Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Read online

  Derance desperately tried to regain the initiative. "Nobody move! If so much as a single one of the hostages moves, I'll kill them all!"

  "Oh, I believe you," said Fanning. "But I'm not here for them." She waved her hand and the Slipstream soldiers began cautiously moving back to the shredded canvas walls.

  "What do you mean you're not here for--"

  "Their people have already betrayed us by joining your side," she said. "They're a lost cause; despite what my double here said, what possible good would it do me to rescue this lot? They're supposed to be here, and if I wanted to curry favor with their masters I'd leave them here, wouldn't I? So it's a matter of complete indifference to me whether they live or die."

  Derance blinked at her, once, twice, three times. "Then what are you here for?"

  Jacoby walked out from behind the table. "I should think that would be obvious, Derance," he said, and he had the pleasure of seeing Venera blink in surprise when she saw it was him.

  "She already has what she came for," Jacoby continued. "A list of all the nations represented here--and therefore, a list of the nations that have signed our secret pact. All this gunfire was just cover to get her actors out safely, wasn't it?"

  Venera nodded, silent for once.

  "... And as you can see, that's already been accomplished," he finished.

  Venera recovered her poise. "Jacoby Sarto," she said with a sneer. "So you ran home to Momma, did you? Cowering under the skirts of your dead Spyre? I'd expected more from you." He saw her notice his bandaged hand, and waited for her to make some quip about it--and he saw her think about it, but she didn't take the opportunity.

  She wasn't going to kick him while he was down, and that threw him for just a second; but Derance was watching their exchange, so he said, "Who were your pretenders? Members of the Slipstream Naval Drama Society?" She shrugged in something like assent.

  Derance glared from her to him. "Shut up, Sarto. What are you going to do now?" he asked Venera.

  "Oh, the only thing that remains is to shoot you and your men, and let these good people," she indicated the hostages, "contemplate where in the world they would rather be these days. Unless, that is, you have a better idea...?"

  As she'd spoken, she had been backing away, leaving Derance standing with his detonator in the center of the cowering nobles. Jacoby's men began lowering their pistols, glancing to him for permission. He flicked his hand at them, and the guns went down.

  Derance sighed heavily. "You just don't understand who you're up against," he said. Then he pushed the detonator button.

  Nothing happened.

  After a moment a faint voice from the edge of the crowd said, "Ah, y-yes, h-here it is. I, um, it took me a minute longer than, you know--but I found the right fuse line, and well..." A gangly man with thick glasses (and wearing the Slipstream uniform) held up two halves of a cut wire.

  "Take that one," Venera said, pointing to Derance. Jacoby raised his pistol and shot Derance in the head. Dozens of rifles were suddenly aimed at him, as the agent of Artificial Nature crumpled to the plank floor.

  "Okay, leave that one," said Venera. "But take him." With a quite unpleasant smile, she aimed her own pistol at Jacoby.

  16

  "THIS IS REALLY quite nostalgic," said Jacoby as soldiers bound his hands behind him. He smiled at Venera, then winced as one of the men brushed against his wound.

  "Why'd you shoot that man?" she snapped.

  "So that we'd be free to talk."

  "I'm not in the mood." Her expression told him she really would be happy to shoot him if he said another word. He shrugged and focused his attention on his nervous men, making eye contact with each in turn and nodding or otherwise indicating his confidence that they would survive this.

  Meanwhile, Venera had swung about to face the hostages. "You lot can do what you will!" she told them. "I think it should be clear to you now that your own people don't give a damn about you."

  "Commander!" A soldier ran up and saluted hastily. "We're cut off!"

  For the first time, Venera looked surprised. "What do you mean cut off? We brought two cruisers!"

  "Apparently they've had to retreat!" Now Jacoby could hear it: the unsteady pop-pop of small-arms fire echoing through the dangling buildings.

  Venera hauled Jacoby to his feet and marched him away from his companions. "Our reunion may be briefer than I'd hoped," she said. "First of all, thank you for not harming my actors. The fact that you treated them well will stand you in good stead when I decide whether to kill you or not."

  "Oh, come now, Venera, we've been down this road before," he said. "You're spiteful and impulsive, but you never drop a trinket if it might end up being valuable to you."

  "And you're a trinket?" She'd brought them out of the tent and to the edge of the street span. The shifting rooftops of Fracas made a bewildering kaleidoscope below. Fanning put the barrel of her pistol to Jacoby's ear and said, "We need to get out of here. You'll survive if you help. What's it to be?"

  The gunfire was coming from above them. Jacoby couldn't turn his head, but caught a glimpse of uniformed figures on nearby rooftops. "Well, it depends," he said. "Where is it you want to get to?"

  "First of all: Why are my ships retreating?"

  He thought about how little he could get away with telling her. "There's guns mounted in some of the outside buildings. They can hit anything to either side of the city's disk. Your ships would have to put themselves in the plane of the city's rotation to avoid them, and even then, we can drop bombs on them from the lower towers..."

  "But not very accurately. And they could obliterate Fracas from there."

  "But you wouldn't. The people here are innocent."

  "So were the people of Spyre."

  He scoffed. "You hold too high an opinion of yourself. It wasn't you who destroyed Spyre. It was the generals. They weakened it--"

  "Whatever," she said, but the pistol left his temple. "The point is," she went on, "if we go out we'll be shot." She nodded past the verticals of cable and chain. "The only way is to go down." She meant toward the outer rim of the spinning ring of buildings. -- And she was right, in a way: from the rim one could simply let go and fall away in the plane of the city's rotation--safe from the guns mounted on either side of the disk of spokes.

  "You could do that, but..." By now, and according to plan, her people were trapped. She had to surrender. "There are no ships or bikes in the lower mobiles," he pointed out. "They're only at the docks, at the center of the spokes, and to get from the axle to the rim you'd have to fly past all the guns. You'd be blown to pieces."

  She peered over the railing. "Only if we fly outside the city."

  While he tried to make sense of that comment, she turned decisively. "Back to the docks!" she commanded her men; but one of her lieutenants shook his head.

  "They've taken out the staircase, and stationed themselves on the rooftops above us," he said. "We have no way to climb." He was one of the baroquely armored men, and he'd spoken in an accent Jacoby recognized.

  "We'll see about that." She turned to the bespectacled bomb expert. "Guesses on how much tension these are under?" She slapped one of the thick ropes that held up the street.

  He grabbed the bristly, tightly wound rigging and waggled it. "Mm, w-well, not much," he said doubtfully. "Wouldn't be t-too much of a backlash. Might toss you a few dozen feet if you held on and cut it below you." He looked over his glasses at her. "Th-that is what you had in mind, isn't it?"

  "I don't want the backlash." She rounded on Jacoby again, leveling the pistol at his nose. "Are these moored at the top, or counterbalanced?"

  Jacoby was curious to see where she was going with this, so he said, "Counterbalanced."

  "Great," she said, and turned away. "Take those suicide charges and set them to cut these. We're going to drop the street."

  Panic erupted among the hostages as they realized the soldiers were about to cut loose the decking they were standing on. They mad
e a stampede for the gangways, but nobody shot at them. They were still valuable, and Jacoby still had plenty of men in the city with which to round them up later. "Let's test this," she said as the bomb expert tied a charge to one of the suspension ropes.

  Bullet holes stitched a line across the canvas ceiling. "Give up!" one of Jacoby's men shouted from a nearby rooftop. The soldiers Venera herself had stationed on other rooftops and gangways began to make their way in under cover of intense fire, as, humming, Venera's bomber made his connections. He finished, and he and everybody else stood back as Fanning aimed her pistol at the charge.

  "This is insane," said Jacoby. "It'll never--"

  Bang-blam! The charge went off and the rope parted. Instantly it snapped upward--but only twenty or thirty feet high before the pent-up tension in the rope was used up, and it fell slack again.

  The entire street creaked, groaned, and dipped a foot.

  "Well, that's disappointing," said Venera, hands on her hips.

  "No, no, your grasp of Newtonian physics is sound, m'lady," said the bomb expert as he hurried to lash a charge to another rope. "All these ropes conjoin about two hundred feet above us. We'll have to cut away most of the street before the counterweight takes over."

  "Ah. Get going, then." But he was already rushing to the next line, accompanied by two soldiers who startled him every few seconds by firing over his head.

  "Mount up!" she commanded. A soldier boosted her up one of the ropes and she twined her legs and inched her way up farther. "Tie the prisoner's hands on the other side of it," she told her men, and Jacoby was towed over to the rope next to hers and his hands lashed on the other side of it. He found himself nose-to-nose with one of the explosive charges, and judiciously took the aid of one of the soldiers to clamber up past it.

  Gunfire from the surrounding rooftops was intensifying. One of the Slipstreamers fell, limp as a rag doll, and his companions cursed and sprayed gunfire indiscriminately into the city.

  "Keep it together!" Venera yelled at them. "And get up here!" Without another word, she lowered her pistol and shot the charge below her.

  Her rope--and her and the five other people clinging to it--rebounded into the air as all of them held on desperately. One of the men let go and tumbled spinning into the air.

  "Pick me up later!" he shouted as he pawed at the foot-fins slung over his back. Jacoby watched in astonishment as he twisted to avoid guy-wires, sewage pipes, and catwalks. If he could do it for just a few more seconds, he'd exit the bottom of the city and be in clear air ...

  Blam! The charge on Jacoby's own rope had gone off and the rope whipped him in the face. Stunned, he let go and it slithered over his forearms and neck. Then he hit another man, who grunted. Jacoby grabbed at the rope again as the soldier swore at him.

  They were twirling into the air, and now coming down to swing in a wide arc out over the bottomless canyons of the city. Somewhere, Venera Fanning was whooping.

  "Just a couple more, boys!"

  Everybody seemed to be shooting now--Jacoby's men in their sheltered windows, Venera's men on the ropes--and as his rope swung him around again Jacoby saw that the street was missing too many ropes now, listing and toppling tables, chairs, boxes, and bodies into the abyss. He watched a travel chest impact a conical roof a hundred feet below and burst like a sudden flower, shirts and trousers its petals.

  The street groaned and lost its shape, becoming a U that shed planks like water. Fanning's soldiers shot out two more of the ropes and the rest snapped. Twisting like some tormented worm, the street sprawled over rooftops and nipped gangways and ladders in its death throes. It tumbled, split apart, and in deadly showers of lumber and coiling nooses of rope, left the city.

  "How could she do that! How could she--" It was one of Jacoby's men, hanging off a nearby rope.

  Jacoby swung by him, laughing a bit crazily. "How could she? She's the one who destroyed Spyre!"

  "You said I didn't!" shouted Venera; then the ropes were hauling them upward faster and faster past bell-like houses and can-shaped shops. Whatever these lines were anchored to on the other side of the city, it was crashing down with as much enthusiasm as the street just had.

  "Foot-fins, everyone," shouted Venera. "And see to the prisoner!" Pain was pounding through Jacoby's left hand and he was about to lose his grip with it entirely; but the upward pull was slackening, and gravity falling away. The last rooftops whipped by and then they were in the vertical forest of cables that reached up to the axle of the wheelless necklace city. They rose hundreds of feet and hanging on got easier. Jacoby was abruptly seized by the soldiers who bracketed him on the rope, and they untied his hands and retied them behind his back.

  He nodded to the man next to him. "You're from Liris," he said. This man wore the ancient, outlandish armor of the tiny building-sized country Venera had been adopted into when she first landed in Spyre. The man grinned at Jacoby, and then they shared a sorrowful glance at the empty sky where Spyre had once been. Meanwhile, Fracas, below them, was turning from a town into an arc of toy-sized roofs.

  "We're taking the yacht, ma'am?" called a soldier.

  "Yes. You'll like it."

  Jacoby knew now that he'd been right to build multiple layers into his trap. The only rational escape route for her yacht was perpendicular to the disk of the city, and his ships that had pinned down her escort had that way covered. No matter what she did now, he had her.

  "Venera, you can't escape!" he yelled. "What you're doing is suicide."

  "It's only suicide if it kills ya," said the soldier from Liris with a grin.

  They were weightless now, flying upward at the tangled underside of the docking cylinder. Jacoby found himself zipping past the yin-yang staircase, looked into the astonished eyes of a businessman sauntering down it. All around him Venera's soldiers were letting go of their ropes, strapping big foot-fins to their feet, and readying grappling lines and hooks.

  Freed of any significant centrifugal gravity, momentum carried them forward now--not up, because there was no "up" anymore. The soldier from Liris let go of the slackening rope and began vigorously kicking his feet. Foot-fins weren't a strong mode of propulsion, but in cases like this they could at least change your heading, and he was angling himself and Jacoby out of the maze of cables and into the open air next to the city. The other soldiers were doing the same--and ahead of them was the lip of the docking cylinder.

  "Ready grapnels!"

  Something whizzed past Jacoby's ear: gunfire from the docks. He shouted and pointed, but Venera's lads were already laying down return fire. Figures ducked and dove into the cable forest inside the cylinder as her men tossed grapples to catch its lip. Somebody threw Jacoby's man a line and they hauled themselves in, and then there they were, standing tiptoed on the burnished edge of the city's axle.

  Venera made a great leap, forty feet across the curve of the cylinder, to her yacht. Her men followed in ones and twos while their friends laid down covering fire. When it was his turn, Jacoby tried to twist free, but all he got was a blow to the ear and then he, too, was landing next to the yacht's hatch.

  Inside, the thin vessel was stuffed with trigger-happy, adrenaline-charged men. "Bring him forward," Venera commanded, and Jacoby was hauled up to the cockpit. Bullets pinged off the hull and one starred a porthole as he passed it.

  "Your survival depends on finding us a safe way off this city," Fanning said to her prisoner.

  "There is none," Jacoby told her. "Surrender now."

  "Very funny, Jacoby."

  "I'm serious," he said. "You'll be exposed to fire from the city all the way. Most of the gun emplacements that used to encircle Spyre were moved here and hung in the city."

  "These guns," mused Fanning. "They point out? Not down?"

  "You mean, down past the rim? No. But to go that way, you'd have to fly right by them..."

  She nodded. "But how many of them point into the city?"

  Jacoby blinked at her. She had no rational choic
es left; but this was Venera. "You can't mean to--"

  Fanning turned to the pilot. "We're going to do a matching maneuver to the city's rotation, then lower through it. Can you manage it?"

  The pilot, a sandy-haired, windburned veteran, simply raised his eyebrows. "Not without consequence," he said.

  "But it can be done?"

  "Y-yes..."

  Jacoby considered letting her go right then. He had no intention of killing Venera Fanning; in the great game, she was a vital token (and besides, he liked her). What she was proposing to do was far more likely to get her killed than he was.

  If he let her go, though, he would have suffered two serious blows to his plans. He'd never be able to forgive himself for being so weak; so he bit his lip and just cursed past the blood on his tongue.

  Outside the broad windscreen, Jacoby could see the docking ring rising past, and the forest of cables and chains swinging into view. Bullet trails sketched a cage around the ship, but none impacted; his men knew he was aboard.

  "I'm prepared to be reasonable," Venera said suddenly. She'd braced herself, legs splayed straight at the floor and wall, both hands on the ceiling. Outside the windscreen at her back, cables whipped past, disturbingly close. The gunfire had ceased.

  "Hmm-what?" He couldn't look away as narrow miss after narrow miss nearly cut the yacht in two. They were arcing down now, angling through the cables toward the city's rooftops.

  She made a moue, eying him. "I'd be happy to drop you off with a pair of foot-fins and a bottle of water. Maybe in a handy cloud, once we've left the city behind. What do you say?"

  There was no way they were going to survive the next five minutes, but the offer was touchingly generous. Jacoby said so.

  "Threading the needle," said the pilot. "This could get bumpy." The yacht's engines roared and with a stomach-churning slewing motion, they dropped into the narrow gap between a mansion and a school. Jacoby caught a glimpse of astonished faces, pointing fingers.