Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

8

MAERTA WAS WAITING in the glass-walled gallery. Both her bodies were here, and six other large multi-armed shapes hovered in the dimness behind her. "Keir, what are you doing?" she asked.

The Virgans all stopped, looking around uneasily. Keir stepped up, meeting Maerta's gaze with a level look of his own. "This is their only way out," he said defiantly. "If they can break through the cordon on the other side, they'll be home-free. The guard bots won't be able to follow them into Candesce's field."

"I understand that," she said gently. "That's not what I asked. What are you doing?"

He swallowed, feeling the panic starting to return. "I'm leaving," he said; then, realizing that he hadn't yet talked to the Virgans about it, he turned to them. "If you'll have me."

Leal and Piero glanced at one another. "We would," said Leal, "but it's not for us to decide."

Maerta shook her head. "It's too soon, Keir. There's no telling what will happen to you if you enter Candesce's influence before the process is complete."

"What process?" He wanted to tear at his hair in frustrated anger. "What's happening to me," he demanded, "and who did it?"

Maerta opened her mouth, closed it, and for the first time, looked genuinely distressed. "Keir," she said hesitantly. "You're ... Dear, you're de-indexing. And ... you did it to yourself."

De-indexing? He polled scry, but the data was inaccessible--doubtless one of Maerta's "child-proofing" locks. He shook his head in confusion.

"I don't understand! None of this is making any sense." He backed toward the glass passage that led out of the city. "But you can't keep me here. I won't stay."

"It's suicide!" Maerta appealed to the Virgans. "Hasn't he told you what's waiting on the other side of the door? Stay here, we'll keep you safe until we come up with a better option."

To Keir's relief, Leal shook her head with a frown. "I have to deliver my message. I'm overdue."

Maerta took an angry step in Keir's direction; he backed away. "What message could be so important that you'll risk your own lives to bring it back to Virga?"

Leal just stared at her in disbelief. From the look on her face, Keir expected some outburst from her, but what she said was "I've been wondering something ever since we arrived here, Maerta.

"How is that you and your people are still human?"

Maerta said nothing.

"You're not from Virga," Leal went on. "Keir said he's from a planet named Revelation. Are you as well?" Guardedly, Maerta nodded. "And is Revelation within Artificial Nature?"

Another nod.

"Yet you fled here. You're hiding here. From what? What happened on Revelation?"

Maerta looked at Keir, then away. Finally she said, "Revelation was ... a little bubble of humanity in the larger universe. Outside of the arena, you understand, where truces hold between the various forces that contend inside A.N. Then ... the balance of power shifted, several years ago. Revelation's protection evaporated. The planet ... fell.

"We came here because Brink was an obscure place, a secret place, and right next to Virga."

"You came to study Candesce," said Leal.

"Yes. To try to find a way to defend ourselves."

"Then let us go," Leal commanded, "because you are not the only ones with this goal. And if I succeed, I may be able to give you direct access to Candesce, to study it from the inside. --And besides," she added, "if you can rescue the rest of our people from the plains below the city, they can stop this assault. Half of them are Home Guard people, anyway; if the others try to land they'll put a stop to whatever lies Loll's told to incite them. Take care of them, and I promise you, we will take care of Keir Chen."

Maerta looked at Keir. Again he held her gaze defiantly. Her shoulders slumped. "Then go," she said. "And yes, Leal, we'll find your men."

Keir turned and, without a look back, raced up the crystal passage that led from Aethyr, Brink, and Complication Hall to Virga.

* * *

FOR A FEW minutes, Leal thought they would make it. Yet as the mysterious blockhouse that hung in the precise black between the worlds came nearer, she heard muttering among her companions; Piero and the other men were slowing. Leal peered ahead, and she, too, faltered.

John Tarvey was waiting for them at the end of the crystal tunnel.

The lads were drawing their guns, both the ones they'd brought and the new ones Keir Chen's people had made for them. Tarvey just stood there, his hands up and his face half-turned aside--not a gesture of surrender, but a pose that said hear me out.

Keir had come abreast of Leal and now he sent her an uneasy frown. She guessed what he was thinking. They could go back; he could summon his people to help. She shook her head minutely. If the firepower they had with them wasn't sufficient to deal with this thing that had taken on the shape of her friend, whatever force would be enough might also be enough to shatter the crystal tube, and kill them all through exposure to the vacuum.

She brought her party to a halt about thirty feet from the creature. "We shot you before," she shouted. "What makes you think we won't do it again?"

"I'm absolutely sure you will," he said. Still with his hands up, he continued, "But I'm not out to stop you. I can help."

The lads exchanged suspicious glances; then their eyes turned to Leal. She moistened her lips and thought about what to say. "What do you mean?" was all she could finally summon.

"We can end that primitive bombardment that's threatening your friends," said Tarvey. "It's just chemical weapons, after all--primitive airships. They could be swept aside in seconds. All I have to do is make the call."

"Make the call?" She shook her head, uncomprehending. "To who? Who's this 'we' you're talking about? I thought we were your friends."

A look of distress flickered across his face then, to be quickly erased by the uncanny serenity that was so unlike the John Tarvey she knew. "You know us as the virtuals," he said. "We're a vast and ancient civilization--the inheritors of humanity's original spark of consciousness. And we want to help you."

"We don't want your help!" shouted Piero Harper. He raised his pistol. "Stand aside. Now!"

Leal touched her hand to Piero's wrist. "Wait," she said. "Tarvey, we don't need the help of the virtuals right now. But we could use your help."

Tarvey tilted his head to one side, minutely. "What?" he asked.

"You said that all you have to do is make the call." She had some notion of what that meant: there had been telephone stations on some street corners in Sere. You could pay the vendor and shout into the staticky roar of the handset, and with luck make out the gist of what the person on the other end was saying. Here, where Candesce's influence was barely felt, such long-distance communication must be easy. "Do you mean to say that you haven't yet told this civilization of yours what's happening here?"

Now it was Tarvey's turn to look suspicious. "They know I've been following you. They know about Brink."

"But do they know about this?" She nodded at the blockhouse behind him.

Tarvey looked aloof. "I can't find any record of this door, but--"

"Don't. In the name of the friendship we had, John, I beg this of you. If it's in your power to hide this door from your ... friends ... if you can do that, then you can help. You. Not Artificial Nature, John. You."

He slowly lowered his chin, and she could see he was troubled. "All I want," he said, "is that you not die. That we can be ... together."

Leal felt a prickle down the back of her neck at the sudden realization of what he was offering. When John said not die, he meant never die. --And that would have been the most wonderful of offers she could ever have heard, were it not for one thing: his reasons.

"John," she said with quiet sadness, "I can't help you now."

He looked up again, and she saw it in his eyes: the prospect of an eternity outside of Virga, of outliving his friends, his family, his country and even the language of his birth. The loneliness of the image made her shudder. If such loneliness was possible, Leal didn't want to be immortal.

"Please," she said again. "Do this for us. For what you once were. And for what we still are."

John Tarvey crossed his arms and, with the slightest push of his toe against the crystal, drifted to the side. Leal and her lads filed past him, until all that was left to him was silence.

* * *

IT LOOKED LIKE nothing so much as a bush made of knives. It even shone as if it were made of metal, but it moved as though alive--and as it advanced on Jacoby and his men, its blades fanned open like deadly flowers.

Jacoby grabbed a pedestrian rope and drew his sword. "Maybe we can..." But his men were diving away through the bodies; Antaea looked at them, looked at Jacoby, shrugged; and followed the others. To buy time, Jacoby drew his pistol and fired it at the center of the shapeless jagged thing that was advancing on him.

Jacoby's shot struck the knife thing in its knotted metal heart, but it simply pulsed like a steel jellyfish, jetting backward, then opened up multiple arms and came on.

A jumble of bodies and whirling lanterns ricocheted down the passage. His men were shouting to one another and somebody kept on firing, the bullets narrowly missing Jacoby as he struggled to catch up. Behind them, loud cracking noises signaled the birth of more of the dagger-balls.

In the tangle of the corridor Jacoby had to jump from rope to rope, or bounce his shoulder or hip off the walls, then plow through clouds of debris. The dagger-balls simply cut through the lines and batted any obstacles aside.

"Wait, maybe they're friendly!" Antaea shouted, then she laughed wildly. But she was hanging back, waiting for Jacoby. "Come on!" She let go of the lantern she was holding and extended a hand to Jacoby. The lantern spun lazily, sweeping shadows across the bladed thing on Jacoby's heels. They weren't going to get away from it.

In desperation he kicked the lantern. It sailed straight into the snicking complex of blades and exploded. He and Antaea dove away from it; they'd made several jumps from rope to rope before Jacoby realized that the burning thing wasn't following.

"Hold." He grabbed a line to steady himself and looked back. The dagger-ball hovered motionless in the center of the passage, its brothers crowded behind it but unable to get past. "Did we kill it?"

Antaea shook her head. "I think it's too clever for that. Look!"

In zero gravity, fire needed moving air to sustain it. Even as Jacoby realized what the dagger-ball was doing, the globe of flame enveloping it exhausted the available oxygen, flickered, and went out.

"Hell!" They fled as the monsters surged forward again.

A hundred feet on and Mauven had stopped dead. He was waving his lantern in frantic puzzlement at a branching of the passage. "Which way?" Antaea shouted.

Jacoby cursed again. "Just pick one!" It was too late as scything blades filled the air between them. "Fall back!" he shouted, but Desick, his boatswain, drew his sword and leaped at a monster. Desick had fought in three wars and was the best swordsman on the Page, but he couldn't parry the six blades that found him and he tumbled backward, silent and trailing red beads.

The dagger-balls had split the party, with Jacoby, Mauven, and Antaea on one side and the others on the other. There was a passage open to each group, so Jacoby yelled "Go!" across the bladed air and dragged Antaea with him into the dark way.

* * *

"MY MIND WON'T be able to go with you." It was the little golden doll speaking from its perch on Maspeth's shoulder. "The interference from Candesce will drive me mad again."

Maspeth nodded. "We knew you'd have to leave us before we got home. I guess it's good-bye?"

"I can supplement these weapons so that they are more effective," it said. "Would that be helpful?"

"Oh!" She smiled, almost bashfully. "That's a great idea."

"Ach! Come on, then," said Piero Harper. "Everybody up and at 'em." He turned to Keir. "By your leave, sir, show us the way to Virga." Keir nodded; his second body was already on its way to the door. "Come on."

"What are those?" Harper was pointing at the faint glitter of the distant ships that sat silently in the space just outside Virga's hull.

"Keir called it an armada," said Maspeth. "I believe that is what you came to warn us about," she added, speaking to the doll.

Keir saw it nod. "Those ships would be powerless inside Virga. Candesce's suppression field is fatal to the technologies they rely on. They're waiting for the field to fail, as it did a couple of years ago."

"Gods, I hope Hayden never hears about this," she muttered.

They had been bounding along the transparent bridge tube that led to the place Keir called the Glass Jaw. It had been very difficult to discern that they were making any headway these last several minutes; but now a long shape began to resolve out of the darkness ahead. The bridge terminated in the side of this.

"That's where we're going," he said. "The door to Virga."

Harper frowned. "Doesn't look like much. It's not even connected to Virga, I can see that. Is there another bridge on the other side?"

"Can't be," said Leal. "We're turning, Virga is not. How would any sort of bridge connect a still object to a moving one?" She turned to Keir. "What's this all about?"

"There's no bridge," he said quickly, "it's something else. You'll see when we get there."

"What do you mean?" she said, suddenly suspicious.

"It's not like any door you've ever seen."

What they had come to was a vast blockhouse, forbidding and dark, its metal sides devoid of windows or running light. The whole structure--which must have been two thousand feet long and half that in height--hung at the bottom of a set of half-visible gnarled buttresses that must have been dozens of miles long. They rose up into dizzying perspective, ultimately disappearing within the chaos of machinery that sealed Virga to Aethyr and allowed one of those worlds to turn against the other.

"It's like a big version of Complication Hall," one of the airmen said about that ceiling, just before they passed through the round entrance leading into the blockhouse and what little pale light there was vanished.

There was a pause while lamps were switched on. Keir took the opportunity to send his dragonflies ahead and make sure that everything was normal in the Jaw room. Then he said, "This way," and led them past side passages and rooms he'd never explored to Virga's door.

Various hulking robot forms waited in the darkness. Some of these were guardians, Keir knew, heavily armed and keyed to wake once an hour. The rest of the bots were sensing devices the Renaissance was preparing to send through the Jaw. Scry showed all of this detail, but of course the Virgans couldn't see it. "This is it?" somebody muttered as flashlight beams roved to and fro. "It looks like a theater."

"Except they won't be puttin' any plays on in this one," said Harper. As Keir knew, there was no stage, nor any screen facing those tall seats--just a blank wall. Many of the seats had been torn out of the metal flooring and now lay jumbled against their neighbors or broken against the back wall. The remainder looked as though they'd once been deeply padded, but the material was torn out in clumps and strewn about the floor. "Looks like some angry monster chewed on these," Piero joked.

"That's about right," Keir agreed. They all looked at him.

"Sometimes things come through," he explained, "from the Virga side. Agents of the virtuals, sort of advance scouts for the armada you saw a minute ago. They're barely able to survive Candesce's radiation, and it makes 'em a bit rabid. These bots put them down when they climb through."

"Climb through," said Leal. "From where?"

Keir pointed at another door on the opposite side of the chamber. "When this door is open, that door is closed, and vice versa." He checked his scry; it was almost time. "We've got about ten minutes. We have to check these chairs, make sure that there's enough secure ones for all of us. What we're going to do is sit down in them and wait."

"And then?" Harper asked.

"There's two cities, one on the Virga side and this one on our side. Each has a room like this. The rooms can move. In about ten minutes the cities are going to exchange their rooms."

Harper looked puzzled. "But--we're turning; compared to Virga, this whole city is going..."

"About four hundred miles per hour," Keir admitted. "Which is why you'd better hope that these seats can withstand the strain when we're suddenly accelerated up to speed."

He put his head back against the rusted metal seat frame and waited. That was enough time for him to wonder about what he was about to lose--not metaphorically, but literally--by entering Virga. His dragonflies were perched about the room. He'd had them to see with for most of his life. They were as much a part of him as his two native-born eyes.

He turned his head to the left, saw Leal Maspeth. She raised one hand to her shoulder, briefly touching the chest of the little doll on her shoulder. Did she feel the same as him?

The silence was absolute, and it stretched out for one minute, then another. Then somebody giggled. "Is anybody else starting to feel foolish?"

Something hit the back of Keir's chair. The room didn't seem to be moving but he was suddenly being crushed into the seat with tremendous force. A buzzing vibration rolled in waves through him from its metal frame.

He heard a sharp crack and a shout, then a tumbling crashing noise as one of the other chairs flew backward. Then, with shocking suddenness, the pressure disappeared. Keir had been bracing his body against it and in the sudden absence he flew forward out of his chair.

The others were doing the same in a chaos of flailing limbs and shouts. They were weightless--naturally, he'd known they would be, but it still felt like falling.

Part of that feeling was visual: his dragonflies were tumbling to the back wall, and as they fell, their vision went out. He could see one twirling toward him and watched himself reach out and grab it from the air.

There was silence, and in the feeling of falling, some steadiness. Things began to drift.

Several loud bangs rang out, shocking and sudden in the darkness. Keir couldn't see, couldn't feel his dragonflies at all anymore. "Who's shooting?" shouted Piero Harper.

"Not us! It's coming from there!"

Keir tried to look around himself, failed, and then forced his head and eyes to turn. It was an unfamiliar gesture, the sort of movement you reserved for those times when you wanted to make eye contact with people you were speaking to. There were the other chairs, a cloud of silhouetted people and weaving flashlight beams--and orange flashes from the black rectangle of the room's suddenly open other door.

"We're in Virga!" he shouted--maybe unnecessarily, maybe they knew it better than he--but something was out there.

"Quiet!" It was Harper again, and as the clamor of voices fell away Keir heard others shouting--and someone screamed.

Then someone appeared in the dark doorway, for just a moment, but fully lit by flashlight beam. Without the competing vision of his dragonflies, untagged by distracting scry, her image burned into Keir's mind:

An oval face, its fine, perfect features dominated by two gigantic eyes. The face framed by hair in a black pageboy cut that held its shape even in freefall. Her garb, black leather that made her limbs disappear--though he could see her toes sticking out of the half-shoes she wore. She was staring straight at him, lips in an O of surprise.

Something flashed over her shoulder and she whirled, raising something--a sword--and sparks flew as it struck something. The force of the blow knocked her right through the doorway.

The thing that tried to follow her was made entirely of metal. Lacking any tags or annotations, it was all movement and eerily smooth metallic sheen. The absence of any tags made Keir's hackles rise--as if the thing had moved in some perfect silence, as though it had stolen his ability to understand what it was. All knives, saws, and swords, it gripped the doorjamb with three of four bladed limbs and twisted this way and that as if looking for something.

It had struck at the woman's spine but the blow had been absorbed by the battered leather satchel slung over her shoulder.

The others seemed paralyzed at the sight of the dagger-thing, but the sheer terror of seeing an untagged machine moving on its own made Keir pull out the weapon the Edisonians had built. He'd had no time to learn how it worked, but it had been evolved for human use and it felt satisfyingly solid in his arms. His finger found a trigger right where one should be, and he pulled it.

The bang! was deafening. He was suddenly blind in a whole new way. Afterimage lozenges were smeared across his vision and so he groped for the sight of his dragonflies, but they weren't there. Suddenly panicked, he kicked away from the doorway and the thing that had been there.

"Help us!" It was the woman. He heard Harper shout something, then a tumble of motion around him. The shocking report of the new guns crashed and roared through the room--but now, it was coming from beyond the door.

"Are you okay?" Long fingers touched his hand, then his face. He flinched.

"Just the flash. I'll be all right." He blinked at her, saw a jacketed shoulder and pale fingers around the fading afterimage. The smear of light was oddly reassuring; it made her look as if she were tagged in some way that he couldn't quite focus on. "Did I get it?"

She laughed, a bit wildly. "It's not there anymore, if that's what you mean."

Her accent was thick from the centuries of Virga's isolation. She smelled of sweat and leather and lamp oil. "Can you shoot?" she said suddenly. "If not, give me the gun."

He squinted, shook his head, gave up, and handed it to her. "Careful," he said. "It's a lot more powerful than you're probably used to."

"I saw," she said. "Don't worry, I'm experienced with firearms."

He could see well enough to show her its operation and did so; then they pulled themselves through the doorway and into a rapidly subsiding firefight.

Knotted in the center of a long gallery was a large group of Virgans, all dressed in piratical glory compared with Keir's utilitarian coverall. They were firing enthusiastically into a cloud of knife-drones, splintering and exploding them. The drones responded by whirling at high speed and throwing blades at the men; Keir saw that several were pulling shrapnel out of their forearms or hips. Several more were drifting, ominously still.

The leather-clad woman aimed and fired. Keir shut his eyes just in time. She barked in triumph and aimed again. The new guns were making quick work of the drones, and quite suddenly they were all ruined--the last one sparking from multiple gunshots as it tumbled away.

There was silence, then a ragged cheer.

The woman turned to Keir. "Where did you come from? We couldn't get the other door open."

"It was locked on your side," he said. It would just take too long to explain what was beyond it. "But what are you--" He stopped, and so did she, with a laugh: they'd spoken simultaneously.

"--doing here?" he said. "Mine's a long story. What about yours?"

She tilted her head, considering. "Long," she said. "Forget it. Can we go your way?"

"The door won't open again for another hour," he said. "I don't think those drones will leave us alone that long."

A man's voice, clear and sharp, cut through the gabble of voices. "Listen up! Who are we all? There's two groups here. Will somebody from each introduce themselves?"

Everybody looked at the man who'd spoken. He bowed in midair. "I'm Jacoby Sarto of Sacrus. We're docked at the edge of the city. We're here on ... Home Guard business."

Leal moved out of the doorway. "I'm Leal Maspeth of Abyss," she said. "We--"

"Leal?" The huge-eyed woman gave a shriek. "It is you!"

"What--? A-Antaea?"

Suddenly they were hugging, laughing wildly, while the men all looked at one another in confusion. Keir shrugged at the leonine Jacoby Sarto, who scowled in return.

"I got your letter," Antaea was saying. "We came to find you!"

"Among other things," Sarto pointed out.

"But I never in a million years would have expected to find you fighting monsters in a ... a place like this! How did you get here?"

Now Leal's expression became cautious. "It's a very long story," she said. "But what it boils down to is, I'm here with a message for the people of Virga, and these men have risked their lives to help me bring it here."

"I ... see." Antaea and Jacoby Sarto exchanged a look, and then so did Leal and Piero Harper. This bizarre tension was interrupted as someone shouted, "Incoming!"

Flashlights swirled around and their light pinioned a door on the far wall of the gallery. The three men who'd suddenly appeared there blinked at the lights. "Uh ... Captain Sarto?" one of them said hesitantly.

Sarto laughed. "You made it!"

"Yes, but those things're right behind us, sir."

"Then we'd best save the stories for later," said Sarto. "Who's got a clear idea of how to get out of here?"

One of Sarto's men put up his hand. "I do."

"Come on, then. Let's form up. We need one of those special guns you brought," Sarto said to Leal, "aimed at each of the six directions. We'll bunch up so they can't cut us off from each other like last time. Is everybody ready?"

"What about..." Two of Sarto's men were cradling the bodies of their dead comrades.

"Bring them, then," said Sarto brusquely. "But don't fall behind."

Leal Maspeth looked around until she spotted Keir, then she flew over. "Are you sure you want to come?" she asked. "You still have time to turn and go back."

He hesitated. The plan had made so much sense just a few hours ago--but that had been before his dragonflies had died and left him half-blind. "I don't know what to--" He shook himself. "Seems I have no choice but to go with you. If you'll have me."

"Of course, but how are you going to get home again?"

He shuddered. "Brink's not home."

"Let's go!" shouted Sarto. The big-eyed woman--Antaea--was leading an unruly flock toward one of the black entrances. He should really get the weapon back; on the other hand, he'd never fired any sort of gun before today. Maybe it would do more good in her hands.

He and Leal followed the rest. Two of her people took up the rear, one moving forward, the other clutching the back of the first one's belt. He let his comrade tow him while he faced backward. "Pull me like that?" Leal asked Keir.

Keir wanted to say no--he couldn't see properly, freefall was making him nauseous, and there weren't even any scry tags on the people or things here--but in the end he nodded. It would be better to let Leal watch for danger coming up from behind, because he was beginning to doubt whether he would be able to see it if it came. He would just keep his two remaining eyes fixed on the backs of the people ahead of him.

What followed was chaotic and terrifying and seemed to go on forever. They bounced, toppled, and flew up small passages like capillaries, large ones like arteries. Hissing whispering things awoke as they passed, and the darkness behind filled with the angry drone of pursuit. Startled shouts and gunshots erupted at random moments; once, everything dissolved into screaming and orange flashes and bangs for long minutes, and then Leal's hand found Keir's wrist again and pulled him onward.

He did his best. He'd expected to lose his extra senses in Virga; it was just that he hadn't counted on the terrible feeling of helplessness that came with that loss.

His scry had gone out for the first time in his life, and too late he was realizing that he'd relied on it far more than he'd known. Half-blind, half-deaf, he held the hand of a stranger as they fled together through a city of monsters.

Only when the pursuit had faded behind them did he begin to feel the sharp pain in his left hand and realize he was tightly clutching something in it. He raised it in a stray beam of lantern light, and stiffly opened his fingers.

One of his dragonflies nestled, half-crushed in his palm. Suddenly it seemed infinitely precious and he regretted leaving its brothers behind. He tenderly teased it out, and slipped it inside the pocket of his coat.