Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

26

HOLON HAD REGAINED something of his original form; at least, Antaea assumed that the dark, man-shaped thing hunched in front of the control mirror was him. She edged backward, finding the right opening for her shot. Holon was busy, so he was a natural target; but because he was busy, she could probably afford to ignore him for now.

She nodded to Venera, who took a deep breath and then popped up over the top of the wall. "Bastaaaards!" she screamed as she fired off several indiscriminate rounds into the corpse-filled room. Then she kicked backward, sailing toward the opposite wall of her own empty room.

One of the three remaining monsters whistled and disappeared out of Antaea's point of view, but she knew where it was going. It appeared over the top of the control room's wall just as Venera disappeared over the next one.

She shot it.

As it tumbled into the air, Antaea shook her head in surprise. "Damn, this is too easy."

"Is it now?" Suddenly she was seeing stars as something had lashed her in the face. Before she knew it she was tumbling somewhere, blazing pain in her eyes, her arms, her belly. She tried to shoot, but where was the gun? She couldn't feel anything in her right hand.

Something had her--was carrying her. She hit a wall and bounced back, hit something softer. A body. Gasping, she tried to clear her vision, found that her eyes and nose were soaking wet.

"Now how would she have gotten a weapon like this?" The questioner sounded like Holon; was he asking her?

"I don't know, I don't, please don't, I swear I--" It was Inshiri Ferance, hysterical and begging.

"You really don't know, do you?"

"I swear!"

"Then I don't need you for now. --Don't worry, I'll resurrect you later."

Antaea heard a horrible choking sound. She rubbed again at her eyes, was rewarded by a sliver of red-soaked vision. She seemed to be bleeding freely into the air. She was also missing two fingers from her right hand, and long black tendrils draped through the air to somewhere below Antaea's chin, from the monster that was killing Ferance.

She couldn't move, but he knew she was still alive, because when he had finished with Inshiri he turned to her. The vaguely head-shaped thing atop his torso tilted as if looking at her. "It took us centuries to evolve these bodies so they'd work inside Virga," he said. "This bioform is related to the one we hid inside your sister. Like what you see?" he said.

Antaea couldn't speak. He had finally admitted that it was his people who'd destroyed Telen. When she didn't reply, Holon, apparently disappointed that she didn't want to talk, turned back to the command mirror. "It's done," he said. "Candesce's protection is gone.

"Thank you," he said to her, "for all your help. And that of your sister. I'm sure she would be proud."

I was wrong. This was the last coherent thought Antaea had before the red in her eyes was joined by black. She was losing track--of where she was, who was talking to her, and what she'd been doing that was so important ...

* * *

SCRY SUDDENLY FILLED Keir's visual field with update windows and helpful directional gridlines. He stiffened and almost let go of the cable he'd been holding.

"It's happened," he said.

Griffin and Leal looked at one another. "Are you sure?" asked the sun lighter.

"See for yourself." Keir nodded in the direction of Candesce.

When night came here, the hot expanded air around the sun of suns cooled and contracted. Breezes blew up from the principalities and carried the accumulated grit and flotsam of the day into the exclusion zone. Such a breeze was blowing now, and it had carried enough of the smoke from the Battle of the Gardens away that the other battle--the one still raging around Candesce itself--was clearly visible.

That battle had been a little flickering galaxy, a coruscating cloud of brief orange dots that signaled the explosion of missiles. A few larger, more long-lasting dots would be burning ships. Now, though, the nature of the light was changing. Orange was being replaced by blue, and the blue flashes were not appearing as pinprick points, but as fuzzy lozenges.

Griffin's brow furrowed as he watched this change. "What..."

"Lasers," said Keir. "And plasma guns, rail guns ... who knows what else. Whatever the virtuals gave Inshiri Ferance. They probably packed her ships with weapons, and she may not even have known about it. They could have been disguised as anything--food supplies, even water. They'd be rigged to self-assemble the instant Candesce's field shut off. I'm betting there's not much left of the ships that brought them here."

Griffin swore. "We have to fire this thing up." He turned his attention to the black ball he was clinging to. "I know how to start a polywell fusion generator, of course; hell, I built this one. But why are we using it to power your device? Couldn't you have built some A.N. battery like they did?" He nodded at the rainbow colors of the battle. "--Some miraculous energy source that would kick in when Candesce's field shut down?"

"Sure," said Keir. "But whatever I used would have to keep working after I turned my machine on ... The suppressor field would shut down its own generator if that used A.N. technology."

"Right ... right." Griffin shook his head.

Sudden blinding light stabbed Keir's eyes. For a second he thought somebody had set off a fission nuke near Candesce, but then an amplified voice said, "You on the mine! Come away!"

He shielded his eyes with his hand, and found that they were pinned in the beam of a floodlight. He heard the grumble of idling jets.

Hayden Griffin squinted into the glare. "Who're you?"

"This is the Last Line army engineers. Come away from the explosive device."

"They think this is a mine," said Leal.

"Well, it looks like one," admitted Griffin.

"What are we going to do? They'll shoot us if we touch anything."

In the sudden bright light, he and Leal looked very much like refugees; none of them, Keir realized, was wearing a uniform. Leal in particular was wide-eyed, her hair a frizz of tangles and mats. Smudges of soot on her face had given her a mask of fear, though he knew she was relatively calm. That gave him an idea.

When he saw Griffin start to cautiously reach for his sidearm, he said, "Let me handle this."

"What are you going to do?"

He grimaced and shrugged. "Leal."

"Yes?"

"Have you ever done any acting?"

* * *

JACOBY SARTO STARED at a world transformed. The night sky was filled with flickering lines of blue and green light. Ships were on fire everywhere he looked. It wasn't just the alliance fleet that had been destroyed; those ships that were emitting the strange bright lines were also breaking up. They, though, were not exploding. Instead, they were disgorging gigantic, many-limbed metal things into the air, and some of those things were turning back and eating the ships that had birthed them.

This would be just a taste of what was happening at the walls of Virga. Leal Maspeth had spoken of an alien armada waiting in silence there, a fleet so vast that it surrounded the entire world. Even now, those ships, and whatever creatures accompanied them, must be bursting through Virga's iceberg-choked skin, preparing to wreak havoc on everything within.

Leal had been right. Jacoby had suspected she was, which was one reason he'd decided to put himself right at the heart of the action. There, he could make a command decision at the critical moment; and he had. It just hadn't been enough.

Closer by, the Thistle drifted, uncrewed. The badly cut bodies of its pilot and mates hung near it like grotesque angels. Near them were the bodies of the two Home Guard soldiers who'd been set to guard the door.

Jacoby leaned out cautiously. The dagger-ball he'd planted in the Thistle could be anywhere. With any luck it wasn't actually in the sloop. He should be able to dive out to it and get it under way before the monster found its way back to him.

It had been a nice trick, keeping that thing in reserve. He'd been sure Antaea would figure it out: if the dagger-ball came to life, then Candesce had been dialed down too far. The monster was like a mine--set to go off if things in the control room went too far.

It had worked to clear the blockhouse's entrance--for all the good that was going to do. Antaea still stood little chance against Holon and his horrible companions.

One of the soldier's carbines was sailing by with stately slowness. Jacoby eyed it.

He could be out of Candesce in ten minutes. There was an open patch of sky down beneath his feet, and if he avoided those damned lights, he stood a good chance of getting out of this alive. Surely the virtuals wouldn't kill every human being in Virga. They had no need to, and it would be a lot of work. No, Virga would probably survive, just under new management.

He watched himself reach out and pluck the carbine from the air. Then, just in case the dagger-ball was nearby, he sealed the door shut before reentering the maze of the control center.

* * *

"HERE THEY COME," Holon was saying. Antaea realized where she was, and tried to scramble out of the way--any direction, anywhere but here. She couldn't move; something was holding her.

"They'll have it apart in a few hours," said Holon. She realized he was talking about something in the command mirror. Scraping clotted blood out of her eyes, she peered at it. Big metal things, like gigantic crabs, had encircled a black oval. Surrounding this tableau were six dormant suns, and, as backdrop, a sky full of laser light and flame.

"I've told Candesce not to come on at dawn," Holon continued. "No day today. We have all the time in the world. But I expect that by the time your current body gives out, we'll have figured out Candesce's secret. The question then will be, can we afford to ever resurrect you? The plan, after all, is to erase Candesce, Virga, and any hint that this place was ever here."

"Why?" she croaked.

His eyeless head turned her way. "This foolish movement toward embodiment must be stopped," he said. "Mind is all that matters. Your people have made themselves enemies of unbounded consciousness. That's evil."

He came closer to her, and she could see the dry, writhing branches that made up his features rearrange themselves in a smile. "Candesce is an abomination. It's a machine for erasing consciousness--for suppressing it. Dumb matter reigns in Virga, except for your brief little sparks. And you'd export this horror to the rest of the universe?

"Don't worry, we can work something out," he soothed. "What you know can never be allowed out in the greater universe, but we can build a quarantined virtuality for you to live in. Death's not the end for the likes of us."

"Then you won't mind if I kill you," somebody said. Holon's body jerked as several bullets hit it.

"Don't be ridiculous, old man," said the outsider as one of his whiplike arms shot out to wrap around Jacoby Sarto's throat. Holon dragged him over the wall and Jacoby lost his one-handed grip on the carbine he'd fired. As this happened, though, a blur shot across the room from the other direction.

Venera yanked at Antaea's pistol, which was still held in one of Holon's coils. Holon turned, twitched his arms, and sent Venera across the room. She hit the wall, but she'd also held on to the gun, and had managed to turn it. Venera jammed her finger against the trigger and a shot spanged off the ceiling just over Holon's head. He roared and ducked, and her next shot took him at the base of one of his four branchlike limbs.

Then he'd swung Venera and Jacoby, bashing them against one another. The pistol went flying, and the two were shoved violently through a cloud of corpses to fetch up next to Antaea.

"Enough of spectators," said Holon. "I'll finish this alone." He raised four of his branches, their sharp ends hovering like poised snakes. Antaea closed her eyes.

The ever-present hum that filled the command center went silent and so did the red light penetrating her closed eyes. But there was no pain. After a second, she opened her eyes.

"What...?" It was Venera's voice.

The lights came back on, and the command mirror flickered back into life. Holon hung in the middle of the room, frozen in place like some grotesque statue. Beyond him, the mirror showed the metal crab shapes that had surrounded Candesce's generator. They had also stopped moving.

"Get the gun," mumbled Jacoby. "And finish the bastard before he wakes up."

"Good idea," said Antaea. But it was too hard to move. She felt herself drifting off to sleep, and it seemed like such a good idea that she closed her eyes, and smiled.

* * *

"YOU CAN STOP screaming," said Keir. Leal coughed and fell silent. A good thing, too: her throat was raw from her performance.

The army engineers had finally dragged her aboard their open-sided vessel, but not before she'd led them on a merry chase around Keir's machine. "No, don't kill me!" she'd screamed. "I don't want to die. Get away from me!" She'd played the hysteria to the hilt, while Hayden clambered out of sight of the engineers and fired up his sun's mechanism.

It had started huffing and thrumming now, and the engineers were alarmed. Hayden appeared around from behind it, waving his arms. "It's okay!" he shouted. "It's not a bomb!"

"Surrender!" shouted an engineer. The man was trying to sound authoritative, but against this sky he stood little chance. Hospital ships and looters were arriving in equal numbers, and as the last of the smoke drifted away, the sheer monumental scale of the damage was becoming clear. The engineers would be clearing unexploded ordnance from the skies of the principalities for years.

"Look!" Keir pointed. Leal peered at the clots of smoke and fire surrounding Candesce. They were appalling, and she shook her head.

"No, look! The lasers have stopped."

She blinked. "Don't you see?" he said. "It's working."

Hayden had drifted over, his hands on his head in deference to the guns pointed at him. "We're generating an analogue of Candesce's suppression field," he said.

"How big is it, Keir?"

"Probably not more than four hundred miles in radius," he said. "But that's big enough to have stopped the attack."

Leal shook her head. "Here, maybe. But at the edge of the world..."

"Get us clear," the engineers' commander was saying. "We'll detonate this one from a safe distance like we did the others."

"Wait!" "No!" Hayden and Keir leaped up together, only to be forced back by armed jittery men. "You can't destroy it!" Keir continued. "It's what won the battle!"

The commander looked at them sympathetically. "They're all going to take a long time to recover from this." He sighed. "Ready the two-inch gun. We'll pick it off from a half-mile out."

* * *

"--NOT COMFORTABLE LEAVING him like that," Venera was saying. "Didn't he say that body was designed to live in the suppressive field? Then why...?"

Antaea blinked at her. "Wha--?"

"It doesn't matter, the field's obviously back on somehow. He's frozen. Shoot his limbs off and throw the pieces out the door," said Jacoby.

"Where--" Pain lanced through her side, and the sudden sound of gunfire woke Antaea further. She remembered it all suddenly: the fight, the monsters, her fighting back. And Holon.

She pulled against Venera, who was hauling pieces of Holon toward the blockhouse's exit. "Wait, you don't understand."

"You're fine, Antaea. We're going to get you out of here." Antaea drifted for a minute, and when she awoke again Venera was back, this time encircling her waist with one arm. Jacoby had appeared on her other side.

"No, no, wait." She was finding it hard to frame her thoughts. And what about that tone in Venera's voice? It was the sort of soothing cadence you used with someone who was dying.

Antaea tried to pull away. "Day's not going to come."

They both let go of her. "What?" said Venera.

"Holon ... turned off the dawn. Candesce..." She was finding it hard to breathe. "Candesce won't come on again unless we tell it to."

They'd kept drifting through the maze as she spoke, and the exit was approaching. "Shall I, or do you think you can do it?" Venera said to Jacoby.

"Let's get her to the sloop first," he said. "Then we'll both go." He pressed the switch that opened the door, and it slid silently aside, letting in hot, smoky air.

"Ouch," said Antaea. She flexed her fingers; at least her left hand was working. "And where's the key?" she demanded.

Venera held it up. "I picked it off Remoran. He--" Praying she had the strength, Antaea made a grab for it. Venera was so surprised she let Antaea take it--and kick her in the stomach.

Antaea had been holding on to the edge of the door as she'd done it, so as Venera sailed out into the night, she reoriented herself and grabbed Jacoby by his bad shoulder.

"Ah!" He doubled up around the pain and she hauled with all her might. He, too, went through the door.

"Somebody has to turn on the sun again!" she cried at the two receding figures. "And how are you going to lock this door? It needs the key to do it!"

Venera swore as she reached impotently to any kind of purchase on the empty air. "We'll lock it from out here!"

"And I'm to trust you?" Antaea shook her head. "This has to end here. The key can never be used again. And the only place in the world where it can never be recovered is right here."

They were shouting at her to stop, to reconsider, but the redness was starting to overwhelm her sight again, and a roaring like thunder was in her ears, so she shut the door.

Then she raised the key to Candesce, and locked herself in.

* * *

IT TOOK FOUR shots before the engineers hit something vital. Then, instead of exploding, Hayden's generator simply sparked spectacularly, and went black.

"Aw, no," said Hayden. "That was good work."

Keir waited for scry to reappear. The seconds dragged on. No new lights came on from the region of Candesce, and while the thud and fire of battle still continued on the other side of the sky, the gauzy blue of lasers was still missing.

When that light still hadn't reappeared after two minutes, he let out a ragged breath.

"I think it's over," he said.

* * *

"YOU'RE A TERRIBLE pilot," Jacoby muttered as yet another body thudded into the sloop's windshield. Venera didn't smile, and he instantly regretted his gallows humor. Hunched at the controls, Venera guided the sloop into the wreckage of the greatest battle Virga had ever seen.

"She'll be all right," he said. "That blockhouse has the best medical facilities in the world. All automated. She'd have to go to Brink to find better."

A bullet or something starred the windshield. Venera jerked, then fingered her jaw, and returned her attention to the controls. "... Can't see a damned thing," she said.

"Just point us at any sun," he said. "Like that one." He nodded at an orange smear behind a bank of indigo clouds, but Venera shook her head.

"We have to find the Surgeon," she said.

For a moment he thought she was still talking about Antaea, and then he realized she meant her husband's flagship.

"He'll be fine, Venera. For God's sake, he's inside a battleship. If he's not safe there, what are we going to do for him?"

She'd grabbed a new pistol from the armory as they'd entered the sloop. She pointed it at him. "The Surgeon," she said levelly. "We'll not be separated again."

He raised his good hand. "The Surgeon it is."

While she piloted, he went back and found the tarpaulin that had been used to cover the water tanks. The tank where he'd hidden the knife-ball egg was gone; Antaea must have tried to dispose of it. He dragged the tarp to the sloop's main hatch and draped it outside. It wasn't much as white flags went, but it would have to do.

They sailed on through darkness and smoke, but everywhere signs of life and humanity were beginning to reassert themselves. Cruisers and cutters from a hundred navies were nosing through the wreckage, netting injured men from the air and tossing ropes to disabled ships to allow their crews on board. He saw one giant vessel that was so festooned with men they hung from every surface and clustered on its hull like flies. This was all the more amazing since the ship had a terrible wound in its flank that had nearly cut it in two.

It rotated into faint amber light and Jacoby saw the colors of Slipstream and the lettering on its prow: Surgeon.

With a smile he turned to tell Venera--then paused. Nearly all the fires of the battle were out, smothered in their own exhaust. Most of the principalities' suns were obscured by clouds. How had he been able to read the lettering on that ship's prow?

He climbed around the Thistle's hull to look back at the sun of suns. Deep red lights glowed there, and they were brightening. As he watched, something like a metal flower began to open behind the vast crystalline spikes that marked Candesce's perimeter. Instead of a stamen and pistil, this flower cradled fire in its heart, and that fire, too, began to brighten.

He swung into the sloop. "Dawn! Dawn's coming! We have to get out of here!"

Venera turned. Her hands were white on the controls, and the expression on her face was terrible.

To his own surprise, Jacoby heard himself say, "The Surgeon's right over there." He pointed to starboard.

She simply said, "Thank you," and banked the Thistle.

The air was choppy now, and they could feel the heat rising through the glass. Outside, the growing radiance illuminated clouds of bodies and shattered ships, and the contorted forms of strange, crablike machines, each one a hundred feet long or more. These had frozen in midgesture and now cast nightmarish shadows across the receding vistas of smoke and the intricate details of aerial carnage.

All the ships that had power were turning away now, racing to escape the exclusion zone before full daylight. Many pilots were having to make agonizing decisions not to try to reach airmen who were waving frantically at them from stranded ships. Chaison Fanning's battleship was powering up its engines, too, but it would take it a while to get up to speed. The Thistle caught up to it easily.

Venera threw a line to some airmen standing in the wreckage of the Surgeon's hangar, and climbed across to join a growing mob of refugees who were all scrambling to get inside before the sun came on.

The heat was becoming intense. Jacoby shaded his eyes and looked back to behold the funeral rites of the principalities writ large: ship by ship, body by body, the radiance of the sun of suns was reaching out to engulf all that remained behind. Whatever was closest to Candesce was already aflame, though the fires were barely visible against the greater light behind them. Thousands upon thousands of silhouetted human figures patterned this sky, and one by one the light reached out to them, and they vanished.

Venera grabbed the arm of a Slipstream officer. "I have to get to the bridge."

He shook his head. "Crew only, ma'am. Besides, it's not safe crossing that." He indicated the twisted girders and shorn bulkheads of the Surgeon's giant wound.

Venera looked him in the eye. "My name is Venera Fanning, and I have to get to the bridge."

"Oh!" He waved at another man. "We need an escort! And semaphore the admiral! Tell him we found his wife."

"Don't," she said; and then she smiled impishly. "I'd prefer to surprise him."

Escorted by four tough airmen, she began climbing up the rigging that stretched across the wreckage. After a moment she paused, and squinted back at Jacoby. "Coming?"

He shook his head. "This is your moment. Besides, if I show my face I'll just be arrested."

"Oh, pfft." But she smiled again. "See you, then, Jacoby."

He watched her climb out of sight. Then he braced his feet under the edge of the buckled hull to watch new upwelling clouds rise from the inferno of Candesce: clouds of ash from a pyre big as the sky. His shoulder throbbed; his left hand pulsed back. He'd come to the end of his strength, and there was no going back from here. In the end, all his guile and violence had been insufficient to prevent a holocaust, and now, he finally felt his age, and knew how little his own epitaph would say.

Jacoby put his head in his hands, and wept.