Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

25

THE PAIN WAS intense. It took Jacoby back to crystalline memories of his youth, and the training he and the other children of the great houses of Sacrus had been put through. At the time they'd called it "endurance exercise"; later, they'd admitted it was torture, systematically applied to toughen up the candidates. Some broke under the strain. Others, like Inshiri Ferance, responded by developing an avid fascination with others' agony.

The "training" hadn't helped him much after she took his finger; he didn't think it was going to help now.

"Get your hands off me," he snarled at the airman who was trying to boost him through the sloop's hatch. Inshiri was outside watching Venera open Candesce's magic door; she shot Jacoby an approving look.

Thunder grumbled irregularly above and below them. Distant flashes revealed something of the intense battle that was surrounding them now. Their two escort ships were standing off, guns swiveling, but both had numerous breaks in their hulls as well as the same peppering of bullet holes that covered the Thistle. If any of the enemy broke through, they wouldn't last very long.

Venera had seen where he was looking, and she sent him one of her less pleasant smiles. "We'd better hope none of those thousands of missiles up there hits any part of Candesce," she said loudly. "I'd hate to see what the sun of suns would do if you stung it."

"Shut up and get inside," Inshiri told her.

Antaea was climbing out of the sloop. Jacoby did a quick head count of the assembled group. Perfect.

"One second," he said, putting out his good arm to stop Antaea. Quickly, he murmured, "If it comes to it, who are you with? Inshiri? Or me?"

To her credit, she didn't even give a sign that she'd heard him, merely mouthing, You.

"I need you to get me something," he said, more loudly.

"What? Now?" She was staring with almost feverish anxiety at the entrance, where cool electric light now glowed.

"Yes, you'll know it when you see it," he said, looking in her eyes as he emphasized those words. "It's in the first of the water tanks."

She cocked her head, puzzled, then retreated into the ship.

Satisfied that he was at least doing something to try to control the situation, Jacoby stepped gingerly across the air and entered the bizarre spaces of Candesce's control center.

Venera had described the place in detail, but it was still impressive to see. Once beyond the cubic foyer, the place was filled with chambers whose walls and floors did not quite touch. You could slip under or around any of them, moving by ducking and turning sideways through a kind of corridorless maze. This was a common enough design for freefall houses, but in this case, Venera had said, there was nothing visible holding the walls and screens in place. She was right, which would have fascinated Jacoby at another time; but with his arm in a sling and spasms of pain radiating from his shoulder, it was hard for him to maneuver here. At least it was cooler.

He caught up to Inshiri's party in a large space with a blank black rectangle, like a picture frame, on one of its surfaces. "Hurry up, we don't have much time," Remoran was telling Venera.

"Actually, I think we do," she said. She pointed. "Do you see those little dots on the wall there? Bloodstains, from," she smiled at Inshiri, "the last person I killed here."

"You're really in no position to be bragging," retorted Inshiri.

"My point is that it's cool in here. And, that those bloodstains are still here after thousands of days. The first time I was here, I suspected that this blockhouse might be immune to Candesce's heat and radiation. This proves it."

"Which means--?"

"That we could hold out here for months, maybe even years, if we had to. All we'd need to do is close the door. This place has supplies and machinery to feed hundreds. It even has medical facilities. It--"

"Stop stalling!" Inshiri drew an intricately etched pistol from inside her jacket.

Venera examined her nails. "Fine line between stalling and outright rebellion, isn't it?"

"Enough of this petty sniping," snapped Remoran. "Mrs. Fanning, we need your cooperation because under our agreement, it will be natives of Virga who make any changes to Candesce's defensive field. Our guests," he nodded at Holon and his party, "are here to observe. However, if you should prove uncooperative, we may have to enlist one of them to operate the machinery instead of you. They all know how to do it. Would you prefer we take that route?"

She scowled. "No."

"Then take us to the controls."

"We're already there," said Venera sullenly. She turned to face the frame on the wall, and spoke several words in what sounded like some foreign language. The area in the rectangle lit up, and then, miraculously, images began to form there.

Jacoby had heard of this sort of technology, but seeing it still took his breath away. The projections of Kaleidogig were laughable next to this. He saw the reaction on Inshiri's face, and knew exactly what she was feeling: hunger for this power to be hers. He was feeling the same thing.

"I can show you how to make the changes," Venera told Remoran. "I watched Aubrey Mahallan do it. And one thing I learned was that control mirrors like this one don't discriminate. They'll take the commands of anyone and everyone gazing into them. Which means that they," she indicated the outsiders, "had better leave until this is over."

Remoran gestured to his men. "If you wouldn't mind?" he asked Holon politely. The outsider glanced at his fellows, and Inshiri Ferance said breezily, "Oh, it's all right. I'll come with you." Holon ducked his head politely, and his group, along with Inshiri and her bodyguards, left escorted by several well-armed guardsmen.

Venera frowned gravely at the general secretary of the Virga Home Guard. "I hope you know what you're doing," she said. "Now, you see that clutch of suns there? The knot of six of them?" Jacoby spotted them before Remoran did: six spiky balls, each at least a hundred feet across, all made of what looked like pale stained glass. "Do you see what they're hiding?"

Remoran peered at the command mirror. "That black thing?"

"That 'black thing' is it. The great mystery," she said in a cynical tone. "Now you're going to concentrate on it, and you will begin to see words and numbers forming around it."

"Oh! Yes, I see." Remoran was silent for a long minute, both he and Venera focused on the picture before them. Then he said, "I see how to do it. We'll start with a little adjustment..."

Jacoby drifted backward. When's it coming? He knew something was going to happen, and soon; he just didn't know what it would be. He'd better make sure he was out of the way when that happened.

So, he was expecting something; yet he still jerked in surprise when the screaming started.

* * *

ANTAEA HAD WASTED no time in finding the tanks Jacoby had talked about. Whatever he was playing at, she needed to get it over with right now, and get inside that blockhouse. As she hauled the heavy tarpaulin away from the water containers, though, her hands were shaking.

Since the trial, a night hadn't gone by when she hadn't thought about what it would have been like to have been here, with Telen at her side. Chaison had allowed her to describe that plan in her book, a plan to put more control of humanity's fate in its own hands, by adjusting Candesce's ability to suppress technologies. But this had not been her idea. It had been Telen's.

There was too much misery in the world. There might well be monsters circling Virga, clawing at the walls of the world to get in. Yet, what more misery could they cause than the hereditary nobles, dictators, and disease and famine already did? The educated in Virga knew what they lacked. They knew about machines that could look inside the body and diagnose or fix diseases before you were even aware of them. They knew about miraculous mechanisms, like Keir Chen's Edisonians, that could evolve the design for any device or object you wanted. They also knew that such things were not just forbidden to all who dwelt in Virga; they were impossible.

Antaea and Telen had dreamt together of a different world. A Virga where Artificial Nature remained outside, but scanners and fabs and computers could exist. Telen had understood the nuances of the plan better than Antaea. She'd been the more intellectual of the two. What Antaea understood was the outcome, if it worked.

And that was why she was here, allied with people she hated and feared, and enduring humiliation after humiliation. To see it through, for Telen's sake, and the sake of millions of people she would never meet, and who would probably never know her name. To prove that their lives were not predestined to be miserable and brief.

She hauled on the lid of one of the tanks at the back, and with a reluctant pop, it sprang open. Antaea hunkered down in the space between the tank and the back bulkhead, and looked inside.

The thing was oval and a kind of translucent gray, and filled the large container almost completely. Various ragged patches on its sides suggested that it had been glued in some way to something else, and torn roughly loose at some point.

Tears started in Antaea's eyes. She couldn't breathe; she watched one of her trembling hands reach up as though to touch her hair, and hang in the air, helpless. Her other hand came up, in a warding gesture. She realized with a distant sort of wonder that she was whimpering.

She had seen such a thing as this before. The last time had been in the abandoned city of Serenity, in a black corridor filled with bodies.

The sound of murmuring voices snapped her back to the here and now. It was the pilot and two crewmen who'd been left behind to guard the ship.

They were Inshiri's people. She reached for her pistol. Did they know about this thing?

Probably not. But the heft of the gun in her hand reminded her of something. She held it up in the dim cabin light. This had come from Brink; it had been made for Keir Chen's group by the Edisonians. It seemed to have been designed--no, "evolved," apparently--especially to handle monsters like this one. She hadn't fired it since the fight in Serenity, and it still had a full clip of its original ammunition in it.

Antaea thought for a second. Then she popped out from behind the tank and said, "Hey, boys, I don't want to ruin your day or anything, but there's an unexploded rocket lodged in this tank."

Their banter stopped. "Hell," said one. "Must have caught us in that last run in."

"I didn't feel an impact," protested the pilot.

"Well, you're going to feel a pretty big one if we don't get this guy out of here."

They came over. Antaea made sure she was between them and the tank's door. "Can you pull it out?" one asked. She shook her head.

"I could try, but ... you want me to try?"

"No, no!" They all raised their hands and shook their heads.

"Okay, then. Why don't we ease this baby outside, and just ... give it a gentle shove?"

They liked that idea, and when they'd all managed to get the tank out the main hatch, she left them to debate how hard to push the thing. Hopefully it would go a long, long ways away.

Antaea dove into Candesce's blockhouse. Suspicious soldiers of the Home Guard elite were manning the door; they gave her suspicious looks, but didn't bar her entry. "That way," one said. "Follow the voices."

She nodded. She had no intention of going that way.

After she was out of sight of the doormen, she took a side route; it was easy since you could duck under, over, or around any wall in this place. Venera had been right about the scale of the blockhouse: she passed sleeping quarters outfitted for hundreds, the chambers immaculate but probably untouched for a thousand years; kitchens, dining nooks, gymnasia, and even a spherical pool. Before she could get too lost, she circled back, pausing to listen every now and then for voices. When she heard them she checked the pistol, then crept cautiously closer.

A loud conversation was happening on the other side of this next wall. She backed into the shadows, then angled herself so she could see past its edge. When she took in the scene, she hissed under her breath.

Three members of the Guard hung lifelessly in the center of the room. Inshiri Ferance perched on the branch of an archaic-looking couch tree just a few feet from the nearest corpse. She was chatting animatedly with the outsider, Holon.

"That's our part done," Inshiri was saying. "You agreed you'd take on the risk for this next step. You clear out the Home Guard and dispose of Remoran, and then we dial Candesce to the mutually agreed-upon level."

"Something like that," said Holon.

"Then why aren't you on about it? We don't have much time."

"If we wait until Remoran's done, then we won't have to attack them with these primitive weapons," said Holon, gesturing at the guns Inshiri's bodyguards were carrying. Their carbines, Antaea now saw, had silencers on them.

"What do you mean?" asked Inshiri.

"Candesce will shift through several stable emulations of Newtonian physics and normal electrodynamics while Remoran dials it down. We don't know how that process works, but we do know, from tests we conducted right at the edge of the field, which technologies will work at the dialed-down level."

"So? What of it?"

"We've brought weapons that will work at that level," he said.

Inshiri nodded. "Yes, that was exactly what I thought. Lads?"

Her men opened fire, and now it was clear that their guns had some sort of silencing mechanism; the shots were barely audible. Holon and the other outsiders twitched under the onslaught, then, propelled by the residual momentum of the bullets in their bodies, drifted to the far wall.

"Looks like the wetwork's up to us after all," sighed Inshiri. She unfolded herself from the couch and unholstered her intricately carved little pistol. Her men, meanwhile, were forming up into three squads.

An odd crick-cracking sound reached Antaea's ears. She saw Inshiri and her men turn; one of the bodyguards swore. Antaea shifted her position to make out what was happening.

Holon's body was convulsing. Its thrashing limbs were bending in ways they shouldn't, and it was the sound of bones breaking that Antaea had heard. "Shoot it, shoot it!" Inshiri screamed--just as the other three outsiders' corpses began to twitch as well.

By the time Holon's body tore itself apart to reveal the thing underneath, they'd put a couple dozen rounds apiece into it. It showed no signs of having noticed.

* * *

REMORAN WHIRLED AT the shouting. "What's going--" His men unslung their machine guns, and two leaped to perch on the edge of the opening where the virtuals had gone. One was immediately flung backward. He hit the far wall and bounced off, clutching at his neck as blood sprayed into the chamber.

Jacoby blinked at the dying man. Of all the things he'd worried about happening in here, a simple gunfight had never crossed his mind.

Then they were all firing as Remoran twisted in midair, trying to find purchase on something--anything--for freefall leverage. He grabbed Venera and doubled up, putting his feet against her flank. The general secretary was about to use her mass to launch himself to safety, and the recoil would take Venera into the line of fire.

She grabbed his ankle. As he cursed and kicked at her, she adroitly spun around and kicked him in the head. Then she made the leap he'd been about to, and grabbed the edge of the wall next to Jacoby. "Hi," she said.

Shouts of alarm distracted Jacoby, and so he turned in time to see something gray and multi-limbed clamber over the far wall. Inshiri's soldiers and Remoran's guardsmen were peppering it with gunfire, but it didn't slow down. "What the hell is that?" shouted Jacoby.

"That would be our boy Holon," said Venera. "I believe he's shed his skin." Another of the spiderlike things was coming over the wall behind the first one.

"Come on." He pawed at her with his good arm, and when she pulled away he pointed at the empty chamber on the other side of the wall. "Time to go."

He looked back for just a second, and beheld a nightmarish scene: long jointed threads had snaked from the sides of the bark-colored thing, and they were stabbing the soldiers. One twisted itself around Remoran's throat, and another was darting at Inshiri Ferance. She kicked off from the nearest wall and sailed over to land next to Jacoby and Venera.

A gray whip coiled around her ankle and she shrieked in surprise. "Cousin!" She lunged for Jacoby, hand outstretched.

"Good-bye, Inshiri." He kicked away into the next room.

"Jacoby! Jacobyyyyy!" She gripped the edge of the wall for a second, then let go and disappeared.

"The entrance!" barked Venera. She took his good hand and they leaped for the next wall. Just as they landed on it a silhouette reared up above it and Jacoby raised his pistol, then cursed.

"Took you long enough," he snapped at Antaea. She shook her head silently, then gestured with her pistol.

"--Not going back there!" Venera protested.

"I shot one of them." Antaea raised her weapon, turning it in the cool light. "This works, but we need to keep them distracted. They haven't figured out where the shot came from yet, but--"

Jacoby nodded. "Glad you thought to bring that. Remoran was a fool--and so was Inshiri. They thought they could rely on Virgan technology and Holon's word of honor to keep his boys in line. I did my best in case they were wrong, but--" He flipped over, preparing to jump back to the room where just a few sporadic shots and screams now sounded.

Venera slapped his shoulder and he nearly blacked out. "--see?" she was saying when he regained his breath. "You're in no shape. Give me the gun, old man."

He handed her his pistol. "You'll pay for that."

"What, hitting you?"

"No, calling me old."

She and Antaea hopped away, and he flipped over the wall. If he got lucky he might make it to the entrance before the monsters finished with those two.