Pirate Sun (20 page)

Chaison opened his eyes. He was falling through a sky dotted with green spherical farms and the distant glow of houses. Ahead, in the direction of his fall, Slipstream’s sun was reddening as it prepared to shut down for the night. Cutting across its face was a long dove-gray contrail. He heard the fading scraping sound of a departing jet.

He yelled, and again struggled to bring his hands around. Now he felt the ropes that bound them. Cursing wildly, he tumbled over and over.

Then a hand clamped onto his shoulder, steadying him. Antaea hove into view, her wings twin strokes of magenta against the darkening sky. She was frowning, and wouldn’t meet his eye.

“Holiday’s over, Chaison,” she said quietly.

For a moment he sputtered, all manner of protests and accusations on his lips. But he kept silent because Chaison suddenly realized his own mistake: he had believed he knew all that was motivating Antaea Argyre, and he had been wrong.

“Where are we?” he asked, through a tight throat.

“We bailed out early,” she said. “Hopefully the others won’t find out in time to find us. Don’t worry, we’re on our way to Rush, too. Just not to visit the same people.”

All his effort was wasted. His worrying, his hopes about getting home; the breakout, running from Kestrel, the defense of Stonecloud—Antaea had wiped it all away. Close as he was, he wasn’t going to see his home after all, and it was a woman he had cautiously come to trust and care about who had taken it all away. The realization stuck in his throat like ashes. He couldn’t speak.

Antaea sighed heavily. “You’re not even going to ask why? Well I’ll show you why.” She unclasped something around her neck. She opened the locket in the fading sunlight. Inside was a nice but perfectly ordinary miniature of a perfectly ordinary-looking young woman. She had the same skin tones as Antaea…and the face was similar.

“My sister Telen,” she said. “As she was two years ago.” Now Antaea did something to the locket, turning the portrait aside to reveal another picture.

“My sister, as she is now. Or was, three weeks after the Outage.” Antaea held the locket in front of Chaison’s eyes until he had to acknowledge that he understood what he was seeing. This time she did meet his gaze.

“Who has her?”

“In a way,” she said heavily, “that’s the most terrible thing. It’s
friends
who have her. Men and women, anyway, whom I believed were my friends…. Come, we have to get out of the clear air incase Darius and Richard see that we’re gone.”

“They’ll feel it,” he said as she grabbed his shirt collar. “The cat will fly differently.”

“I was counting on them being too tired to notice.” She began kicking the wing stirrups, and with him in tow flapped laboriously in the direction of a peach-colored cloud bank.

As she flew, Antaea seemed to be composing her thoughts. “I was telling the truth when I said I believe Virga has been trapped by its own technologies,” she said. “We paid too high a price to keep artificial nature out; we sacrificed the ability to keep people free from robbers, and demagogues and…pilots. Pirates. I thought—oh, for two or three seconds—that you might be sympathetic too, and decide to give up the key freely. I forgot that Slipstream’s a pirate sun. You’re no better than Falcon, or the Gretels.”

“You don’t know what I might have done.”

“I know you weren’t about to give up the key. But…” She was silent for a long time, and during that silence they entered the chilly precincts of the cloud. “The fact is I wouldn’t have given it up either,” she said at last. “Not to
these
people.”

“They’re not the home guard, are they?”

“Oh, they are! Members of the guard who have been outside Virga, like me, and have seen what’s possible. Who disagree with the guard’s policy of political and technical neutrality. We—they—believe that the people of Virga deserve the right to choose their own fate. The guard is arrogant and ultimately only serves the powers-that-be inside Virga. Well, I didn’t want to serve the pirates.”

Chaison said nothing. She was tying them together in the silver darkness. Soon it would be completely dark and he would be back in the nightmare of his cell.

“After the Outage, some of the members of my group decided to act. We were all looking for the key anyway, but they were determined not to hand it over if they found it. We’d use it, they said, to free Virga from our terrible backwardness.

“I was the extraction expert for Meridian, the only one of our group who knew Slipstream and its neighbors. I had to be the one to sniff out the location of the key. So they came to me, in secret of course, and asked for my help.

“And like an idiot, I refused.”

“Why?” He barely heard himself; all sound was absorbed in the cloud, like vision itself.

“I didn’t trust the motives of our leadership.—Less than I trusted the leaders of the guard itself. I’d thought…well, I never believed we would get the chance for the kind of power these men craved, and in the meantime their stated agenda had fit mine. How was I to know you would plunder a mythical treasure, find something supposedly lost forever, and throw the whole world into chaos with it?”

“Don’t blame me,” he said. “I’m the one who’s tied up here.”

“They have my sister. Chaison, you have to believe me, I wouldn’t be doing this if there were any other way! I have to, or they’ll kill her.”

“You have to what?”

“I have to get you to tell me where the key to Candesce is,” she said.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I take you to them,” she said, looking away. “They’re waiting for us. In Rush.”

Chaison gave a long, ragged sigh. Then, despite himself, he had to laugh. “What?” said Antaea, sounding wounded.

“It seems everyone is waiting for us in Rush,” he murmured.

“Just tell me where it is,” she said. “Then we can head for the city. I can drop you off at some pub; you can find Darius and Richard and laugh about your narrow escape…. And never have to see me again.”

“You know I can’t give you what you want,” he told her.

It was, of course, fickle, duplicitous Venera Fanning who had the key. And while Chaison had no idea where to find his wife, and though she was not the proper person to trust with the key, he couldn’t bring himself to give her up. He found that he didn’t care what she was doing or whether she’d waited for him; the thought of Antaea’s people going after her enraged him. He would give them nothing, come what may.

He smiled grimly at Antaea, and they settled in silence to wait.

IT WAS IN
the deepest chill of the night that Antaea decided the coast was clear. She unfurled her wings, flicking dew from them, then began to tirelessly pump the stirrups, towing Chaison out of the cloud and into memory.

He knew these skies. Dark as it was, the air was alight with thousands of lamps and lanterns from the many settlements that clustered near Rush. Each had its characteristic shape and coloration and as a boy Chaison had memorized them all. They were the constellations of his youth.

There had been that escapade when he was eighteen, down there in Blanson Township. Funny thing: Antonin had been involved in that little bit of petty theft and vandalism. And over there was the little wheel of Hatfall, where Chaison had briefly (and awkwardly, he now knew) wooed a local girl. Her parents had been overjoyed at his attention, highborn as he was. But one thing Chaison had not been in his youth was an accomplished lover.

Not until he met Venera.

There was a tug on his rope every few seconds, as Antaea’s wings made another peristaltic flap. It felt maddeningly like a tug to get his attention, but she wasn’t speaking and he had nothing to say to her. He brooded and watched the lights that preserved his memories go by, untouchable and unreachable.

At least Darius and Richard would be all right. Even now Darius might be running in the streets of his childhood home, free for the first time since he came to an awareness of who he was. The thought buoyed Chaison, surprisingly strongly. Wars, whole countries might be lost, but a commander who’s saved even one life is a hero to that one.

Despite himself, he smiled.

“Hey,” he said into the darkness. After a moment Antaea grunted, and he realized she had been half-asleep. Chaison cursed his luck; had he known he could have climbed up his rope and subdued her…maybe.

“What is it?” she said, not pausing in the slow rhythm of her wing-flaps.

“What are you going to do after you’ve got her back?”

There was a long silence. “Don’t ask me that.”

“Oh, are you going to gag me now?”

“Chaison, I’ll—”

“Do whatever you have to, sure. But you know what, Antaea, if you have any sense of honor in you at all, then one of the things you have to do is treat me fairly. And the least that you can do is not stop your ears to me.”

A pained, weary sigh drifted back on the air. “Is this my penance, then?”

“No, it’s a conversation between combatants.” She didn’t answer that, so he continued. “You and I find ourselves on opposite sides here. But I’ve found that there’s two kinds of soldier, Antaea. There’s those who can only fight by demonizing the enemy, or belittling him in their own minds. They have to hate you to fight you. But the true soldier can fight without hating.

“I’m just wondering if you always despised me, or whether you’ve made yourself do it in order to give you strength to do…this.”

There was another long silence. Then, very softly, “What do you think?”

Chaison laughed bitterly. “Don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t presume to demand that I make some sort of lover’s leap of blind faith about what you feel or what you think because I
don’t
know, I have no idea what you’re really feeling at this very second and right now, guessing could get me killed. So tell me the truth—and don’t lie to save your own feelings or mine, I won’t respect that now or later. Did you only sleep with me to put me off my guard?”

This time the silence stretched for over a minute. Chaison decided he knew the answer from that silence, but eventually she said hoarsely, “No. I didn’t sleep with you to put you off your guard.”

Then, before he could reply, she said, “Why are you doing this to me? You know perfectly well I don’t have any choice about this. Chaison, Telen’s my
sister.
They’ll kill her unless I deliver you.”

“Fine,” he said. “Fine, I understand that. My question to you is, what about after you deliver me? What happens then? They turn her over to you and you both fly away to Pacquaea and that’s the end of the story? Or do you ensure her safety and then come back for me? You’re an expert at extraction, after all.”

“They’re not going to kill you,” she said. “Chaison, if I thought that, I—”

“Don’t lie to me, Antaea. Because here’s the thing: you could have told me about this. You could have explained that your sister’s life was at stake and convinced me to talk to these men. I believe you would have tried that, if you’d believed that they wouldn’t kill me. But that’s not really what you think, is it? You know full well that my secret is worth dying for and killing for, and you didn’t believe you could marshal an argument strong enough to convince me to go along with you. You didn’t try to convince me to help you save your sister by cooperating because you knew that I would do the math and realize that I’m not getting out of this unscathed, even if they let me live.

“Yet you still could have told me the truth, if you were willing to plan an escape for me. We could have worked on that together—all of us, even Kestrel who wants me alive for his own purposes. Yet you chose not to do that. Why? Because you’ve decided: once you have your sister you’re done here. Done with me. Isn’t that right?”

“You’ve figured that out, have you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I have. But since I’ve decided not to make any more assumptions, I’ll ask just to be sure. Antaea, are you done with me? Are you leaving me to these men without trying to rescue me or soften what they do to me?”

This time there was no answer from her at all.

ANTAEA HAD ALWAYS
had a certain fondness for Slipstream, piratical interloper that it was. The people were warm and welcoming aside from that strange political blind spot that permitted them to contemplate and carry out the conquest of the nations they moved through. The paradox was endlessly fascinating.

Under any other circumstances she would have been happy to be approaching Slipstream’s capital, Rush. The city was gorgeous even at night. In daylight you could see the huge brightly colored pinwheels that spun from the edges of the city’s town-wheels. At night it was the sky-spanning panoply of lights that was enthralling. A few points of brilliance dotted the sky behind her as she flapped wearily through the still-warm air—but ahead they thickened rapidly, becoming swirls and knots of radiance where buildings clustered. Then, two miraculous sights hove into view, warring for attention: Rush city and Rush asteroid.

The city’s town-wheels were huge open-ended cylinders, festooned with lights like jumbles and piles of gems. The air glowed around each quartet of cylinders brightly enough that she could have read a book even here a mile out. Hundreds of ships sat in or slowly trawled the skies around the wheels and a low hum reached her, the composite noise of many jets, conversations, machines, and the movement of things small and large through the air.

Rush invited. You could get lost in there, among so many people. It welcomed foreigners in a way that no city in Falcon Formation could. Antaea and Chaison should be heading for one of the late-night bars right now, there to slouch in a corner and listen to the musicians and the laughter, smell the pipe smoke, and share the beer. Then to a cramped but wonderful room together. It was what she wanted; was, in fact, how she had defined
adventure
to herself before Telen introduced her to the home guard and its awesome mission.

She turned resolutely away from Rush, aiming instead for the second miraculous sight in Slipstream’s sky. Rush Asteroid carved its dimensions out of the night in shades of reflected city-light, all muted by the foliage of the trees that carpeted it. The asteroid was four miles long and two wide, the single largest concentration of matter in Meridian. From a distance, in daylight, it was a bright silhouette hiding Slipstream’s sun. As distance closed you began to pick out details, and each one shattered your sense of its scale. First the green carpet resolved into trees, then you began to make out towers and blockhouses thrusting out at odd angles. Closer, and the many gaps and cracks in its surface became visible.

Rush asteroid was of a stony type, comprised of four main bodies and a lot of gravel like glue between them. Slipstream’s industries had mined that gravel for centuries, first digging deep pits into it and lately, carving trenches that threatened to cut the asteroid into several pieces. Nobody wanted that because of centuries of forest growth and building, so scaffolding and heavy girders laced their way across the biggest gaps. Deep inside these wounds cascades of glittering light nestled—buildings and streetlights from the factories and foundries dug into the asteroid’s flesh. At night it was these bare pits and trenches that were visible because the forest ate any lights that glowed under its canopy.

At the end of her strength, Antaea flew slowly toward a gigantic stone, hundreds of feet wide, that had been jacked up out of its original socket in the asteroid’s side. Spars and beams held it up against the asteroid’s microgravity; it was bare of trees and scarred on all sides by decades of mining. Glowing windows and fans of light from opened doors made an intricate diorama at the bottom of the cup-shaped cavity below it. This was where Raham had told Antaea to go.

She back-pedaled her wings, bringing herself and her captive to a stop in the night air. Chaison Fanning had remained silent for the past half-hour; now he laughed bitterly. “Second thoughts? Somehow I doubt it.”

“I’m going to untie you,” she said. “Things are getting a bit tight here and we’re likely to be seen. I’d find it hard to explain why I’m towing a bound man across the sky.”

“I daresay you would.” He rubbed his wrists after the rope drifted away, while Antaea brought out her heavy pistol and cocked it. “Problem is, I haven’t got wings. How am I going to follow you down there?” He nodded at the pit.

“You’ll hold onto the rope, like a proper passenger,” she told him. She flipped the end over to him and he took it reluctantly. “And don’t even think of yanking on it,” she added.

He took the rope, but shook his head. “Antaea, you’re really not thinking this through. If I wanted to kick up a fuss, shooting me would just bring more attention.”

“If
you
despise
me,
then go ahead,” she said. “You can make things go badly for both of us; or you can cooperate and they’ll just go badly for you. That’s your choice.”

He made no more protest as he allowed her to tow him across the air. Of course not: he was an honorable man.

The underside of the enormous stone was patched with moss, deeply scored by machines and nature, and washed with faint light from the buildings below. They threaded their way between the girders holding it up and descended toward the semicircle of shacks at the bottom of the cup. These were wooden boxes connected by ropeways, some with incongruously normal doors and windows on them. Antaea was familiar with the place, since this mining company was a home guard front. Like Ergez’s mansion, it was a safe house and storage depot for any guard operations involving the nations of Meridian. It was seldom used.

As she flapped deeper into the bowl she noticed something new. A gnarled, thickly branched tree stuck out of the stone next to the largest shack. There had never been a tree there before; it was beyond her why anyone should move a mature tree into a place like this, where it would receive little water and not enough sunlight.

As she approached the shack the tree quivered, and then stood up.

Chaison swore loudly, and Antaea heard herself doing the same under her breath. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s a friend.”

I think.

Clearly, the precipice moth was in disguise. The thick branches couldn’t completely cover its glittering surface, and its head was free of foliage as it rose to look at her. She recognized that scarred ball. It was one of only a few moths Antaea had seen up close.

“You’re the commander of Flight twelve,” she said in surprise. Flight twelve was Telen’s squadron.

The moth cocked its head, but before Antaea could say any more, a dozen winged human forms took flight from hiding places around the shack.

The seven men and five women quickly encircled Antaea, gesturing her down with drawn weapons. She recognized most of them as Gonlin’s people. This was definitely the right place.

But…“What’s
that
doing here?” she asked one of the women as they settled next to the shack. Several of the guard members were glancing nervously back at the giant beast, as if afraid it would do something hostile. Antaea saw that Chaison had noticed this too; she exchanged a glance with him that was, for the first time in hours, complicit rather than hostile.

Nobody answered her question. One of the men nodded to the now-opened door of the shack. Mouth dry, Antaea entered, leaving the rope outside.

She hesitated again at the split in the stone floor that led to the mine. This felt wrong. “What, no congratulations for me?” she said to the grim-faced guard members. “What about a ‘welcome home’ at least?”

One of them, a man named Erik who had once been a close acquaintance, said, “Welcome home.” He didn’t return her smile.

Chaison sent her another glance, and gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. Antaea forced herself to smile and laugh. “Thanks!” She ducked into the crevasse and the others followed.

Antaea had once heard that places like the one she was in were typically billions of years old. This one might predate life on old Earth. There was a time when such facts might have impressed her; but she’d seen death, and so past and future no longer seemed distant at all. They were as close as the air on the inside of a bubble, reachable by an instant through the simple act of dying.

Still, this place had an eery coldness to it that reminded her of the wall at the world’s edge. The crevasse widened beyond the entrance until its side walls disappeared entirely. Antaea moved ahead between two surfaces of rock, only a chain of whirring gaslights indicating which direction to take.

She had been here in daylight once and remembered seeing slivers of light in the far distance. The asteroid was cracked in half at this point; the undulations her raised hand brushed were the mirror image of those her toes touched. There were other ways in and out, suitable for a slender woman but not mining equipment. It was a fact to bear in mind, considering the circumstances.

Ahead was the beginning of the mined area, marked by more lights and shacks. The shacks were just several walls joining the ceiling and floor; some were open on one side, others on two. They were for the most part just places to store tools. But several were fully enclosed, and had lit windows.

“In there.” One of the men gestured to one of the bigger shacks with his rifle. Antaea moved reluctantly toward it, hearing the slight scuff of Chaison’s feet following her. She couldn’t look at him. She felt sick.

“So the precipice moths are part of your conspiracy,” Chaison murmured as the shack’s door swung open.

“Not my conspiracy,” she hissed, feeling herself flush. “Not anymore. And no…a moth
couldn’t
be part of it. They don’t have loyalties to humans—only humanity.”

“Then what—?”

“Antaea! It’s good to see you.” Gonlin emerged into the half-light outside the shack. The light of the doorway behind him was blocked by several other large men.

Gonlin appeared tired, but relaxed. There had been a time when Antaea had been impressed by his calm assuredness. That geniality struck a false note now as he put out his hand for Antaea to shake. She was so appalled by his brazen hypocrisy that she found herself shaking it. Gonlin beamed at the others as if this proved something.

“Thank you,” he said to her with apparent heartfelt sincerity. “Chaison Fanning, indeed! I take it that, since you’ve brought the man himself, you weren’t able to make him talk yourself.”

Despite herself she glanced away. “No,” she said curtly.

“That’s all right,” said Gonlin soothingly. “It was a monumental feat to capture him at all—considering that there’s two whole nations’ worth of troops trying to do just that. You were always our best extraction agent, Antaea, that’s why we had to have you do the job.”

“Where’s my sister?”

“Right over there.” He pointed to one of the outlying shacks. She saw a gleam of lamplight in the little box’s window.

“Really, Antaea, I want to hear all about how you did it,” he said, “but I know you’re angry and anxious about Telen. Go see her and we can talk later.”

“Talk—? Gonlin, if you’ve hurt her—”

He looked puzzled. “Hurt her? Antaea, it was
her
idea.”

She just stared at him. Gonlin shook his head in a long-suffering way. “You thought you knew Telen, but really, she knew
you.
She knew what would motivate you. And she understands necessity, Antaea—in a way that you never did…”

Gonlin continued talking but his words were just a gabble. She whirled and jumped toward the shack he’d pointed to.

More words from behind her: it was Chaison shouting, “Careful! He’s playing you!” She heard a muffled blow, then a jumbled scuffle. Then a door slamming.

Antaea spun around slowly as she slid between the two gray rock faces.
He’s playing you.
What had Chaison meant by that?

“Antaea, wait!” Erik was following her. She didn’t wait for him or pause until he said, “Gonlin wanted me to escort you.”

She whirled. “Am I a prisoner too, now? Is that it?”

He looked away. “Antaea, I’m sorry. We didn’t know this was Gonlin’s plan until you’d left.”

“Excuse me if I don’t believe that,” she sneered. “Well? Are you here to keep me from leaving? Or can I take my sister and go, like Gonlin promised?”

He backed away. “Of course, of course.” There was a light of calculation in his eyes, but Antaea couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She turned again and kicked off from the stone plain.

The shack was just ahead. It was a rough cube of planks ten feet on a side, with a single door and small dust-rimed windows in its other walls. Darkness swallowed any details beyond it.

She had to know if Gonlin was lying. If Telen was in that glorified crate, was she a prisoner or free? What would she say when Antaea confronted her—would she fall weeping into her sister’s arms, or would she be cold?

Antaea braked herself against the rock face just outside the shack. She reached for its rusted latch, then hesitated. This unthinking haste was what Gonlin had wanted from her. That was what Chaison had meant: Gonlin had deliberately provoked her to throw open this door without thinking about what lay beyond it.

Why would he do that?

She licked her dry lips. Her fingers trembled an inch from the latch. She was suddenly sure that if she tugged on that latch, she would receive a bullet in the heart or shrapnel through and through. Why would Gonlin bother to leave her alive after his brutal extortion? Yet she had to know whether Telen was here.

She glanced back. Erik was watching her from near the other shack. There seemed no alternative; she wrapped her fingers around the latch.

There was a distant crash and she heard Chaison shouting. Erik turned his head to look and in that brief second Antaea bounced between the rough stone ceiling and floor, around the corner of the shack, and into the shadows. Erik looked back again, paused for a moment, then turned away decisively, moving toward the sound of the fight. As quietly as she could Antaea drifted to the shack’s side window. Heart pounding, she looked in.