Pirate Sun (13 page)

The tension ringing through the city made sense now. Stonecloud had been abandoned by its government, a pawn sacrificed to the enemy. And that enemy was about to arrive.

Antaea turned the bike and shot back into the city.

GETTING BACK TO
the burned-out smugglers’ den proved difficult. The city’s arteries were boiling with people, an increasingly hysterical and aimless mob. Antaea’s uneasiness grew. They should strike out now—before dawn—and take their chances in the open air. Better that than to be trapped here when Neverland arrived.

By the time she arrived at the smugglers’ den she was calm because she had decided that this was the only sane course of action. So when she drew the bike up next to the doorway where she’d left Chaison, and saw that he wasn’t there, Antaea swore and kicked the bike’s cowling six times.

“Fanning! Where are you, damnit!” She circled the building, then stopped to climb inside it. He was nowhere to be found. Antaea’s heart sank. Of course, he was a military man and as ruthless as she. He’d never had any intention of waiting for his men, he’d just waited until she left and struck out on his own.

Either that or Richard and Darius
had
arrived in her absence. Maybe they had convinced him to abandon her.

She preferred that version of events.

Depressed and full of self-recriminations as she was, it took Antaea a while to notice that the traffic around her had changed. When she did she sat up, startled, and looked around. Had Neverland arrived already?

People were streaming through the city, vast throngs of them headed in one direction. They weren’t going out, so it wasn’t to escape. They were on their way
in
.

She cut the engine and strained to hear the loud conversations, interspersed with shouts and waving hands that propagated up and down the stream of people. The voices blended together into a chaos of noise in which she picked out the words “Neverland” and “attack” every now and then. There was one word however that kept being repeated, like a mantra.

Corbus.

She burped the bike’s engine so as to drift next to the crowd. “What’s going on?” she yelled at nobody in particular.

“The pols are gone!” shouted a rakish young man with a buzz cut. He wore one of the uniforms that were common throughout Falcon Formation, but the shoulder patches that indicated his job and rank had been torn off. Now that she’d noticed that, Antaea saw that many other people in the crowd were missing their patches as well.

“The city fathers, the bureaucrats, the pols—they all left when the battle went against us,” continued the young man. “Flew away like bats at dawn. The city’s wide open to the Gretels!”

“So where is everybody going?”

He laughed, a bit wildly, and pointed ahead. “The circus!”

In the distance, the giant bowl of the circus stadium glowed under smoking arc lights. The golden wickerwork sphere it cradled was spinning with stately majesty, colored spotlights on it throwing arms of light into the depths and bowers of the clouding neighborhoods. Flocks of people converged on it from every direction.

“But—but why?” She burped the bike’s engine again to catch up with the man who’d spoken to her. “What’s at the circus?”

He laughed again. “Corbus!”

“The
strongman
?”

He nodded. “People were starting to riot, they were trashing the municipal offices. Somebody’d cornered an informer, they were going to tear him to pieces. Then Corbus shows up, he’s carrying a bag of yarn. Apparently he knits! He throws it aside and fights the whole crowd! Knocks down twenty men, tells them to stop acting like babies. Then he jumps to a podium and starts talking. Tells jokes, gets the whole crowd laughing with him. And then…”

“What?”

“He organized them. Sent them to put out the fires, look in on the old people…He took charge!”

The cry was being taken up by the crowd now, drowning out the rest of what he said. “Corbus, Corbus, Corbus!”

Antaea sat back in amazement. The pols had deserted the city, and somebody had stepped forward to take responsibility. A circus performer! It was simultaneously pathetic and glorious, and she found herself drawn to follow these people—whom she didn’t know and shouldn’t care about—to the stadium. Yet she had to find Chaison.

Unless…A suspicion came to her.
He wouldn’t.
He might. Chaison Fanning was a romantic, a man who took the notion of noble obligation seriously—an anachronism in an increasingly cynical world. It would be just like him to break up a fight, to put out a fire, command rioters to go look after the elderly…Corbus and he were kindred spirits. And if he’d heard about the city’s power vacuum, and further that somebody was
taking responsibility
for these people…

She spun up the bike and headed for the stadium, which was a swirl of people like panicked schools of fish, darting this way and that unpredictably with flashing wings. There was a general movement into the bowl of the stadium, though, and she followed it, pausing to tie up the bike in a nearby grove.

Nobody was taking tickets at the stadium’s lip, people were just pouring over it and hand-walking down the ropes crisscrossing its interior to find perches. The noise was incredible, just a continuing, mindless chant of “Coooorbus, Cooorbus.” The mob mind could turn in any direction at any second and Antaea felt herself being swept up in it, in a way she hadn’t felt since she was a child attending the city games at home. The feeling was terrifying and intoxicating and even as she fought against it she felt a crushing sense of loneliness come over her. Everybody here was
with
someone, it seemed, and even the solitaries were one with the city itself tonight.

Antaea shook off the feeling. She had come here to save her sister Telen’s life. Everything she had done for weeks now had that as its aim. This crowd, this city, even the admiral were just steps along that road.

The chant faltered and an animal roar filled the stadium. Antaea found a perch on one of the ropes and looked up. The majestically-turning golden sphere in the stadium’s center had stopped and spotlights were sliding over to focus on one patch of its surface. The whole ball was festooned with devices, she saw: trapezes, cannon, and nets, water sculptures and cages and twirling mirrorballs. The circus would have used all of that as an aerial playground, and if the ball was spun up to any high rate of turn, the performers would have had to do their stunts while hanging precariously over the heads of the crowd. That was a situation few in Virga ever encountered and for most people the sheer novelty of it would add a thrill to the proceedings.

A hatch opened in the side of the ball and the spotlights zoomed over to highlight it. A bald man climbed out onto the wicker surface. He waved his hands for silence and there was some cheering and a diminution of the overall chaos, but ragged elements of the chant continued. After a moment he threw up his arms in disgust and disappeared back up the hatch.

He’d been an odd-looking fellow, short and squat in a way Antaea had never seen. The opposite look was common enough, of people stretched out to almost spidery lengths by a life spent in low-gravity and freefall. This look, though, reminded her of something.

A few seconds later the hatch flipped open again and the man emerged, only now he was wearing an absurdly bright black-and-yellow-striped tunic. A massive cheer rose, shaking the stadium and making the taut ropes thrum. Again, he waved his hands for silence and this time, reluctantly, the crowd obeyed.

He waited until the noise had subsided, and then waited some more. Antaea had thought it was silent, but it became even more still. He waited, and the silence became as vast a presence as the roar of the mob had been minutes before.

“What are you
doing
here?” The words were startling because they seemed to come from behind Antaea, but she’d seen Corbus’s mouth move just before she heard them. The acoustics of the bowl focused the sound back on the ropes, she realized. He was perfectly audible.

“What are you doing here?” he said again. His voice was very deep and gravelly, belying the clownish attire. “Please, it’s not safe. I beg of you, return to your houses and look to the safety of your children. There’s nothing for you here.” He turned to go, but a wave of noise rose from the crowd, an animal hiss that made Antaea’s scalp crawl. Corbus was pinned by it, halfway into the hatch. He turned to look at the crowd and though he was too far away to see clearly, she imagined that right now he must look deeply frightened.

He stood out from the wicker again, raising his hands in supplication. “Please! Our situation is impossible. Stonecloud has been isolated by the Gretels and our own forces have deserted us. What are we to do?”

“Fight!” someone in the crowd yelled. The mob rumbled assent.

Corbus shook his head. “How? This is insane! What army have we got? Are we going to push the Gretels back with our bare hands?”

“You’re an Atlas!” a man shouted. It took a moment for the word to register with Antaea; then she blinked in surprise.

The Atlases were legends, or so she’d thought. (
Ha!
a little voice in her head said,
you thought the precipice moths were legends too, and the Gates of Virga, and…
) As a girl she’d heard stories of nations that built special town-wheels where the gravity was much higher than normal—up to three gravities, so it was said. They raised babies on these wheels, trained them as soldiers. Turned loose on enemies in freefall, they were practically unstoppable because of their titanic strength and endurance. Atlases were reputed to be short and squat, boulders of muscle with thick necks.

Corbus waved again. “I’m just an entertainer,” he said. “A buffoon. What I might have been…it makes no difference now. The Gretels will be here in days, maybe hours. What do you want me to do?”

“Fight!” someone shouted. Others took up the cry. Corbus waved his hands desperately.

“Fight who?” he cried. “They’ve sent a
city
at us.
Navies
fight! Not cities. Not people. The people in Neverland are just like us—just like you. Women, children, old people who’ve earned nothing if not the right to die in peace at home. We fight them, we fight ourselves. Even if we won, we’d lose.”

The chant continued rising in intensity:
Fight, fight fight fight!
Corbus hung in the air, his whole posture beseeching, defeated. He curled in on himself as if the words were blows.

“Get out of there, get out,” she heard herself mutter. “Come
on.
” She realized she was gripping the rope with maniacal intensity.

Suddenly Corbus burst into motion, throwing out his limbs to make a star shape. He had torn off his polka-dot shirt.

“Fiiiiiight!”
he roared. The sound filled the stadium and the chanting died instantly. The crowd gasped and Antaea felt as if she’d been slapped.

What had just happened? Had his reluctance just now been an act? Or had he really undergone a magical change of heart before the whole watching city, buoyed by its passion and compliant to its will? The cynic in her couldn’t believe it, but there was an electricity in the air suddenly, a hunger to believe. She longed to follow it.

“If fight we must, then we must fight the true enemy!” he bellowed. “The Gretels’ navy leads that city. We can fight that navy and spare the innocent city that is being shoved like a sacrificial victim onto our swords. But understand this: if a fight is what you want, then
you
must fight. Not your neighbor there on the rope beside you. You, yourself! You must commit to it, you must be willing to die for your city if you are going to see it saved! Can you do that?”

Yeeeeesss!

“It can be done,” shouted Corbus. “We can save Stonecloud
and
Neverland. Not for the fucking bureaucrats in their distant capitals, not so the pols can return to torment us for eternity. But for our own sakes! For the sake of our cities and ourselves! Are you with me?”

They screamed YES at him. Antaea’s heart was pounding; she wanted to scream right along with them. But as she stared around wide-eyed at the crowd, she spotted Chaison Fanning.

Among twenty thousand shouting people, he stood out. He was perched on a rope near the top of the bowl, quite close to Corbus. And, seemingly alone in all the crowd, he wasn’t cheering or yelling. He sat quite still, his faced turned toward Corbus, his expression serious and intent.
Studying.
Or, perhaps, judging.

Again Antaea’s hackles rose, but this time it was because she was seeing an aspect of the admiral she had known, in an abstract sort of way, must be there. She’d met him as a refugee, but what she was looking at right now was a coldly calculating military leader. He was assessing the situation, deciding what Corbus might be capable of.

Swearing luridly enough to draw shocked glances from the people around her, Antaea began to jostle her way over to him. She had to step from rope to rope, flying little distances. People yelled at her to get out of the way, she was blocking the view. She kept on going.

“If we’re going to do this,” Corbus was saying, “I’m going to need experienced people. I’d like everyone who’s got military experience to come up—in an orderly fashion!” He glowered at the crowd. “Assemble here.” He pointed to the empty shark cages to his right. “We’re going to need city workers, people who know where the sewage lines run, the emergency routes, and who have keys to the fire trucks. Assemble here.” He pointed to his left. “And lastly, I’m going to need commanders. Military personnel of rank. I don’t care how old you are, if you mustered out twenty years ago. The city needs you. Are there any captains in the crowd? Anybody who was a colonel in the last war? Join me now.”

Antaea knew exactly what was about to happen. She was going to lose her admiral to this man. Once Chaison was ensconced with Corbus and his people, she would never get near him. She’d have to go back to Gonlin empty-handed and then her sister…