doing some drilling…”

Thinblood looked at Venera, who shrugged. “It's going to be a firefight from now on,” she said. “Better get downstairs and free those prisoners. Then we can—” Something bright and sudden flashed in her peripheral vision and there was a loud
clang!

She stared in dumb surprise at the metal bars that now blocked the way to the stairwell. “Blow them!” she shouted, pulling out her preservationist-built machine pistol. “This is no time for subtlety!”